A strategy game in which you attempt to bring about the apocalypse, by moving covert agents through a complex fantasy world to accomplish a wide range of schemes, plots and rituals. You start the game by bribing guards and infiltrating minor farming communities and slowly build up your forces until you are bringing about ice ages, eradicating entire nations with plague, summoning volcanoes and commanding city-devouring snake-gods.

You play a set of agents and corrupted heroes against the forces of good, the rulers and heroes of humanity, lead by the Chosen One. They may be stronger than you, and could eliminate your agents with ease, but you have the advantage of secrecy, and humans are easily turned one against each other. Why fight a war against a unified empire when you could shatter in into civil war and clean up the pieces with orcish hordes?

Complex AIs power the forces of good, and you can, if the mood takes you, play on their minds. Rulers can be driven to gold-obsessed lunatics, who will cause their people to rise up in anger at the insane taxations, dukes can be tricked into turning on their Kings by a carefully placed personal item which implies a court scandal, heroes can be driven insane by the maddening tales read in The Laughing King's Tome and the shadow can corrupt your enemies to the point where they start funding your agents instead of their own people.