You woke here. So did I, once. So did everyone whose name is on the wall behind me, and so will everyone who comes after. The village does not choose who walks in. It only chooses to still be standing when they do.
Long before the world ate itself, Galyfada was a frontier post — a wooden palisade and three buildings on the edge of country no map agreed about. Patrols came through and stayed for a winter. Some left. Some did not. The ones who stayed kept the central fire burning, because the country was the kind that punishes a cold camp.
When the cities went dark — and they did, one after another, in the order their walls had been let to rust — the survivors started arriving at Galyfada without knowing why their feet had brought them. The keeper before me wrote that the fire pulls. I have stopped arguing with the keeper before me.
The stones around the central fire are not decoration. Each one has a name on it. The names belong to the people who made it possible for the road you walked in on to still exist. They are called Patriarchs in the old papers, though no one alive remembers using the word as a title and not as an inscription. I have not added a stone in my hundred winters here. The stones were placed before I arrived.
Read them when you can. Walk past the wall on your way to the smithy. The ones who paid for the road you walked here on did not ask you to thank them. They asked only that the road still be there when the next person needed to walk it.
The fire does not need tending. I do anyway. There is always more wood than there should be. I have stopped arguing with that as well.
— The Keeper of Galyfada, undated
What you actually see when you log in
- The onboarding village. Every new character spawns at Galyfada. No starter zone variants. No faction tutorials. One fire, one keeper, one wall.
- The Hall of Fame wall. The 100 Patriarch-tier Founders are carved into the stones around the fire, before any Open Beta player walks in. Visible to every character, every login, forever.
- Safe-ish, not safe. Galyfada's palisade is the only place where karma decays faster than elsewhere. PvP isn't disabled — the keeper just makes it more expensive to start.
- The only place that doesn't decay. Buildings outside Galyfada weather and need upkeep. The keeper's fire does not. It is the one constant the world allows.
The wall is the most permanent thing in the world. The Founder's Pack is how a name reaches it. — See the Founder's Pack