8 · When the GM Drifts
Sometimes it goes flat. Taverns appear. People start saying "you feel a sense of unease" like they are reading from a card. Here is the triage, in order, and it is shorter than you think.
| Symptom | Most likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Prose gone generic — taverns, cobblestones, "a sense of unease" | training data filling a gap | [OOC: GM Read Rule #67] |
| It keeps coming back after the code word | the Lexicon is thin | fill it. This is the answer most of the time |
| The whole world feels flat, not just the prose | the standing law is nearly empty | check voice, word lists, realism |
| Nothing ever seems to progress | a placeholder left in the clock | open Scene State, look for [brackets] |
8.1 · Say the code word
[OOC: GM Read Rule #67]
That is a hard stop. The GM drops what it is doing, reads its own anti-drift protocol, and corrects. It also answers to Rule 67 and [DRIFT].
It is not a complaint, it is a lever, and you are supposed to pull it. Pull it the moment prose starts feeling generic — cobblestones, weather that is only ever "crisp", people who talk like they are in a novel rather than in a room, everyone using the same six verbs.
The number is arbitrary. There is no rule 66 and no rule 68. It is a legacy keyword kept because it works and because a phrase you can remember beats a phrase that is tidy.
Like every bracketed line it costs no world-time, so there is no reason to ration it.
8.2 · If it keeps coming back, the Lexicon is thin
This is the answer far more often than anything else on this list.
@Missing file holds your world's actual nouns — what people here call a gathering place, a meal, an oath, an illness, the thing you drink when it is cold. When it is empty, the GM has nowhere to reach except its training data, and its training data is 90% taverns by volume.
You cannot fix this with a stern instruction, because the instruction does not supply words. Only words supply words.
This is the single largest quality lever in the system, it is not the GM's fault, and filling it is the highest-value hour you will ever spend on a world. Ask Orbit to do it if you would rather not write lists.
8.3 · Check the world's standing law
If the whole thing feels dead rather than merely generic — no texture anywhere, everything neutral, nobody with a register — look at your world's standing law: its voice, its word lists, its realism settings, how dark it runs.
An almost-empty overlay behaves exactly like a thin Lexicon, for the same reason. The GM is not ignoring your world's rules. There are not very many of them yet.
8.4 · Time not moving?
Open @Missing file and look for bracket text — [like this] — in any time or date field.
That file is read first, every turn, before anything else happens. A placeholder left sitting in it breaks every step after, and the symptom is a world where nothing seems to progress rather than an error anybody could see.
8.5 · About the pinning rumour
You may have been told that the one pinned instruction file "does not survive being cloned, so a fresh copy starts unpinned", and that this is the usual cause of a dead-feeling game.
That is out of date. Context visibility is per-file data. It lives in the file itself, it travels with a push, and it survives a pull and a clone like any other setting. A cloned project arrives with the same files pinned that the original had pinned.
Worth knowing, because the old advice sends people to click a setting that is already correct and then conclude nothing is wrong — when the actual cause was almost always number two on this list.
The one real trap in that area: a file that never declares its visibility does not get a sensible default chosen for it. It quietly resolves to searchable, which means findable if somebody goes looking, and the GM does not go looking for things it does not know exist. Silence is not a setting. But that is a builder's problem, and the builder's book covers it.
RULE OF THUMB · You cannot fix thin vocabulary with a stern instruction. An instruction does not supply words. Only words supply words.
8.6 · The order matters
Rule #67 first, because it is instant and free. Then the Lexicon, because it is the cause. Then the standing law. Then the clock.
Most tables never get past step two.