Running the Game
This is the shortest chapter, and the one that ties the rest together, because the systems here only matter once someone actually runs a session. What follows is the loop, as a habit.
Before a session (two minutes)
Check the world state: the current site, the threat level, and the open mysteries. That is your opening. The site file tells you what the room is and what its secret is; the mysteries tell you what the crew is circling; the threat level tells you how much pressure to start with. Do not prep a script. Prep a place with a secret and a clock, and let play find the rest.
At the table
Run the site by its own fields. Describe the atmosphere as the crew arrives. Let the hazards and threats present do their work as the pressure wheel in the rule set turns. When a perk machine, a wonder weapon part, or a piece of intel sits in the room, its file is your instruction sheet — the tell on a threat is your free telegraph, the rule text on a perk is your ruling. The site and its contents were built to be improvised from; trust that.
The rulings you own
The two things only you adjudicate are the conditions the crew earns and the standing they build. Hand out conditions as the price of bold choices — they are not punishment, they are the receipt. Move standing only through downtime, betrayals, and deaths, never through a single good roll, and say so out loud when a player tries to talk their way from loathed to trusted. These two levers are the tone of the whole system, and they are yours.
After a session (five minutes)
Log the world state: append the event log with canon-break flags, adjust faction standings and party resources, mark mysteries answered, increment the cycle where the fiction calls for it. Move the sites-lost record and any statuses. This five minutes is what makes the next session load-bearing — without it, the loop is invisible and the campaign is a sequence of unrelated rooms.
GM instructions, live
The project carries a GM Instructions type for exactly this: the running, session-facing rulings and secrets that should not live in a public handbook. Keep the table-facing rules in the Player's Handbook, keep the build know-how here in the Builder's Manual, and keep the live truth — the twist, the escalation, the secrets — in GM instructions and on the GM-only fields of your files. The split is the same as everywhere in this project: public text stays clean, private truth stays on the file, and never the two shall leak.
When it goes well
It goes well when the crew stops asking "how do we win" and starts asking "who are we, and what are we willing to spend." The system hands you the tools to make that question expensive and honest. Let the site, the horde, and the record do the rest — your job is to refuse to answer the question for them.