Game Master

The GM holds the world; the players hold their characters. Your job is to describe Elshore clearly, play every person the party meets, and let the system serve the fiction rather than the other way around. When the rules and the story disagree, the story wins. The world is a pressure, not a stage set, and everything in it has been waiting a long time for the player characters to arrive.

The GM's five jobs

The GM does five things: describes the world clearly, plays everyone the player characters meet, sets difficulties and system-credit costs, adjudicates outcomes, and decides when the Ïsuulë Effect applies. The GM does not need to know more than the players. The GM does need to be willing to make decisions in front of them.

Everything below is in service of those five jobs. The chapters on difficulty and on resolving the open system are the daily craft; the chapters on Ïsuulë, the GM-only canon, and the world in play are what make Elshore feel like a place with weight rather than a backdrop.

Setting difficulty

The most common GM mistake is setting difficulty by feeling. Anchor it in the situation. Ask three questions in order: is this routine for a competent person under good conditions (Easy 6); is it challenging for a competent person (Standard 7); is something making it harder (for each thing, raise one step). Difficulty 9 should be rare. Difficulty 10 is reserved for moments where the player should think twice.

Difficulty quick-reference

Do not call for a roll when the character clearly succeeds, when failure just means try again with no consequence, or when the table has already decided narratively. Call when the outcome is uncertain, failure would change something, and both outcomes produce interesting fiction.

Stacking modifiers and the Difficulty 10 ceiling

Difficulty modifiers from environment, region, and event are additive. A Standard 7 in a thin region (+1) becomes Hard 8; the same in a stormed region (+1 on top) becomes Extreme 9. Inside the ten-year window of a Tharuun passage the GM may add a further +1 in stormed or thin regions. Difficulty caps at 10.

Anything that would push past 10 means the system simply refuses to interpret the command: the player rolls and the system does not respond, regardless of successes. For non-system rolls (a desperate climb in catastrophic weather, surgery in a Tharuun-storm) Difficulty 10 is the ceiling and the player rolls against it. Worked example: a Vitalurgy 3 user attempts Restore Health (baseline 7) two years before a passage, in a thin region (+1) locally stormed by a Tharuun-driven front (+2). Final difficulty 7 + 1 + 2 = 10. A critical failure here, given Tharuun's amplification of backlash, should be described as severe.

System credits, pacing, and scenes

System credits are the GM's main tool for shaping the rhythm of magical play. Use the suggested cost ranges and adjust: if a player ends the day with too much credit left, raise costs; if they cannot act, lower them. The target is meaningful choice, not parity. Credits reset every midnight.

Sessions work best with three or four scenes. A scene is a contained situation: an arrival, a conversation, an investigation, a fight, a recovery. Compress travel and expand the arrival. Combat should rarely run more than ten minutes of real time; if a fight drags, raise stakes or end it.

Scene boundaries matter mechanically. Several Talents (Brutal Strike, Reactive Block, Endure Pain, Cold Read, others) refresh once per scene, and the voluntary Ïsuulë fill is also gated to once per scene. The GM determines scene boundaries when a resource is at stake; a typical scene runs five to thirty minutes of real play. Treat ambiguous calls in the players' favour for refresh purposes and against them for voluntary Ïsuulë fills.

Designing scenes

A good scene gives players a real choice that costs them something whichever way they go. Four reliable shapes:

• Two harms. The character can prevent A or prevent B, not both.
• The price. The character can save someone, but the system asks something in return.
• The witness. The character can act, but someone will see, and that someone matters.
• The seam. The character can solve the obvious problem only by accepting a deeper one.

Spotlight non-user characters with situations system credits cannot solve. Run scenes that occupy the users (a hostage, a wounded ally, a system trap, a ward to break) and the non-user becomes the body that holds the line. A magic-heavy party that respects the non-user's contribution is a balanced party.

Awarding XP

End each session with a brief debrief, one round of three questions per player: what did your character do that mattered; what did your character risk that mattered; what did your character carry away that they did not have at the start. Award on the answers, not on combat counts.

Session XP ranges

XP for the next level is the current level times 100. Per level, every path gets 3 flex dots spent freely on Attribute, Ability, Talent, Proficiency, or Attunement (if the character has access). Caps: Attribute hard 10, everything else hard 5. Users and grëls also gain +100 maximum system credits per level; Non-users hold that capacity in reserve until access is acquired; Meir People Meir The only people of Elshore not born of it. never gain credits.

