Building a World on Top

This is the playbook for the world-building session: laying a setting on top of the ruleset without rebuilding the engine. The world fills the entries; the ruleset stays the engine. Work in this order and each layer informs the next.

The order

1. The skeleton. Decide the world's name and its two courts — what the Celestial and Chthonic poles are in this setting. They may be gods and demons, order and entropy, light and tide — the poles keep their pull either way. Write one paragraph: what the world is, what the two courts want, and what a practitioner is here.
2. The deities. Three to five, no more, each a personality with offerings, taboos, boons, and correspondences. Make the offerings concrete and the taboos violable. Give the pantheon a shape — an Olympian court, a river pantheon, a dead empire's saints — because the players will pick patrons from it.
3. The daimones. Five to eight spirits across the grades: a couple bindable at grade 1, a couple at grade 2–3, one that should not be bound at all. Each is a price, a binding, a weakness, and 3–4 concrete powers. The grade-1 spirits are the starter content; the high-grade one is the campaign hook.
4. The knowledge. A handful of formulas (common, grade 1, composeable — the world's bread) and two or three mysteries (rare or lost, each breaking one rule, each with a source with teeth). Formulas define what practitioners routinely do in this world; mysteries define what they dream of.
5. The works. One or two of each kind, at least: a phylakterion (one-shot safety), a periapton (passive wear), a talisman (charged), and one katadesmos or ensouled work (the signature piece). Each references its patron and school, and each passes the cost test.
6. The materials. Re-name the tiers if you want, but keep the economy: common buys grade-1 work, uncommon grade-2, rare must be found, extraordinary is a quest. Name the world's rare materials — the equivalents of gold-mercury, grave dust, old-mint coins — because names are where the world shows.
7. The locations. Three to six: a starting hub (the tavern, the shrine, the crossroads), a place of power per sphere, and one place that is wrong — the cursed space that generates adventure. Give each a thing that happens there.
8. The characters. Two starter practitioners, one on each road (and optionally a middle walker): trackers filled honestly, inventory referencing gear, a first project in progress. These are the proof the whole stack works.
9. The game start. A lobby card with a name, image, and description, then the play configuration wired with the game-start command: starting location, playable characters, opening beats. This is the world's front door — it should show the world's shape in one screen.

The reskin checklist

Run the world through the invariants and mark each as kept or renamed:

• Roll grammar (d20 + Stat + Prep + Grade + Dynamis − Miasma) — kept, always
• Preparation promise — kept
• Dynamis cap (4 + grade × 2, never banks) — kept
• Two schools (grace vs. ledger) — kept; names may change
• Two axes (allegiance, miasma) — kept; the courts' names change
• Four grades — kept; names may change
• Failure ladder — kept
• Material tiers, DC bands, resistance tiers — kept; flavor may change

Calibration

Three checks across the whole world:

• The grade spread. Most content lives at grades 1–2; grade 3 is the mid-campaign reward; grade 4 is endgame and rare. A world where every daimon is grade 3 has no starter content; one where everything is grade 1 has no ceiling.
• The economy. Materials at the top cannot be bought. If your world makes extraordinary materials purchasable, you removed the quest layer — decide that is what you want.
• The favor ladder. Each deity's favor (indifferent → friendly → patron) should be reachable — a player who serves should be able to climb it within a campaign, or the ladder is a wall, not a ladder.

The three-rule test

Before an entry ships, ask: Does it fit the grammar? Does it respect the grades? Does it pay in dynamis, materials, time, or favor? Entries that pass all three for the same world will measure against each other automatically — that is the whole calibration trick, and it is cheap because the engine is small.

Deliverables

A world is playable when it has: a skeleton paragraph, 3–5 deities, 5–8 daimones, 5+ formulas and 2–3 mysteries, 4+ works, a material economy with names, 3–6 locations, 2+ starter characters, and a wired game start. That is roughly thirty files — a session's worth of building, not a lifetime. Everything beyond that is the campaign filling itself in as it runs.