**Seasons of State: Nightlife** is a clan-and-city engine: single-player strategic play fused with a living narrative, where the city is the castle and the family is the state. You hold ground through patronage more than force — the hall, the funeral home, the union local, the clinic, the club, the courthouse corridor — and your power is measured by who gets seated, who gets protected, who gets buried, and who pays whom to keep the lights on.

**How it runs.** Each clan holds canonical aggregate stocks. At every full moon the **Lunar Calendar** settles: dues, rents, envelopes, feeding rights, losses, and standing are computed, the deltas commit to their owners, and the cycle is appended to the clan's record. There is no invisible per-turn tick — settlement is a due event on the world's clock, and long skips resolve it in meaningful batches. Rival houses are authored characters with goals, obligations, and knowledge of their own, and the GM advances them behind the scenes when the stage demands it.

**The world stays ordinary where it counts.** Vampires, ghosts, witches, werewolves, and cryptids are residents, not spectacle: they pay rent, sit on committees, and hold addresses. A district dispute is worth playing because it decides feeding rights, rent, police attention, magical safety, the corridor's traffic, and whose people feel protected — not because something monstrous might appear.

**Powered by Living World Engine OMEGA.** Underneath runs the genre-neutral Living World Engine: a minute-resolution clock, due-wake simulation queues, objective Storybook history, fallible subjective memory, faction capacity and knowledge modeling, and bounded context discipline that survives hundreds of live entities.

**Status.** This project is the **Nightlife installation** — the Nightlife game itself, standalone and no longer the clean engine. Layers land in phases: identity (0.1.0, done), clan and Lunar Calendar core, territory, social layers, and city onboarding with its seat choice — clan head, lieutenant, or outsider. Progress is tracked in `/Seasons of State/System Ledger.lore.md`.