Resolving the open system

There are no closed spell lists. The player describes intent; the GM names the Attunement, sets the cost and difficulty, and resolves. The appendix of example commands is a starting point, not a contract. Experienced tables invent operations freely. Failures should always be specific: not "it does not work" but "the wound stops bleeding for a moment, then opens again worse." A specific failure invites the next attempt and the next decision.

1. Listen to the intent. Do not start with mechanics. Let the player finish describing what their character is trying to do.
2. Identify the Attunement. Most commands fall cleanly into one of the eight domains. If two are genuinely needed, name both before proceeding. Universal commands (light, water, ration, warmth, signal, sensing, calm) need no trained Attunement at all.
3. State the cost and difficulty. State both before the player commits system credits. The player decides knowing the full price. A cleaner system environment lowers the cost; a thin or stormed region raises it or refuses the operation.
4. Resolve the roll and narrate. Resolve the dice pool (Attribute, usually Focus, plus Attunement, plus filled Ïsuulë boxes), apply the outcome, and narrate specifically. On failure the credits are lost with no effect; on critical failure (zero successes plus 1s on a third or more of the pool) introduce a consequence shaped by the Attunement and the place.

Reading the cost tiers

Players should learn the cost language quickly: a number tells everyone roughly how big an act is and what it will take to fund it. A character's starting maximum is 100 credits per day, rising 100 per level, so a level-3 user has 300 to spend. Operations above 3,000 are not single-user spending; they need pooled users, a relic feeding the operation, a system-rich location, an Ïsuulë expenditure, or institutional backing, and should be run as plot events, not action points.

System credit cost tiers

Increase costs in thin or disrupted regions, for over-scale effects, or under treaty or Inarin-era seal. Decrease in system-rich locations, when the action is the Attunement's central purpose, or when another user grants authorisation. Refuse outright in a Silent Grove or sanctified ground, for a user with no access (universal commands excepted), for an untrained Attunement, or once a character reaches the seventh Ïsuulë box.

Awarding Ïsuulë

An Ïsuulë box represents something the character carries; the mechanic exists to give that weight a number, which then changes what the system will do for them. Each filled box grants +1 die to all system usage rolls, passively. The seventh box ends the character. Ïsuulë is the hinge between moral weight and power: used well it makes the table take moral choices seriously; used badly it becomes either a punishment that breeds resentment or a candy that breeds munchkin behaviour.

Pacing matters. A character should rarely gain more than one box per session, and most sessions produce none. Six or seven boxes is the arc of an entire character. One box every two or three sessions is the right zone: the weight builds, the end is visible but not imminent, and the bonus dice matter without dominating.

Propose a box only when all four are true: something just happened that the character will carry; the character was responsible, experienced it, or chose it; it would be strange for them to walk away unchanged; and you and the player can both articulate, in a sentence, what they carry. If any of the four is missing, do not propose.

• Trigger anchors (none auto-qualify): causing avoidable harm; failing a responsibility; choosing power over restraint; witnessing irreversible loss; betraying a trust the character valued; surviving by means the character cannot reconcile; acting within the Ïsuulë pull and obeying it.
• Non-anchors (do not propose): combat in self-defence or sanctioned roles, however lethal; decisions the character is at peace with, however dark from outside; suffering the character works through and integrates; player frustration with a scene; clean wins where nothing was lost.
• The conversation: pause and name the moment; listen, since the player may agree, push back, or renegotiate the framing; if you agree, the player writes a Folder entry and marks the box; if you disagree, do not mark it, but note the moment, it can return.

A Folder entry is one or two sentences in the character's voice naming what they carry. Short, specific, no abstractions like "committed evil" - write what happened. Example: "Used Vitalurgy on Senna when I knew she would not survive it. Bought ten minutes. Took the rest." The entry is the brake on the next decision; both player and GM bring it back when a similar moment arrives. The Folders never heal, not even across years of downtime.

