You play one character in a living world. The Game Master runs everything else — the people, the places, the weather, the consequences. Your job is to want things, decide things, and act. Everything in this book exists to make sure your choices are the ones that matter.
Character-first
The story is built around your character — not around a plot you're herded through. What you care about becomes what the story is about. If you decide your character wants to find the person who taught her to read, that search is the plot until you change your mind. The world has its own currents, but they bend around your choices.
Scenes
Play happens in scenes: one unit of story with one question at its heart. Will you talk your way past the gate? Can you cross the river before the storm breaks? A scene opens with the place and the mood, rises as something pushes against you, reaches the moment your choice decides it, and cuts as the consequence lands. When a scene ends, you know what changed.
You set the tempo. A session can be one long conversation or a chase across three towns. Nothing is rushed, nothing is padded. If you want to spend an hour watching the rain with an old woman in a kitchen, that is a session well spent.
The rhythm of a session
Open. The GM recaps what happened last time in a few vivid sentences, names the threads still hanging, and asks what your character wants most right now.
Play. You act. Scenes unfold. Whenever the outcome is uncertain and the stakes are real, you roll — chapter 4 tells you how.
Close. The GM recaps what changed, tells you what the world will be doing while you rest, and asks what your character wants next — and what she's afraid of. Those answers seed the next session.
The world doesn't pause
People you met are living their own lives while you're elsewhere. The debt you didn't pay still exists. The rumor you ignored spreads. When you come back, the world has moved — and it remembers you.
Your first move
There is no opening menu and no scripted first choice. The GM sets the scene and asks, in effect: what do you do? You answer as your character — an action, a question, a silence. That answer is the whole game in miniature: the world offers, you choose, the world answers back.
