Shrines

Overview

Shrines are the network of physical waypoints scattered across Vale Sangora. They serve two purposes at once: they are the only fast-travel anchors in the game, and they are the primary location where Coen learns and upgrades his perks. Activating a shrine for the first time is a mini-quest in itself; revisiting it later is the player's main way to bend the 30-day clock around the rest of the map.

Activation: Finding the Missing Heart

A shrine is inert when Coen first encounters it. Each shrine is locked behind a small unlock quest that the developers shorthand as finding the shrine's missing heart. In the demos shown to press, the process looked like a localised dungeon: the area around the shrine is held by a handful of soldiers or vampires, a chest contains the heart relic, and clearing the soldiers plus looting the chest restores the shrine to functional status.

Once restored, the shrine joins Coen's fast-travel map and unlocks its perk-vendor function. The unlock is permanent for the rest of the run.

Fast Travel

Restored shrines are the only fast-travel points in Vale Sangora. There are no horses or mounts. During the day Coen uses Mercurial Fervour to cover ground at speed; at night a perk-unlocked wolf transformation takes over the same role. For longer hops across the valley, the shrine network is what cuts the in-game day cost of travel.

Travel between shrines does not advance the 30-day clock by itself. Quests at the destination do.

Perk Vendor

Shrines are where Coen spends his XP. Standing at an activated shrine opens a perk catalogue. Each perk shows two costs side by side: an experience-point price and an hourglass icon indicating how many in-game hours the player will burn training the perk. The training time is real; it advances the calendar by the listed amount.

This is the core of why time matters even outside of quests. A run that goes deep into the skill tree pays for those perks in both XP and days. A run that takes the leanest perk path keeps more of the 30-day budget available for rescue planning and exploration.

Not every perk is bought at a shrine. A handful of perks (such as Precision) are obtained by finding and reading manuals hidden across the world. Manuals bypass the shrine economy entirely; reading one teaches the perk without spending XP or in-game days.

Religious Layer

Shrines also appear in the world as objects of Brencis's reshaped religion. The roadside shrines that now line Vale Sangora's paths bear his likeness as part of the vampire regime's propaganda campaign. Most of those decorative shrines are not interactable as fast-travel or perk hubs; the player-facing system shrines and the decorative Brencis shrines share the same word in-fiction but serve different mechanical purposes.

Strategic Use

Because shrines combine fast travel with perk access, they reward routing the run through them. A common loop:

• Reach a new region. Identify the nearest shrine.

• Spend a small in-game window clearing the missing-heart unlock.

• Use the restored shrine as a quest hub: fast travel out for objectives, fast travel back to spend earned XP on perks before pushing further.

• Track the time spent at the shrine in hours, not days, so the perk budget stays predictable.

Skipping shrine unlocks is viable for time-pressed runs but compounds: every skipped shrine is more on-foot or hex-assisted travel later, and is a perk vendor the player has chosen to walk past.

Relationship to Other Systems

Shrines connect directly to time as a resource, the 30-day cycle, skill trees, and exploration. They do not interact directly with the notoriety system: fast-travelling does not raise infamy, and shrine training does not draw Brencis's attention.