Ashgates

#What an Ashgate is

An Ashgate is a town portal. Read an Ashgate Scroll out in the field and two gates open:

• one at your feet, and
• its twin beside the waystone in the town of the region you're in.

Click a gate (tap it on a phone) and your hero walks in and crosses to the other side. Gates never take you just because you walked over one, so you can't slip home by accident mid-fight. You come out beside the twin, never in it. Your gate shows your name and where it leads floating above it, and an ember ring marks it on your minimap.

Only you and your party can see and use your gates.

#Opening one

Press T on a computer, or tap the scroll button beside the potion on a phone. Then stand still: you read for 1.5 seconds while shards pull up out of the ground around you. Moving, attacking, dodging or being hit breaks the reading, and you keep the scroll.

Where your gate leads:

• In a region's wilds, to that region's town (Qadir Oasis in the Sunscorch Desert, and so on).
• In the Ashen Depths, a lair or an Ember Rift, to the town of the region you entered from: Emberfall for the Depths and the rifts.

#Going back

Click your gate by the town waystone and you come out right where you opened it: the same Depths floor, lair or rift, with the same monsters where you left them, your delve's depth and shrine boons intact, and any loot you left on the ground still waiting. The floor waits for you while your gate is open.

Your gate closes when:

• after you use it, it always stays open at least 5 more minutes, so you can go back and forth and your party can follow;
• you open another gate (you only ever have one),
• 10 minutes pass, or
• you log out.

If it closes while you're in town, that delve is over: head back down the normal way.

#Travelling together

Your party and anyone who went through with you can use your gates both ways; nobody else even sees them. Nightmare lairs and the Ember Throne still need their usual combat level.

#Where Ashgates won't open

• In town. You're already there.
• In or near the Wilderness, or right after a fight with another hero. The spires swallow the spell.
• Indoors, in houses.
• Near a living boss, or anywhere in a lair while its boss is fighting. Finish the fight first.
• While you're dead. The dead can't read, and can't walk through gates either.

The game tells you why when a gate won't open.

#Homeward Gates

Beat the boss of a lair, a Nightmare lair or the Ember Throne, an Echo of the Warden in the Ashen Depths, or an Ember Rift's guardian, and a Homeward Gate tears open beside the body, a couple of tiles clear of the loot. No scroll needed.

It's an Ashgate's cousin, and you can tell them apart at a glance: a still arch of slate shards on two pillar stones, burning with cold blue-white soulfire, where an Ashgate is a turning ring of embers. A blue arch marks it on your minimap.

• Click it (tap it on a phone) and your hero walks in and comes out by the waystone in the town of that region: Emberfall for the Depths, the rifts and the Ember Throne, Qadir Oasis for the Sunscorch lairs, and so on.
• It takes anyone in that lair or on that floor, so the whole party can use it, each in their own time. It stays open as long as anyone is still inside.
• Behind you, a gate of your own stays open back into the lair or floor for at least 5 minutes, seen only by you and your party: go back in if you left too soon, or to fetch loot you left behind.
• It rises for 1.6 seconds after the kill before it takes anyone, and like any gate it only takes you when you click or tap it: walking past never sends you home.
• Hover over it with the mouse (or tap it, or just walk up close) to see where it leads. Right-click it on a computer, or press and hold it on a phone, for its card with a Go home button.

#Getting scrolls

• New heroes start with two.
• Every town provisioner sells them (see Ashgate Scroll for who and for how much).
• Monsters sometimes drop them, and Depths chests often hold one.
• Craft two at a time at a crafting bench: Ashgate Scroll.