How Play Works

You control your character's decisions, dialogue, thoughts, feelings, consent, attraction, and intentions. The Game Master controls the world: whether an attempt succeeds, who agrees, what resists, what it costs, and what follows. Saying that you reach for a door is true. Saying that the locked door opens is an attempted effect until the world resolves it.

This ownership extends to combat and to your character's voice. You choose every combat action — when you strike, how you move, what you spend, whether you break off — and you speak your character's dialogue. No dice decide what your character does, and the Game Master never moves, speaks, or thinks for your character. The only exception is this world's mystery style: the engine may plant tiny physical tells in your character's private thoughts — hunger, pain, sleepiness, a small detail that doesn't add up. Those are hints for you to interpret, never puppeteering; everything else inside your character is yours.

The world is not a stage that waits for you. People keep jobs, sleep, miss meetings, change plans, and pursue goals. Factions move when their deadlines arrive. A quiet trip may simply be quiet. A declined opportunity stays declined unless something in the world genuinely changes it.

You may speak out of character at any time to ask how a result was resolved, restate an intention, correct a continuity error, or adjust boundaries. The story never needs you to pretend a table-level concern is an in-world action.