The Living World

Since v2.0 the world runs on the engine’s own tick. Every round after your action, the engine advances heat, pressures, opportunities, encounters, and faction moves; the game reads that truth back rather than keeping copies. This page is what you will feel at the table, and where to look when you want to see the machinery.

What moves without you

System	What you see	Where to inspect
Heat and pressures	Kills raise a district’s heat; once it wakes, a faction raises a pressure (a bounty, an investigation, an alert) that later escalates, resolves, or expires. A line says so the round it happens.	/pressures, /status
Opportunities	Offers spawn and expire on their own; accept <title> takes one while it lasts.	/jobs, /contracts
Encounters	Entering some zones spawns an ambush or a patrol, announced as a headline.	the play screen
District mood	Commerce, morale, and safety shift with what happens; the mood colors narration and prices.	/districts, /district
Rumors	The street talks about you. NPCs hear rumors as hearers who believe or doubt; rumors spread to adjacent districts.	/rumors (play or director mode)
Market	One quoted price sits in the location block when the district has a market: Market: Healing Draught 13 (+30% vs base); the note names the faction’s standing toward you when one controls the district.	/market, /trade

Enemies act

A hostile that shares your zone is aware of you. An aware hostile that decides to attack telegraphs first — Crypt Stalker readies an attack against you — and lands the next round: Crypt Stalker's attack finds you — 3 damage. Those lines live in a reserved block above the narration, together with your own outcome (Your strike lands — Crypt Stalker: bloodied.) and any kill (The Crypt Stalker falls.). Everyone’s condition is one of five rungs: unhurt, hurt, bloodied, reeling, down. The round you drop into reeling, the channel says so and names the way out — You are reeling — flee (Chapel Nave · Vestry Passage) before you fall. flee leaves by the zone’s own exits.

Enemy damage is a tuning lever (enemyDamageScale, default 0.5, set on the measured sheet); enemyAggression can be off, telegraphed, or immediate.

Asks and recognition

People ask you for things: carry this, lend a little coin, guide me below, hold this for me, vouch for me. Some need the help. Some are cons, and they look the same. The game plants cues — a rumor on the board, a faction tie in /npc, a contradiction in what they did — and the truth comes out later, at a named cost if you were taken in (… story wasn't true. 5 coin gone.) or for free if you walked on (… story wasn't true. You never bit.). A real need left unanswered resolves badly for the petitioner, and the world says so.

Answer with help <name>. Help a genuine ask and the same round says who will remember it; the faction’s standing moves, a rumor about the deed starts, and the petitioner owes you gratitude that repays later — a warning before an ambush, a better price, a pressure quietly resolved. Enough standing earns an honorific, shown by /leverage and used in dialogue.

Talking to the street

• A sentence typed at the NPC who just spoke to you is speech to them, not a request for clarification.
• A bare name talks to that NPC; a bare exit name moves there.
• /go <exit>, /move <exit>, /zone <exit> move; /rumors reads the board from play mode.
• An unknown slash command is answered at once — the nearest command, where it lives, and what you can do right now — without spending a turn.

The tuning surface

Every living-world lever has one measured default, readable with /tuning in director mode. The levers that moved on measurement in v2.0: rumors are believed only below suspicion 0, rumors spread to adjacent districts, and enemy damage scales to 0.5. The measurements come from a deterministic 30-round matrix over all thirteen worlds (dogfood/tuning/ in the repository), one lever per wave, with an outcomes document each time.

The recap

quit or the end of a session prints what the world did: pressures spawned and resolved, opportunities offered and expired, ambushes, mood transitions, rumors mutated, asks made of you, deeds recognized, gratitude repaid, and the marks the street left on you.