2 · Getting In

Welcome to the mad lands. What matters is knowing which chat you are standing in, because there are two of those as well, and they are different minds with different powers.

2.1 · Door one — just start playing

Open the game chat and go.

If nothing has been built yet the Game Master notices, and instead of stalling it starts asking. One question at a time, inside the fiction, writing each answer to its file as it lands. Where is this. What do people call it. Who is that, and why do they already look tired of you.

You will be playing before you have finished describing the world. That is the correct order, not a shortcut — it is the adventure-mode move rather than the character-creation-screen move. The game runs; the details accrete while it runs.

2.2 · Door two — let Orbit build it

Orbit is the workspace assistant, and it is the one with hands. It writes schemas, makes folders, generates people and places and images. The Game Master cannot do any of that. It plays; it does not build. Asking the GM to install something is asking your save file to patch the executable.

Open @Missing file in Orbit — the Orbit chat, not the game — and say, exactly:

Initialize Realm Flow Setup Kit

That phrase is the invocation. Not install, not setup, not begin. Having the file open when you say it genuinely matters: Orbit reads what you have open, so it starts holding the whole procedure instead of hunting for it.

Then it runs the thing top to bottom — what kind of world, how dark, how much dice, where your limits are, what any of this is even called.

Two depths, and QUICK is a real answer. One question, and it infers the rest into a genuine, playable world. DEEP is the full questionnaire. Nobody should talk you up that ladder, including the installer.

DON'T · Don't try to make the Game Master build things. It plays; it does
not build. Asking the GM to install something is asking your save file to
patch the executable — see 2.2 for which chat has hands.

2.3 · Difference between the Installation types?

The deep build reads what already exists before it writes a word.

So there is no penalty for starting fast. Play an evening, name six people, decide the harbour is on the wrong side of town — then run the installer later and it builds around all of it instead of over it. Nothing you improvised gets bulldozed.

That is the single most load-bearing decision in the whole start sequence, and almost nobody believes it until they have watched it happen.

Which chat What it can do What it cannot Game chat Play. Write world state as the fiction moves. Answer you. Create file types, change schemas, touch project settings Orbit chat Build. Schemas, folders, people, places, images, settings Play. It is not the world and does not pretend to be

2.4 · The three questions that constrain this beast

Your limits. Who you are at this table — one character, several, or the world itself. And how dice work, including which direction they point.

Each of those is structural. The rest of the world gets written assuming an answer, so changing one afterwards means changing the world rather than flipping a switch. Three chapters later in this book take them one at a time, properly.

Everything else — tone, darkness, weather, how often people talk over each other — is a dial you can turn mid-campaign without anything noticing.

2.5 · Before it asks you anything

Orbit installs its own instruction blocks into the project, then reads them back and counts them out loud in front of you.

Let it. Those blocks do not survive being cloned, so a fresh copy of anything starts with an Orbit that has never read this engine — competent, generic, and impossible to diagnose afterwards, because nothing will look broken. If it ever cannot install them, it hands you the blocks and the panel and waits rather than proceeding, which is deliberate.

Say yes. It takes a moment, and it is the difference between a world and a first draft of one.

SEE ALSO · Chapter 10 · Three Ways to Sit Down for the control
question · Chapter 12 · Nothing Is Forced for limits · Chapter
**9 · Dice, and Not Knowing for the dice question. Those are the three,
and each one gets a chapter because each one is structural.

2.6 · Then go

@Missing file is the door in. Open it in the game chat.

Type what your character does. Speech in quotes. That is the entire interface, and the next chapter is the long version of that sentence.

If you want the two-minute settings pass first — project type, tags, the things nobody thinks about twice — @Missing file has the list.