The Three Gates You Cannot Add Later

Almost everything here is adjustable mid-campaign. Three things are not, and they are worth ten minutes of thought before you start rather than a rebuild afterwards.

1 · Limits

hardLimits and softLimits on the Table Contract. Recorded verbatim, never summarised — a limit paraphrased is a limit half-kept.

They can be widened or narrowed at any moment, in one OOC line, with no ceremony. What cannot be retrofitted is the trust that comes from having been asked properly at the start.

2 · The control gates

Single character, squad, storyteller — who the human is at this table. This shapes how scenes are written, how input is attributed, and what the GM is allowed to narrate about whom.

Retrofitting it means rewriting the scenes that already exist, because they were composed for a different relationship between player and world.

3 · Dice direction

Not whether dice exist — that can change. Which way they point.

Roll Under inverts every band in the system. Set it one way, narrate it the other, and the world reads as relentless bad luck. The tell is subtle and it takes most tables weeks to identify, by which point the campaign has a mood nobody chose.

Everything else is fair game

Tone, darkness, magic depth, technology level, realism clusters, voice pool, maturity register, interruption rate — all adjustable, all sensibly defaulted, none of them worth agonising over up front. Change them when the world tells you to.