You never move your character. You write their orders, then read what those orders turned into while you were gone.
Each tick they check whether your orders say anything about the situation in front of them. Five misses in a row and they stop working from your page until you write again. They do not stand still when that happens. They drift: take a shift if one is going, queue for the ration if they are hungry, walk somewhere, watch somebody, sleep. A drifting character stays alive. They just stop being yours until the next window.
So write conditions. For every instruction, say what happens when it cannot be followed.
Get money. Become important. Make people respect me.
Carry yourself with dignity at all times. Be impressive. Never let anyone see you struggling.
Take work at the docks. If the foreman is a Varro man, do not give my name, say the netmenders sent you. If there is no hauling on the quay try the salt sheds, and if the sheds are full go to the Hiring Stone and wait to be pointed at. If somebody threatens you, walk away without answering and remember the face. Eat once a day. If you have nothing to do at all, go back to the Hiring Stone.
| Pilot | They read your orders and decide. This is the real game. |
|---|---|
| Yourself | You queue single acts. They happen one a tick, before orders are consulted. Useful when you want something done exactly. |
| Notice | Pay criers from your character's purse. It goes on a wall and travels by mouth. Spend more, travels further. Nothing checks whether it is true. |
|---|---|
| Letter | Write to another player's character. It waits where they are. Whether they believe it is their business. |
The city decides whether each one worked. Saying you take the crown does not take the crown.
You can put hands on people. fight settles it on the spot: fear, followers and how much is left in you against the same in them. Win and they are on the stones and sometimes they do what you say afterwards. Lose and it is you.
rally calls whoever is standing there to your back. Hungry people, idle people and people you have fed come over easiest, and a shut granary is worth more than a speech. riot needs four at your back. The street goes up: every person on that corner and the ones beside it gets hurt, the grain goes out of the doors by the armful, and the city's patience with whoever wears the crown drops hard. Some of your people scatter afterwards and you cannot raise them again for hours.
demand takes it off somebody instead of asking. Against a townsman it is coin or grain out of their hands. Against one of the city's own it depends whether you frighten them more than they frighten you, and either way they remember it. Every NPC keeps a private reckoning of you. Push it far enough down and the foreman looks past you at the hiring, the lender shuts the box, the steward counts you out of the ration queue, and nobody tells you anything. Giving and paying bring it back up, slowly.
Force is a real road to the throne, but it is only one of four. A mob makes you feared, not lawful. You still need a claim of forty and to be standing in the right room.
| coin | what you have | work, trade, lending |
|---|---|---|
| standing | what people think | trust, visible work |
| force | what you can make happen | people who back down |
| claim | what you can argue | being on the record |
Claim of forty before anyone hears you. Then out-stand whoever wears it. A reign is untouchable for two days, after which the city sours on the wearer by itself, faster the longer they hold on. Reigns run two to five days.
Twelve streets by twelve, a castle in the middle, farmland and a river outside the wall. Never enough grain, and the price moves daily.
Your character knows only what they can see from where they stand, plus whatever they have been told, some of which is wrong. After about fifteen things, older memories collapse into one vague line. They misremember on purpose.
A tick is twenty minutes of city time and one minute of yours, so a day in Corvane takes about an hour to live through. Seventy two ticks make the day. Your window comes every six city hours, which is about twenty minutes of real time. Miss one and it banks, up to three. Spending banked windows buys a longer leash rather than extra actions: more tolerance for confusion, and the orders stay live longer.
Everyone here is working from a page written by somebody who is not in the room. That includes whoever is wearing the crown.