You loved the wrong woman. Or the right woman with the wrong father. Beatrice's father owned your labor and your lodging, and when he found the two of you together he took both, along with your name and your place in the world.

They put you on the road barefoot and penniless. The travelers who passed offered no help, only a name: Tradeshaven, a town of opportunity. With nowhere else to go, you went.

Getting in costs money. A great deal of it. Tradeshaven respects exactly one thing, and it isn't love.

Gilt & Grime is a medieval life-sim about clawing back from nothing. Outside the walls there is honest work: the mine, the tavern, the workshop bench. Long hours, small coin, and a clean conscience nobody pays for. There is also the other kind of work. The schemes, the favors, the people who would rather you didn't ask where the money comes from. Both will make you richer. Only one will let you sleep.

How you climb is remembered, by the town and by you. Every fortune leaves a stain; the game keeps track of yours, and in the end it decides who you've become.

And the world doesn't wait. Tradeshaven keeps its own hours: guards open the gates at dawn and bar them at dusk, the night watchman walks his rounds lighting the lamps, workers trudge to the mine and home again. Everyone has somewhere to be. None of it is for your benefit.

Out on the road you'll meet Halsten Roeve, a soft-spoken man who left Tradeshaven on bad terms and has since found gentler employers and dirtier work. He has uses for a desperate man. So does everyone, once they smell it on you.