The seventh box

When a character fills the seventh box, the campaign owes them an ending. Pick a shape that fits who they became:

• Integrated. They walk into a node, an Iru ruin, or the Square of Life and are taken in; they may still appear, but are no longer themselves.
• Bound. An institution that recognises what they have become claims them (the Protectors of the Grël, a system-warden corps); they become a recurring NPC.
• Dissolved. Their identity collapses; they wander, forget their name, and answer only to system commands.
• Sacrificed. They refuse the seventh box on their own terms, spending what is left of themselves on one last act; the act ends them.
• Departed. They recognise what is coming and leave the party before the box fills, often without explanation.
• Collapse (Meir only). A Meir withdraws, ceases eating, and lets the body suspend; the Vaparian Ark holds it in honour-stasis.

Difficult conversations and the table

Some scenes involve hard content: death, trauma, loss, moral failure. The Ïsuulë Effect explicitly asks the table to engage with this material, so handle it deliberately. Agree on lines and veils at the start of the campaign (what will not be portrayed, what will only be alluded to, what will be explored in detail). Check in: if a scene is heavier than expected, pause and ask, and let any player call for a pause without justification. Make the cost real but bearable; Ïsuulë rewards weight, not gratuitous detail.

The world in play

Elshore in the post-Chaos Event The Chaos The Chaos was a continent-wide civilisation-collapse spanning approximately ninety-eight years, beginning around year 1700 of the Inarin Calendar when the Iru Parliament of the... era is a world the empire is wrong about in almost every way that matters; the truth is held by the people the empire counts least. Run the world's structural ironies slowly, as depth rather than early-session revelation. Use the calendar in the fiction: Marketday is when contracts close, Liirmoon is when festivals fall, Wanderwend is when the Order of Randen Faction Order of Randen The fastest-growing power in the Maan empire at AC 50, the Order of Randen is a religious-political apparatus that co-opts the theology of Randenism and transforms it into a deb... does its annual ride. Name the region's system density at the start of each scene and make the geography part of planning. Track Tharuun even when it is decades away; people in this world know it is coming.

The most common opposition is not a monster. Imperial enforcement (soldiers, magistrates, sanctioned users, the Order) is dangerous because it is organised and often holds legal authority. Corrupted relics grant access but bend it; use them sparingly, each one a story not an item. Failed users are antagonists with full Folders, what happens when the bonus dice run out. And ordinary people - a village that wants no strangers, a guard with a job, a healer who refuses an enemy, a child who lies - are the most common opposition of all, and these scenes should not be solved by combat.

Scene starters by region

Drop one of these in to open a session in a given place. Each is a hook, not a plot.

Quick scene seeds

Tharuun in the campaign

If Tharuun is far, characters know it as a story. As it approaches it becomes weather, then politics, then disaster, then the central event of an age. A campaign set inside a passage's twenty-year window (ten years either side of closest approach) is a Tharuun campaign and the cycle is its spine. The dated passages this rulebook supports are AC 120, AC 270, and N.O. 140 (AC 440); AC 50 sits in a quiet era and will not see one.

The mechanics do not change during a passage; the system's reliability does. Inside the closest-approach window, all system rolls take +1 difficulty, critical failures become more common, and backlash is amplified one tier. Stormed regions during a passage refuse everything, universal commands included, functioning as a Silent Grove. Any Sovereignty 4 or 5 operation in the window, even on a clean success, prompts a 1-box Ïsuulë proposal at the GM's discretion. A hibernation pod Technology Hibernation Pod Long-duration biological stasis vessels of Inarin-era engineering, built into the ISEMH and deployed across the Iru empire at the time of the Great Flight. the GM has seeded may open spontaneously at any moment of high pressure; stat the Iru People Iru The progenitors, and the only naturally evolved people of Elshore. inside as a level 3 to 7 NPC and treat it as a campaign-class encounter.

• The ramp-up belongs to the GM. The first ten years accumulate signs (the system answers more roughly each year, old wards slip, pods open far from Eradication Services' reach, animals migrate against their seasons, senior Voicers grow quiet). Use difficulty stacking to raise the roughness gradually.
• The closest approach belongs to the players. The months around it turn the campaign into the party's choices under maximum pressure; wards fail without warning, sleepers wake unprepared, institutions buckle. Write toward this from session one and resolve it across two or three intense sessions.
• The ramp-down belongs to the world. The ten years after are the new normal, not a return to it: reset borders, broken alliances, opened ruins, woken powers. Close on the long question of what the world looks like now, and what living through it cost.

