“A good horse remembers your voice long before it remembers the road.”
- stablehand’s wisdom, heard in Ban Jal

Horses

Stables have started appearing alongside the usual shops in the Adventure Cities, selling horses outright rather than the wild, unpredictable stock you’d catch and break yourself. Pay up, and a tamed, saddled horse appears at your side a few steps away - ready to ride immediately, no taming required.

This is separate from the wild horse herds that already roam Irrupt on their own; see Animal Behavior for those. A stable-bought horse is yours from the moment it’s paid for.

Buying a Horse

Stables don’t sell a random animal off the range - they sell curated stock, bred and raised to a known standard. Every horse you buy falls into one of the stable’s tiers, and the tier tells you roughly what you’re getting before you ever see the animal:

Sturdy- built for toughness and endurance over raw speed. A dependable animal that holds up well on a long haul.
Swift- built for speed first. Faster on the road, but with less stamina to spare.

Two horses of the same tier still won’t be identical - exact speed, stamina, and constitution vary animal to animal within what the tier promises, same as any bred stock. Every horse comes saddled - a stable never sends you off bareback - and prices are set per stable, same as any other good (see Trading).

Calling Your Horse

/horse call- sound a call for your nearest horse, audible to anyone standing nearby. Your horse neighs and comes running on its own legs, picking a real path to you rather than appearing at your feet - across open ground, around obstacles, even through water if that’s the way. It neighs again and settles once it arrives.

How far your call carries depends on your Honor. The more honorably you’ve carried yourself, the farther a horse will hear and answer; a poor reputation shortens that reach considerably. A horse too far off simply won’t hear you at all.

Keeping It Close

/horse follow- tells your horse to stick with you and keep pace as you move, wherever you go, water included. Call it again to release it.

Even without asking, a well-kept horse doesn’t wander far from its owner on its own anymore - it’ll graze and idle nearby, but won’t drift off across the map the way an unowned animal might. The one exception is a horse tied off with a lead: a tethered horse stays exactly where you left it, wander-guard or not.

Dying Costs You Your Horse

Whatever horse you own - bought from a stable, bred, or simply tamed the old way - does not survive your death. It’s gone the instant you fall, wherever it happens to be standing, not just left behind for you to walk back to. There’s no recovering it afterward.

Keep that in mind before you ride somewhere dangerous.