Everything the live screen shows is your effort taking shape — never a settled outcome. The march predicts; the after-the-march verdict adjudicates. That split is deliberate, and it’s why a march can only ever surprise you pleasantly.
Setting out
1
Open the march flow
You’ll land on the herald’s summons — a single gold crest, “To the Field,” and one command: Every step claims ground.
2
Raise the Banner
Tap Raise the Banner and the march begins. GPS starts recording; the war-map wakes; your “you” chevron drops onto clear ground.
3
March
The resting screen is deliberately spare — two numbers (TIME and CLAIMED) and a single Pause control. Everything else lives in the periphery, so you can glance and get back to the road.
The war table
The map beneath your march is not a street map — it’s a stylised, tarnished heraldic table drawn from the land as factions. There are no roads or labels to read while you run; there’s the shape of who holds what, and your route burned across it in tarnished gold.- Your route thread is the mark you leave on the land — a gold breadcrumb that brightens at its most recent tail, so “where I’ve been” always reads clearly.
- The “you” chevron is the brightest thing on the table — your position and heading, always kept in clear ground so the HUD never sits on top of it.
- Each territory is filled by its state, so a glance tells you whose ground you’re on:
Rival ground is always cool slate, never crimson; contested ground is a texture, never an alarm colour. Crimson is spent only on an active siege pressing your own hold — a genuine threat, never a scolding.
The herald at your shoulder
Cross a border and the Herald announces it. A strip slides in from the top for a few seconds, then settles into a quiet standing line that stays until your next crossing — so you always have a readable trace of the last thing the Herald said:- Invading — you’ve pushed into a rival’s hold.
- Fortifying — you’re within land your house holds.
- Claiming the open wold — you’ve entered unclaimed ground.
- Contested — — you’re on disputed ground.
Grip — presence, not a scoreboard
Inside the standing line sits a small row of grip pips (▓▓▓░░). Grip is a measure of how much presence you’ve pressed into this territory this march — distance covered inside it and time spent there.
Grip is not a “percent to victory.” It caps at a firm grip and stops there — reaching full grip says you’ve pushed hard here, never you’ve won. Whether a rival hold actually changes hands is settled by the rules of conquest and revealed after the march. Grip is an honest, humble hint that deliberately under-promises — so the verdict is only ever neutral or a pleasant surprise.
Closing the loop
Claiming new ground means running a closed loop. As you head back toward where you started, the map helps you close it:1
Tracing
The default. Your trail is open and still forming — keep going.
2
Closing
When you come back near your start point and the shape you’d enclose is big enough to hold, the start seal brightens and a dashed ghost-close arc stretches from you to it. The Herald whispers that a holding is taking shape.
3
Closeable
You’re close enough to close. The arc invites you to finish — it never closes the loop for you. You end the march when you’re ready.
The arc is live guidance, not a promise — GPS drifts, so the app treats “close enough” generously, but the final geometry is surveyed on your full track after you finish. If the shape you close is too small, the Herald tells you gently to range wider. The minimum loop size lives on the Game Reference.
Auto-pause, and what counts
Stop at a red light or a water fountain and the march auto-pauses — distance and time freeze so a two-minute wait doesn’t pollute your pace. Start moving again and it auto-resumes on its own; you never have to tap to keep going. If you forget to end a march entirely, it eventually auto-closes and files itself, so it’s never lost. This ties into a rule worth knowing: effort counts moving time only. Paused and stationary time is excluded from your pace and your baseline — exactly like every serious run tracker — so standing still never penalises you. (How effort scales your march is on the Game Reference.)Day and night
Direct sunlight washes out a dark map, and most marches run in daylight. So the war table has two skins of the same table: a tarnished (night) treatment and a parchment (daylight) one that survives the sun. It follows your device’s light/dark appearance automatically and never flickers mid-march; you can also pin it to Parchment or Tarnished in run settings.March controls
While you’re marching, the only control on screen is Pause — by design. Nothing that ends or discards a march is reachable while you’re moving, so you can never end a march by a pocket tap. Ending is always two deliberate acts: pause first, then choose. Tapping Pause (or an auto-pause) opens the pause screen with exactly three actions:
Resume is the biggest, brightest, safest choice. Save is a single tap because losing a finished march is far worse than an accidental save. Abandon is set apart, quiet, and guarded by a hold and a warning (“Nothing is recorded. Your march and the ground you covered are lost to you.”) — it’s the one and only way to deliberately throw a march away.
If your march is interrupted
If your phone crashes or is killed mid-march, the app doesn’t quietly lose it or quietly file it. On next launch you get an honest review — “Your march was interrupted” — with the ground you covered shown on the map, and a choice:- Continue — pick the march back up and keep recording. Offered only when you’re still standing where the track left off, so nothing is fabricated across a gap.
- Submit march — file what was captured and go on to the normal verdict.
- Discard — throw the recovered march away (with a confirm).
A march is never lost
Marches record offline-first — no signal is never a problem. If you run beyond the map data the app cached at the start, the war table simply goes bare and the Herald falls quiet, with one calm line: “Territory data unavailable here — your march records all the same.” Your route, your numbers, and the recording carry on; the war-map resumes the moment you’re back on cached ground. A finished march that can’t reach the server yet doesn’t vanish either. It’s held safely, shown on your Home screen as a pending march that files itself when the path clears, and carries an “as of…” caption so you always know how fresh things are. A march leaves the queue only when the server truly has it.Where a march came from
Once filed, every march wears a small source ring around its activity icon on your Campaign Record, so you can tell at a glance where it came from:- Gold — recorded live in the Ashenmarch app.
- Strava orange — imported from Strava.
- Slate — another connected source.
After the March
The verdict — what your march claimed, fortified, and earned.
Conquering Land
Claims, tiers, fortification, decay, and walls — the rules the survey applies.
War
Sieges, defending your ground, and planning marches with the War Council.
Game Reference
Loop minimums, the effort curve, and every other number in one place.