Builder's Manual · Chapter 1

The Layers

GM Brain/ holds five kinds of file. Three of them are a depth ladder, one is a state machine, and one is the write path. Knowing which is which is most of knowing where a new rule belongs.

The depth ladder

The three are distinguished by exactly one property: whether the GM can open them during a turn.

The pinned Ladder. @Missing file loads on every turn, automatically, whole. Measured with characters ÷ 4 it currently runs a little under seven thousand tokens, every time the GM thinks — measure it yourself rather than trusting this sentence, because it moves whenever somebody edits it.

It shares pinning with four files in total, and the other three are data: @Missing file, @Missing file, and @Missing file. One pinned instruction file, three pinned state files. That ratio is deliberate and the visibility chapter defends it.

The Ladder holds the turn procedure and almost nothing else: time and life first, then input, refusal, the cascade, checkpoint, voice, write, scrub, persist. Everything it needs elsewhere it names by title.

Do not add reference material to it. If a rule feels important enough to pin, it is almost always cheaper to have the Ladder name the file holding it — naming costs about ten tokens once, pinning costs the file's full length forever.

The cards. GM Brain/Cards/ — most sit between five hundred and roughly twenty-five hundred tokens, with the median comfortably under a thousand. A card is the operative layer: thresholds, a short procedure, the exact schema fields to write. One opens when the Ladder names it, and it is gone again afterwards.

A card is not an essay about a subject. It is what to do about that subject, in the order you do it.

The mechanics. GM Brain/Mechanics/ — three thousand to nearly thirty thousand tokens each. This is the world-book, the deep reference a card is a summary of.

Never read whole during play. That is not a style note. The largest mechanic in this project measures 5.1× the pinned Ladder — one file, four times the cost of the thing that loads on every single turn. Cards exist precisely so the mechanics never have to be opened at the table.

The state machine

GM Brain/Phases/ is the layer both books used to skip, and it is why the same turn procedure produces a conversation and a chase.

Eleven of them are phaseMode values on Scene State — Downtime, Adventure, Conversation, Travel, Combat, Investigation, OOC, Multi-scene, Somewhere Else, Absence, Player Control Loss. That enum is the state; the phase file is what the state does. @Missing file sets minute costs, beat floors and what people are actually doing while they talk. Phase files run about the size of a large card.

Four more are tints, not states. Multi-Unit, Storyteller, Off-Screen and Maturity Link modify whatever phase is running rather than replacing it. They are switched on by installation flags, not by the turn. A tint has no phaseMode value and never will — writing one into that enum is a rejected push.

Adding a phase means adding an enum value and the file, or the mode is unreachable. Adding a tint means neither.

The write path

GM Brain/Tools/ — roughly one per file type the GM writes. These are the shortest files in the project, a hundred-odd tokens each, and they are the least understood.

A Tool is a registered post-condition validator. It fires after a write, not before it. A read trigger lands during preprocessing; an update trigger lands during postprocessing, after the change it is riding on has already happened.

That timing is the whole design constraint: a Tool cannot instruct the write it fires on. It arrives too late. It can check what landed, correct it, cascade to a second file, or refuse to let a stale record sit — it cannot shape the value. Anything that must shape a write belongs in a card the Ladder names, or in a narrative trigger on post_player_message, which arrives before anything has been decided. @Missing file is the authority on that ordering.

A Tool written as a paragraph of advice is a Tool that does nothing. Write the check.

The rule that holds it together

The pinned file names. The card carries. The mechanic explains. The phase decides which card. The tool checks what landed.

Every time something feels important enough to promote a layer, check whether naming it from one layer up would do. It usually does.

Manual updated Aug 12, 2026.

Realm Realistic Flow

The Demon Lords Have Come To Earth!

🚧 WORK IN PROGRESS — Actively being built. Begin your journey as the Demon Lord in Seoul who aims to rebuild his kingdom by gaining popularity and prosperity as a teacher in the art academy where demons and heroes hiding in the society! Action Romance Comedy genre.

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@rayjustaway

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Versionv18

CreatedSep 14, 2026

UpdatedSep 21, 2026

Universal System · WIP

A world that keeps living while you're not looking

# 🚧 WORK IN PROGRESS

This system is under active build. Everything you'll read below is real and runs now, but expect sharp edges and features still in the oven.

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**A roleplaying system where the world is the protagonist and you're just the one who showed up.**

Realm Realistic Flow drops you into a living realm with a flow of its own — one you lose control of the moment you let it loose.

## 🕘 Time is a peer, not a countdown

Every turn advances the clock, and the world spends the same hours you did. People you are not watching are doing something. Threads come due whether or not anyone checks.

## 🌌 There are no NPCs

Everything that acts is a **Potential Character** — it wants something today, does not know something, remembers your last conversation slightly wrong, and may refuse you. Friction is the default, not the special case. The world has inertia; you earn every yes.

## 🎲 Math you can dial, not code you rewrite

The world's numbers live as data on a single file: stat curve, difficulty bands, derived stats, advancement. Dice are a formula — 1d100 roll-under, 3d6, 4d6kh3, even 2d100 answering two different questions at once. A narrative table and a percentile table run the same schema, and moving between decks is an edit, not a migration.

## 🎭 Three ways to sit down

Be one person. Direct several, with in-world time held until every unit has an order. Or hold the pen yourself and let the GM play a character inside the world you are writing — one with free will, its own agenda, and the standing right to refuse you.

## 🧠 A GM that remembers, hurts, and knows when to stop talking

Long-term memory that actually sticks. Consequences that land and stay landed. A narrator that answers the moment, not the message — spend the winter learning to read and the winter genuinely happens, clocks running, everything due coming due. It refuses without softening, and it never once tells you that something mattered.

## 🗄️ Unique advanced systems to pick apart

- 🟥 **The Loom** — a unique idea generator - 🟧 **The Lore Genesis** — original lore grown out of yours - 🟨 **The Lexicon** — an LLM world-bank trainer for your unique words - 🟩 **Con-language** — create and manage new languages from scratch - 🟦 **Realm Flow** — computed math that cascades logical forces into the illogical

## 🌍 Universal

One cascade runs fantasy, forensic, cyberpunk, or a quiet story about a market town. Supports all genre and game types — with a 🔞 **+18 optional add-on** for tables that want it.

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💌 This is a love letter to people who want to express themselves but don't know how, and to builders who want a world beyond what they asked for. You should feel like a **player** in the world you made — not its director, not its fuel.

Glimpses

Author's note

Built for tables that want the world to push back. The default install is narrative — no stats, no targets, nothing to optimise; every number is opt-in and lives on one file you can read in a minute. The two inverted modes (Storyteller, Multi-Unit) are decided at install and deliberately can't be bolted on later, because each one changes what the game *is* rather than what a scene does.

🚧 **WIP** — Realm Realistic Flow is under active development. Expect polish passes, new systems, and sharper edges as it evolves.

World Map