System Architecture & Design Intent

This manual is for creators extending this project. It explains how the content is organized and what the rules are built to do. The rules themselves live in the Player's Handbook and the Core Rulebook reference volumes.

How the Project Is Organized

• Reference volumes (Reference/Core Rulebook/) hold the full rules text, GM guidance, adversaries, and environments as markdown.
• Typed records hold each class, ancestry, community, domain, and piece of equipment as JSON validated against the schemas in .craft/file-types/. The Game Master reads and updates these during play.
• Hope & Fear content. Records whose notes say "Transcribed from Hope & Fear" are expansion material: the Assassin, Brawler, Warlock, and Witch classes, the Dread domain, and several ancestries and communities. The Core Rulebook volumes don't describe them, so check new content that touches them against their records.

What the Rules Are Built to Do

These principles come straight from the rulebook. New content should serve them.

• Story is consequence. Every roll changes the scene. Design features so that a failure produces something to play with, never a dead end.
• Two axes on every roll. Success and failure are crossed with Hope and Fear. A success with Fear still costs something, and a failure with Hope still pays the player.
• Resources are the levers. Hope (max 6), Stress (6 slots to start), Armor Slots, and the GM's Fear (max 12) are where features should hook in, through costs to spend, slots to mark, and triggers on rolling with Hope or Fear.
• The spotlight, not a turn order. Players act until someone fails, rolls with Fear, or the GM spends Fear. Features that grant extra actions or interrupt should be written against that flow.
• Rulings over rules. The golden rule is to make the game your own with table consent, and a ruling that fits the fiction wins over an out-of-context reading of the text.