The manual

You wake up somewhere you have never been, with no title, no class and nobody waiting for you. Everybody else in the realm has been busy for years and is not about to stop because you arrived.

That is the whole game, and it is worth saying plainly before the chapters start: Bonemark does not hand you a destiny. It hands you a country that is already running, and lets you find out what you are in it.

The short version

You will travel, work, trade, fight when you have to, and slowly become somebody particular. Nobody grades you. There is no bar filling up towards Good and no bar filling up towards Evil. There is a realm full of people with memories, and they will each form their own opinion of you, which is a much harder crowd.

One. Everyone is awake

The people in Bonemark do not stand still until you talk to them. They get up, work, walk somewhere, come home, gossip, get frightened, get greedy. Prices move because caravans moved. A village empties because something moved in nearby. None of this waits for you, and almost none of it is about you.

The upside: you can arrive somewhere and read what has been happening. The downside: if you sit still for a season, the world is not sitting with you.

Two. Your reputation is not a number

Do something in one town and word travels the way word actually travels: to the people who care, at the speed of the road, changed a little on the way. A house may hear a version of events you would not recognise.

This is why the game never shows you a single score. There is no one number because there is no one opinion.

Three. Time costs something

Travel takes days. Injuries take weeks. Work takes hours you could have spent somewhere else. A quest with a deadline is a real deadline, and the world does not politely pause while you finish another one.

Nothing here is designed to punish you. It is designed so that choosing is actually choosing.

Four. Fighting is one option, not the option

Combat exists and it is dangerous. Wounds are specific: a blow lands somewhere, and where it landed matters afterwards. Which means the smartest thing in the game is often not being in the fight.

You can hire people. You can pay somebody off. You can leave. All of those are real answers.

Five. You will not see all of it, and that is deliberate

A single run cannot reach every corner. Two players comparing notes will disagree about what the realm turned into. The Codex fills up with what you found, not with what exists.

What is in this manual

The manual is arranged in three parts. The printed chapter numbers run from 1 upward in the reading order shown here. Internal source identifiers stay stable so links and references do not break; the number you see on the page is your place in this book. The parts tell you what kind of reading you are doing.

Part One — The Realm. The land, cultures, houses, Old Seat politics, economy, war, the Mark, relationships, history, faith, and worked examples. This is where you learn what the people of the realm notice and remember.

Part Two — Playing. Starting a chronicle, controls, travel, time, rest, trade, practical combat, the Codex, saving, conclusions, and safety. Open this part when you want to know what to do next.

Part Three — Reference. Progression, perks, items, combat rules, actors, skills, and the glossary. This is the lookup layer: numbers and definitions live here rather than interrupting the world's prose.

If you are new, follow the Your first hour route on this page. It links the smallest useful set of pages in the order you need them. If you only came to look something up, open the Catalogue instead: every person, monster, troop, weapon, item and place has its own entry and picture.

And if you want to add your own

Bonemark can be modded without writing a single line of code. New items, new merchants, new people, new buildings, new maps, and now whole quests of your own, all written as small text files. The Modding tab at the top of this page is a step-by-step guide that assumes you have never done it before.

One last thing

Nothing in this manual tells you what you ought to do. It tells you how the world behaves so that what you decide is yours. If a chapter ever reads like it is grading you, we wrote it badly.

A man will tell you a very funny story about his brother's funeral, and mean every word of both halves. Bonemark takes dying seriously, and takes just as seriously that people are ridiculous while it happens. Magic is real here and it has never once paid a debt or carried water up a hill. Whatever else the realm is, it is a place where somebody still has to do that.

What You Do

You arrive in a realm already in motion. You work out who owes what to whom, decide which promises are worth your weight, and then live in the place where those promises land. Almost everything touches the same world: a conversation, a caravan, a night spent reading somebody else's ledgers. There is no role you are supposed to take. You can hold a balance together, take a side, or make a very good living out of another man's bad year.