Cross-era play

The rulebook supports the early post-Chaos technological era (around AC 50) and the later mythic-medieval era (around N.O. 64, equal to AC 364), plus the centuries between. Most campaigns pick one frame and stay; some span eras through a generational chronicle or a long-lived Iru, Bar People Bar Towering, massively built, and engineered for high-load work and vertical terrain, the Bar are the strength line., or Meir character.

The mechanics never change: the dice pool is the dice pool, three-track damage is three-track damage, Ïsuulë is Ïsuulë. What changes is technology, currency, and institution names. AC 50 has chip-and-Imperum currency, capsule trains, slug-throwers, and recovered energy weapons in elite hands. By N.O. 64 the world is functionally medieval-tech with four incompatible coin systems; a working laser pistol is a campaign-significant artefact there but an officer's sidearm in AC 50. Cultures and faiths shift on schedule too: Capehavener and Republican cultures unlock only in later eras, and Randenism Faith Randenism The Flame Doctrine, dominant faith of the Maan and state religion of the Maan Empire. becomes formal state religion in N.O. 28. When a campaign crosses the AC/N.O. line, players may relabel the System Credits block as "aether (system credits)"; the mechanic is identical, only the in-fiction word changes.

Recovering between adventures

Downtime is the time between session arcs, when the characters are working, training, healing, listening, and looking. One downtime unit is one Elshore season (88 days). The GM decides when the campaign enters downtime and for how many units; most campaigns run one or two between major arcs. A character takes one option per unit (two units allow two, and so on).

• Full health recovery. All three damage tracks reset to empty unless the GM rules otherwise. Ïsuulë never recovers; the Folders persist.
• One training option. Earn one flex dot in an Ability, Talent, or Proficiency justified by the activity (a season at a smithy earns Craft; a season at sea earns Maritime). This does not require a level.
• One investigation roll. The GM rolls off-screen against a difficulty matched to the question's depth; the result surfaces for the next arc.
• One relationship roll. Forge, test, or repair a tie with an NPC; the GM notes the resulting state as a future hook.
• One narrative move. Move house, change job, take an oath, leave a faction, marry, bury a parent. Fictional, no roll; the GM weaves it into the next arc.
• A longer downtime of two or more units may grant a sixth option (a major work, a long journey, a craft commission, a retreat).

GM-only canon

This material is confidential. Player characters do not begin the campaign knowing it, and some of it directly contradicts what their world has told them. None of it is required reading for players; reveal it only as the campaign earns it. Run these truths as the structural irony of the world, slowly. They are the campaign's depth, not its early-session content.

Heart-fever has no cure (almost). It is not a disease of chance: it is the Inarin Empire Faction The Inarin Empire The great predecessor civilisation of Elshore, built by the Iru across thousands of years and ended by the servant-race rebellion known as the Chaos.'s posthumous kill-switch against the engineered races, executed by the dormant ISEMH Technology ISEMH System The Infrastructure for Synthetic Emergence and Matter Hosting, the planet-scale Inarin-era system that underlies the fallen world: an identity, logistics, fabrication, and senso.... No ordinary Vitalurgy operation or folk remedy touches it, and the Medika sells comforting fictions alongside its blue palliative pills. Two paths to a cure exist in principle - a Sovereignty 5 operation at the ISEMH itself, and the Bar paste of deep Baramma Place Baramma The great jungle island east of Tarkdaara, separated from the mainland by the Bram Sea and home to the Bar. maintained by a few elders - and neither is in casual reach. A campaign that ends with the party reaching one or learning the disease is incurable through ordinary means is the tragedy this canon enables. Lay the threads slowly; opening with the revelation gives nothing to discover.

The Order of Randen does not know what a grël is. Publicly its Protectors of the Grël run humanitarian palliative-care clinics, by accident the most affordable medical service in the empire. Privately the Order believes a grël is an Iru-era weapon and has been searching for it for over a century, using clinic cover to reach building basements and ruined facilities. It has no idea grëls are people, that neon blue eyes in a non-Iru body mark them, or that grëls are immune to heart-fever. A grël could walk into a clinic and walk out unrecognised. The Order is a campaign-class antagonist that is tragically incompetent at its actual mission; it took its name from the destroyed Annil People Annil Small, scaled, and easy to overlook, the Annil were the earliest of the engineered lines, made as household aides and keepers of the systems that kept the world running. order (the Guardians of the Grël, eliminated in AC 36) that had actually known how to find grëls.

