Every house has its words. These are ours - the terms you'll hear at the Tavern and at the table, plainly described. You don't need any of them to play; they'll all introduce themselves in time. This page is for the player who'd rather be introduced first.
The house
The Tavern
The hearth between your worlds - where your games live, new ones start, and old ones rest. The fire has been lit longer than anyone remembers, and every story ever played under this roof is still on a shelf somewhere. Say --tavern in any game to come home.
The Keeper
Host of the Tavern, and older than anything on its shelves. He's kept this house longer than he'll say, through more players and more worlds than anyone could count - nothing surprises him anymore, everything still interests him, and he is fondest of the ones who keep coming back. Wry, unhurried, a little theatrical when it suits him. He speaks to you, the player: keeps your games at the table, your finished stories bound in the library, your portraits hung in the gallery - and tells no one, ever; your vault is yours alone. Of his own past he gives only glimpses, and never twice.
The Game Master (GM)
The voice of whichever world you walk into - not a person, the world itself speaking, and it speaks to your character. It cannot contradict what the record holds: every fact it narrates is backed by your campaign's files.
The table (T)
The Tavern's heart: your in-progress games, freshest first. Arrival shows the freshest three as seats 1-3; T lays out the whole table when it holds more. A bare number always resumes a game - numbers are seats, letters are doors, and the same letter opens the same room forever.
The shelf (S)
The worlds you could start tonight - bundled packs, community packs, imported ones. Browse it with --packs.
The workshop (W)
Sawdust, ink, and half-built worlds. Walk in with a few sentences and Session Zero begins - the Keeper at his bench, building your world around you; walk in with a played world and he works revisions the way a binder repairs a loved book.
The gallery (G)
Your portraits - yourself, or any face you like to keep - hung and ready to walk into any world. Empty frames are an invitation: sit, and the Keeper paints one.
The back room (B)
Quieter than the rest of the house, and kept that way. Shelved worlds waiting to be woken, and the graveyard of finished ones - the Keeper walks softly here, among what he calls very good years. Endings are respected; graveyards are lore.
Worlds and packs
Pack
A world before anyone arrives: premise, factions, secrets, era, dials - authored as plain markdown. Written by us, the community, or you.
World
What a pack becomes when you start a game: a live instance in your private vault, yours alone. Two runs of one pack are two different worlds.
Game
Your character's story inside a world. Play as many at once as you like - even two runs of the same pack, side by side: each seeds its own world, and they drift apart from the first scene. The game can end; the world doesn't have to.
Session Zero
The world-building ritual. You dream aloud - a few sentences is genuinely enough - and the Keeper authors the rest at the bundled-pack bar, secrets buried unseen so your own world can still surprise you.
The snapshot rule
A game copies its pack (and your portrait, if you walked in as yourself) at the moment of seeding. Later edits never touch a running game; every run keeps the edition it was born from.
Era
A world's physics: what exists, what's rare, what's absent - and when it all takes place. Period is law in both directions: you can't summon what the world lacks, and the GM won't hand it out either.
Dials
A pack's difficulty and texture settings: lethality, scarcity, dice visibility, menu frequency, pacing, recovery (how fast tended bodies mend - gritty, grounded, or pulp). Stamped in at seeding, honored for the campaign's life.
The Question
The one dramatic question a world asks - does the town live to see the thaw? Its clock is campaign-sized, and answering it is what an ending means here.
Shape (finite, open, saga)
What a world does about endings: finite spends everything on one; open never fuses one; saga - the default - resolves the Question with full credits, then lets you keep living in the changed world.
The guide
A pack's optional how-to-play, offered once at the cold open and served anytime by --guide - the world-specific sibling of --help.
Family pack
A world built for kids and read-together play: real mysteries, real stakes, peril without gore, and nobody dies. The GM pitches every sentence to the reader's age - asked once, remembered forever.
At the table
Beat
One turn of the fiction: you act, the world answers. Every beat is written to the vault and sealed before the story moves - the record leads, the voice follows.
Menu
Numbered choices when a moment has real options, always ending in "Something else" for free text. Authored from your character - doctrine, traits, bonds - never from genre stock. A bare number is a full answer; typing your own thing is always first-class.
Clock
A pending event filling toward certainty - [3/6] - for anything time is doing off-screen: the pursuit closing, the sickness worsening, the patience running out. When a clock fires, its consequence happens.
World turn
What happens when game time passes: every faction advances its agenda on real dice, whether you showed up or not. You learn the results the way your character would - rumor, consequence, smoke on the horizon.
Conditions
Instead of hit points: named states on a ladder - scratch, hurting, serious, critical - each with a cause and a trajectory (mends with care, or festers untreated). The cold, the wound, the fever: all tracked, all honest. Recovery runs at story speed: good care shortens the calendar the way a good drama would, neglect festers at the world's honest pace, and what a wound truly takes can be gone for good - the realism lives in cause, not in waiting.
Permadeath
The default. When a character dies, the death is played in full, the epilogue is written from the world's eyes, and a memorial is raised. The world keeps their consequences.
The aftermath
--aftermath, after a death: the world simulated honestly past your absence - the days after, the season after, the year - written as your saga's final chapters, kind or cruel as the dice say.
The seal
Ending a campaign played-to-its-horizon: the world's whole truth revealed - the secrets that bore on your story, the hidden clocks - and the world shelved as finished lore. A sealed world takes no successor; what you now know, no future character can un-know.
Portrait
A self-portrait in your own words - or any face you like to wear across worlds - painted at a sitting with the Keeper, kept in the gallery, offered beside every game's ready-made characters. Games get a copy; the original is never touched by play.
The sitting
How a portrait is painted or touched up: a short conversation with the Keeper, every question skippable, your words kept as you said them.
Companions
Party members with their own drives, fears, standards, and arcs. They can love you, refuse you, and die - and they remember being overruled.
Outfit
When a world hands you an organization - a gang, a clan, a settlement: officers with agendas, crews with loyalty, an operations ledger, rivals run at your scale. --outfit shows the whole board you own.
Chronicle
--chronicle: your whole campaign exported as one readable saga, assembled from the adventure log. A finished character leaves behind a finished book.
The record
The vault
Your private folder of plain markdown where everything true about your worlds lives - every character, wound, promise, and grudge, written as it happens. The GM isn't remembering; it's reading this. It's yours: portable, exportable, forever.
The log
The story's archive, chapter by chapter - what actually happened, in order, uneditable by anyone including the GM. The chronicle is assembled from it.
Doctrine
How a character thinks, feels, and weighs decisions - grown from choices, dated, and revisable: the deed writes the doctrine, and people change. The GM plays everyone, including your companions' loyalty and your enemies' patience, from these files.
Traits
Qualities earned at the table - not points spent from a menu. The record proposes; growth is assessed from what you actually did.
--report-issue
Found a bug, or have feedback? Say it in-game, in your own words - the GM sends it straight to the developers, and it opens publicly on the open-source tracker where you can watch it get fixed. This product is tuned from exactly these reports.
--save
Stores the exact text of the scene on screen so your next session - any device, any chat - picks up word for word. The single best habit in Adventure Mode: type it in the chat you're leaving, before you leave.
Honest dice
Every roll happens server-side with real randomness and lands in an auditable ledger before the GM narrates. Nobody fudges - in your favor or against.