The Tone of Bonemark

The heavy things are handled without a wink. So are the light ones. Somebody in this realm is having an affectionate argument about cheese while, three valleys away, a house decides who eats this winter, and neither scene is a break from the other. Comedy here does a job. It shows you who a person is, or it lets the pressure out of a room. What it never does is turn suffering into something you are allowed to stop caring about.

A World, Not a Morality Meter

Nobody here is sorted into light and dark. A generous act can prop up a vicious institution. A selfish one can stop a war before it starts. What the realm records is what you were seen to do. There is no number underneath it that knows what you meant.

You wake on a bed that belongs to somebody else, in a room that was already in use that morning. It is a real place — a house, an infirmary, a room somebody rents out — and it exists in the world your seed built. Who is standing there, what has gone wrong locally, and who you owe by nightfall all come out of that one choice. Nothing about your past is stated as fact by anyone, this manual included. A run lasts one, two or three in-world years, or it does not end at all. Every fixed length gets a whole story paced to fit it.

Your First Morning

Whoever owns the room you woke in was using it that morning. Somebody has been moved, or put out, or is going to want it back. The trouble the neighbourhood is already in and the first faces you see both follow from where the seed put you. There is no universal hospital scene, because there is no universal anything.

What Amnesia Means

Amnesia keeps the run open. It is not a licence for the game to hand you a fact and call it a memory. A document, a scar, a skill your hands turn out to have — each supports some account of who you were, and several accounts can be supported at once. Until evidence lands on one of them they are all still claims. A new run gets a new world, and nothing you privately learned in the old one comes with you.

Ask a carter how far it is to Old Seat and he answers in days, not miles, and then he asks you what the road has been like. This chapter is the shape of the realm: which cities exist and who lives in them, what the villages are for, and what a map will and will not tell you.

Reading the Map

Old Seat is politically central, which is not the same as being in the middle of anything. Marshland can come right up to a settlement but never sits underneath one, because nobody founded a town in a bog. A map tells you how far apart things are and how you would get between them. It tells you nothing about who is loyal and nothing about where it is safe to sleep.

The Three Regional Cities

Three regional cities besides Old Seat, one to each culture: Durnwall old-realm, Thorngate elven, Valdmere Keldran. Grentham is the port, and is not one of the three. The names do not change between runs and neither do the positions. What comes out of the seed is what a place is short of this year, who it is quarrelling with, and which roads are worth taking. Culture shapes the institutions and the daily life. No city is uniform, and no culture is an alignment.

Old Seat

Old Seat is where the six houses go to measure themselves against each other. It began old-realm and still has the population to prove it, and control of it has changed hands more than once without changing who lives there. Holding the garrison is one victory. Being recognised by the archive is a different one. So is controlling credit, and so is being trusted by the men who drive the roads. Winning any of them is not winning the rest.

Three Villages per City

Each settlement that has villages has three, and the old three-part rule — one grows food, one makes something of it, one holds a crossing — describes the centre of the realm accurately. It does not describe the west. Durnwall and Valdmere sit in the extraction belt, where there is coal and iron and stone and no field worth the name. Their villages dig or fell, and the bread comes from Old Seat. That is not a hole in the map. It is the reason Old Seat's grain is a political instrument rather than a commodity, and it does not stop being one in a good year. A village needs households and work and a reason to exist beyond being a marker on your map. The places that could not meet that bar are production sites now, and the catalogue calls them what they are.

Old-Realm City

The old-realm city keeps its archives, its courts and its guilds, and all three remember an order that no longer exists. Some people there want it back. Some want it reformed, and some would settle for being let go. Law in that city can protect somebody who owns nothing, or hide a privilege behind a procedure so clean you cannot fault a single step of it.

Elven City

Elves here are mortal people who live two or three human lifetimes and have very few children. That does not make them wise. It makes their losses last longer. Patience and resentment are still choices, made by particular people, one at a time. And the city is not necessarily in a forest: its architecture and its routes follow the ground the seed gave it and the work it actually has to do.

Generated Geography

North is not cold by decree. Climate and danger are not permanently assigned to a compass direction. The seed places the biomes, and the settlements bind to the ground it produced. Their names, their positions and who depends on whom are fixed, and are the same in every run you will ever play. What varies is the state of a place: the shortage, the argument, the condition of the road. Marshes and ruins and camps belong outside dense civic centres unless a specific history explains why one is not.