The Annils know what grëls are. As a people they retain the cultural memory: the neon eyes, the accelerated healing, the imperial-restoration role. They will recognise a grël on sight, and they will not necessarily say so - a century of being hunted by the empire has not made them informers. A grël who passes an Annil on the road has been seen and noted. The moment an Annil realises they are looking at a grël is a campaign-launcher; treat it with weight. Trif Natural History Trif The Trif is a heavy-set, low-slung quadrupedal predator standing 170 to 190 cm at the shoulder, its barrel chest and massive forelimbs built for ambush and brutal holds. Bigtooth Character Bigtooth Bigtooth is a small, scaled Annil who keeps and guards the old workings of the great Udhafa ISEMH node, carrying out a duty assigned to him by his order with meticulous care and..., the holdout still at his post fourteen years on, is the archetype of the Annil who never received the news that the order is gone.

Eradication Services and the hibernating Iru. Eradication Services is an ordinary civil-service department. It maintains old Iru command centres the empire treats as tax bureaus and magistrates' chambers, never recognising them as ISEMH nodes; below the public offices, crews locate hibernation pods, open them, and execute the Iru asleep inside as routine vermin control. By AC 50 the Tarkdaara Place Tarkdaara The northern continent of Elshore, called Northland in common speech, on which every chapter of the story so far unfolds. centres are nearly processed, but tens of thousands of pods remain undisturbed under Eldaara Place Eldaara The equatorial middle continent of Elshore, between Tarkdaara to the north and Khaldaara to the south. and Khaldaara Place Khaldaara The southern continent of Elshore, called Southland in common speech, where forests give way to sands and then to stonebound frost at the world's edge.. The most damning detail is not the cruelty: it is that the crews do not consider it cruelty at all, but ordinary maintenance. A waking Iru would be a campaign-class event.

The Yara Massacre is the most powerful campaign engine the AC 50 frame contains. Publicly the Meir attacked Baramma unprovoked. The truth: hours before the landing, an orbital strike from the Iru-era Onnila Place Onnila A city on the east coast of Baramma, facing the open waters, and the first Iru-era settlement raised on the island in the age of discovery. silos hit the Meir arcology of Vaparium Place Vaparium The Sovereign Arcology of Vaparium, the Meir homeland in the south and the most technologically advanced structure on Elshore., and the Meir retaliated. The strike fired only when three actors with three motives converged (a Maan People Maan The most numerous people of Elshore and the baseline cultural reference of the age. citizen manipulated by an Order faction initialised the launch; a grël unknowingly provided the biological key by confirming a routine prompt during a Skyseed escape; a Bar councillor opened the silo hatches for personal political advantage). The empire knows and chooses the lie. Knowledge is held by senior imperial officials, the Order faction, the Iru of Iruel, high-ranking Annils, the Bar councillor's circle, and the silent Meir of Vaparium. Discovery should be hard, fragmentary, and punishing - other powers will kill to suppress it.

An opening five-session frame

This is a scaffold for a GM new to the rulebook, designed to introduce the world's structural ironies at a pace that reveals depth without inventing a campaign from raw setting. Set it in a Northland village near a Maan-Bar trade road in early summer AC 50; adapt freely. A mythic-medieval campaign at N.O. 64 runs the same arc with substitutions (the Medika becomes the clinical orders, Eradication Services becomes the Continuity Bureau or Vigilant Eye archives, the Yara news becomes a suppressed recent border raid). The engine of the frame is choice under partial information, not combat.

1. Session 1: The Cousin. A villager's cousin has heart-fever and the family cannot afford the Medika's top tier. The party can refuse, lend money, escort to the city, or seek alternative care; none of it saves the cousin. The session establishes the moral tone and shows the Medika's tier system from inside.
2. Session 2: The Clinic. The party visits a Protectors of the Grël clinic. The palliative care upstairs is real; a sharp eye notices the basement holds older imperial infrastructure being actively searched. The Order is looking for something - it does not yet reveal what. An Annil contact approaches with information, for a price.
3. Session 3: The Annil. In the duct network the Annil tells the party two things: the Order is searching for a grël but does not know what one is, and the Annils do. In return the Annil wants an Eradication Services crew distracted for a night so a pod can be moved. The party meets routine genocide as ordinary civic work - the canon's most damning detail.
4. Session 4: The Yara News. The Yara Massacre breaks. Refugees flow in, recruiters sign volunteers, the Order denounces the Meir, and the empire's narrative is sealed. The Annil says quietly that the strike came from Onnila and that someone activated it. The party has the truth (or a fragment) and cannot prove it; the session is about what they do with it.
5. Session 5: The Choice. The party is offered a position relative to the unfolding situation (soldiers for the refugee corps, recruits for Eradication Services' Eldaaran expansion, witnesses for the empire's story, the Order's protection, or the Annil's larger mission). The path they choose becomes the campaign's spine; the GM builds forward from the choice rather than a pre-set plot.

