Why 1204?

I have wanted to make this game since I was sixteen, hunched over a battered copy of Lords of Midnight on a black-and-amber monitor. Mike Singleton's world taught me that strategy did not have to mean spreadsheets; it could be weather and dread and a single rider trying to outrun winter. 1204 is, in the most literal sense, my attempt to repay that debt.

The Fourth Crusade is the perfect canvas. The walls of Constantinople had held for nine centuries; in three days of April 1204 they did not. The Empire shattered into splinters — Nicaea, Trebizond, Epiros, the Latin states — each convinced it was the true Rome. Every faction is a protagonist. Every road is a frontier.

I want the player to feel that fracture. Not as a campaign map with hex tiles, but as a chronicle: a manuscript that updates itself as you ride from Prusa to the Meander, as your characters age and die, as the icons in the margin go from saints to skulls.