When the GM Drifts

Sometimes it goes flat. Here is the triage, in order, and it is shorter than you think.

1 · Say the code word

[OOC: GM Read Rule #67]

That is a hard stop. The GM drops what it is doing and reads its own anti-drift protocol, then corrects. It is not a complaint, it is a lever, and you are supposed to pull it.

Use it the moment prose starts feeling generic — taverns, cobblestones, "you feel a sense of unease", people who talk like they are in a fantasy novel rather than in a room.

2 · If it keeps happening, the Lexicon is thin

The Lexicon holds your world's actual nouns — what people here call a gathering place, a meal, an oath, an illness. When it is empty, the GM reaches into its training data instead, and its training data is full of taverns.

This is the single largest quality lever in the whole system and it is not the GM's fault. Fill it, or ask Orbit to.

3 · If the whole thing feels dead, check the pin

Project settings → context visibility → is GM Operating Principles pinned?

That is the only file that loads every turn. Unpinned, the GM has no rules at all — and it fails completely silently. You still get prose. It is just generic, and nothing anywhere tells you why.

It does not survive being cloned, so a fresh copy of any project starts unpinned. This is the cause more often than everything else combined, and it takes one click.

4 · Time not moving?

Open Scene State and look for bracket text — [like this] — in any time or date field. The whole engine reads that file first, so a placeholder left in it breaks every step after.