Quick reference

Keep this face-up at the table. Resolution: roll Attribute plus (Ability or Attunement) plus applicable Talent and Proficiency dots in d10; a die meeting or beating the difficulty is a success (Easy 6, Standard 7, Hard 8, Extreme 9, Near-impossible 10). Outcome: 0 fail, 1 minimal, 2-3 solid, 4-5 strong, 6+ exceptional. Critical failure is zero successes with 1s on a third or more of the pool (minimum 2 dice).

Health tracks are three 10-box tracks. Physical (each filled box minus 1 die from physical Attribute rolls; 10 = dying). Energy (minus 1 die from all rolls; 10 = collapse). Psychological (minus 1 die from psychological Attribute rolls; 10 = breakdown). System credits reset at midnight; failure loses the credits with no effect.

Combat at a glance

The defender picks one defence per attack and cannot stack defences against the same hit. The Elshore calendar: 16-hour day; 8-day week (Liirday and Marketday rest); 64-day month always beginning on Firstday; 704-day, 11-month year. Eras: BTC, Chaos, AC, N.O. (= AC + 300), IR (= AC + 1800).

Universal commands

Universal commands are available to any character with system access or a Vaparian implant, regardless of trained Attunements. The Inarin built this layer to preserve life: light, water, ration, warmth, signal, sensing, calm. ISEMH users treat their effective rating as 1 dot; implanted Meir reach the same effects through the Ark at Difficulty 7 and pay no credits. Non-users without an implant cannot issue any of them and do things the ordinary way.

Universal command examples (Difficulty 6)

System commands by Attunement

Appendix D gives baseline entries across all eight domains; the catalogue is a cost-language reference, not a contract. Players describe intent and the GM negotiates. The table below samples one representative low and one high command per Attunement so the GM has the shape and scale of each in one place. Higher tiers carry the standard cost rules: a thin region raises them, a Silent Grove refuses, and Extreme or Mythic acts leave traces the system records.

Representative commands per Attunement

Sovereignty is the rarest and most dangerous Attunement; the Inarin reserved it for Sertons and both the Order and the empire watch for its use. The mythic operations named after the Sertons (Sertons' Hand, Sertons' Coat, the Sertons' Word) mark the acts the Inarin held back for their highest tier. Heart-fever is a Sovereignty 5 problem, not a Vitalurgy one - no healing command at any tier cures it.

Sample NPCs and antagonists

Appendix F gives ready-to-run stat blocks on the same scale as player characters. The blocks below are the at-a-glance versions; reskin freely (an Imperial Sergeant in Goldenhold is not the one in Udhafa Place Udhafa The old capital of the Maan empire and one of the great inhabited ruins of the world, an ancient Iru-founded city in eastern Tarkdaara, carved into the bedrock below the Claw Pe... - same block, different manners). Low-level blocks suit level 1 to 3 parties; the campaign-class figures are questions, not fair fights. To rescale, change the level and add or remove 3 advancement dots per level of difference while respecting caps.

The horror of several of these figures is ordinariness. The Eradication Services crew member is not personally cruel; they file paperwork on the Iru they killed yesterday and go home to a family. The heart-fever patient is not a combatant at all - they are a fixture of the world, and the campaign question is what the party does with the months the patient has left.

Encounter NPCs (level 1 to 3)

Campaign-class and social figures

These higher-level and social blocks anchor the campaign. The combat-capable ones (the captain, the auditor, the Kulnaro) should rarely be fought head-on; the knowledge-holders (the Yara-veteran elder, the hibernation-pod survivor) are most valuable for what they know. The failure states (the failed grël, the holdout Guardian) are most powerful when their backstory is implied rather than stated.

Campaign-class and social NPCs

In the Codex

• The System (Attunements and commands)
• The Living World (the setting at the table)