The Workspace
The file types split into three groups, and knowing which group you are touching tells you how much care a change needs.
World content
Character, Creature, Location, Faction, Item, Property, Feat, Job, Expense, and Lore. This is what you will spend almost all of your time writing, and it is the safest place to work. Add as many as you like, delete every example, none of it affects the engine.
Story and memory
Campaign State, Chronicle, Story Arc, and Companions. Three of those are singletons in practice. There is one Campaign State and one Companions file per game, both meant to be pinned, and Chronicles accumulate as the campaign folds its journal. Change these carefully, because the triggered instructions name their fields directly.
The rules layer
Rules documents, Guides, GM Instructions, and the Game Start file. These are prose the AI reads rather than data it fills. The next chapters cover editing them safely.
What to replace first
Working in this order gets you playable fastest.
- The Game Start file. This is the opening of every session and the only thing reliably loaded, so anything the GM absolutely must know belongs partly here.
- Locations, starting with wherever the first scene happens.
- The starting character or characters, then the Feats they need.
- Factions, because faction attitude gives the GM something to move.
- One or two Story Arcs seeded with a development trail already on them, so the GM has a worked example of the shape.
Lore, Jobs, Expenses, and Creatures can all arrive during play. The GM has dedicated instructions for creating each of them, and it does so reliably.
The example content is a teaching set
Every example file ends its description with the word Example so you can find them all and clear them out. Before you do, read them once. Each was written to demonstrate one thing. The three starting Feats sit at different tiers to show the ladder. The bandana is tagged for two slots to show how slot tagging works. The vehicle carries a finance deal, which is why there is a matching Expense file for it.
A note on pinning
Pinned files are the ones the GM sees no matter what else has scrolled away. Pin the Campaign State, the Companions file, the core rulebook, and the narration style guide. Leaving those unpinned has been the single most common setup mistake, because an unpinned rulebook is a rulebook the GM stops following about twenty turns in.
The upkeep rules are the deliberate exception. Set that one to partial so the GM knows it is there and opens it when it needs it, since its per file rules already fire as triggers at the moment each one applies, and pinning it as well puts the same rules in front of the GM twice on every single turn.