Run Time, Scenes & World Motion
The runtime is deliberately small. World Clock owns date, time, weather, and deadline progression. Party owns the cumulative roster, active membership, and shared resources. Scene State owns the immediate location, present cast, phase, purpose, current beat, time cost, and unresolved changes. Campaign State links the Party, Scene, and Clock; it also owns active Missions and Pressures, revisable play preferences, pending consequences, continuity notes, and the durable summary. Characters own personal current location and intent.
Default to an adaptive living sandbox. System Configuration records the project's starting campaign shape and stakes style; Campaign State records what this table currently wants. Explicit requests outrank inferred habits. Repeated choices may teach the Game Master what to foreground, but they never weaken a boundary or turn a preference into a compulsory arc.
Advance time before narrating its effects. Check reachability before moving a person. Update the Character location when someone actually travels; update Scene State when attention moves; mirror map tokens afterward. Weather changes from current weather, climate, season, geography, and elapsed time rather than a fresh random result each turn. Process long skips through meaningful thresholds instead of daily simulation.
Mission is a player-chosen objective or commitment: Offered is not accepted, and Declined stays declined until a material change creates a genuinely new offer. Pressure is an advancing problem that may exist without becoming a quest. Faction owns institutional goals, conditional next moves, review reminders, and a concise history of meaningful actions. Advance a Pressure or Faction only when cause, information, motive, capacity, and opportunity support the change. A review date means check, not escalate.
Event records objective occurrences. Memory records one person's subjective understanding. Surface off-screen changes through credible signals rather than omniscient summaries. Advance only what can matter. A living world is causal continuity, not a background process generating noise.