Keldran City

The northern city is a human culture, not a race of raiders. Families are large, assemblies are loud, and an oath is repeated out loud for longer than anybody bothers to write it down. Ships matter if the seed gave the place a coast. Inland, the same city lives on its roads, its animals, and whatever the passes will let through in winter.

The Realm at a Glance

Three regional cities and Old Seat, three villages leaning on each: twelve villages in all. Grentham makes a fifth city and holds none, because a port answers to the sea. Everything else has to be earned by the ground. A castle stands where somebody would have built one, a mine where there is something worth digging for, a ruin where something fell. The six house seats are fixed. The outposts are not, and appear only where a road or a border asks for one. The west is where the realm digs. Durnwall and Valdmere have coal and iron and stone around them and not one arable village between them. They eat from Old Seat's fields, and that is a permanent fact about who has leverage over whom.

Routes Matter

Every city has at least two strategic connections, and that is the whole reason the realm survives a bad season. Block a road and the price of grain moves, the medicine arrives late, a garrison stops hearing from anybody — and the smugglers have an excellent month. What does not happen is the realm switching off. There is another way round. It costs more.

Three traditions share the realm: old-realm humans, elves, and the Keldrans of the north. None of them owns a border, and none of them owns a moral position. Culture will tell you how somebody was raised. It will not tell you what they are about to do. What follows is who the three are, how to read the signs of them in a building or a funeral, and why those signs stop short of a person's intentions.

Culture Comparison Table

Culture here means institutions, habits and memory. It does not hand out a morality, a class or a fate. Every line below is crossed constantly, by marriage and adoption and exile.

Three Traditions, Many Lives

Old-realm humans inherit written law, and with it the archives and the arguments about them. Elves are mortal: two or three human lifetimes, very few children, and a slow recovery from any loss at all. Keldrans are human. Their institutions are the extended family and the assembly, and their memory is spoken aloud rather than filed away.

Culture Is Not Destiny

No culture here has one morality, one landscape or one side. People marry across all of it, are adopted into it, or simply decide otherwise. Exile and conversion cross it as well. Elves are not automatically wise and not necessarily among trees. Keldrans are not a separate species and not merely raiders. Plenty of old-realm humans would be glad to see the old order stay buried.

How to Read Cultural Clues

A building, a funeral, the wording of a contract — each will tell you something about where a person comes from. None of them tells you what that person intends. The useful questions are who taught them the custom, who profits by it, and whether they keep it, bend it, or have quietly let it go.

Six houses hold the realm between them, and not one of them can do without the other five. What follows is what each of them is good at, what that same thing costs them in a war, and why an advantage here is never a lock on a door nobody else can open.

The Six Great Houses

Six durable great houses: Whitecliff and Greycoast, Ironholm and Hawthorne, Holloway and Stoneside. Each starts with a practical advantage — in people, or in access, or in organisation — and each carries dependencies that turn painful during a war. No house owns every unit of anything vital. The advantage gives it leverage and an identity. The weakness gives everybody else a reason to negotiate.

House Comparison Table

Every house has a recognisable advantage paired with a material or political cost. None owns a monopoly, and none is morally predetermined. A run may strengthen, weaken, or transform these profiles.

Inherited Wounds

Whitecliff fears that duty has become a mask for control. Its leaders call obedience protection, and its people learn to hear the difference.

Greycoast

Greycoast survives by compromise and disputed trade. A bargain can keep the harbour alive while leaving somebody else to pay for it.

Ironholm

Ironholm takes pride in endurance. Its wound is the temptation to treat people as material that can be spent.

Hawthorne

Hawthorne makes hospitality into a civic virtue. The same welcome can become surveillance, obligation, and a debt nobody agreed to owe.

Holloway

Holloway preserves its communities with unusual care. Preservation can harden into stagnation when privilege starts calling itself tradition.

Stoneside

Stoneside prizes independence above comfort. Its people sometimes mistake isolation for integrity, then discover that no one can help them.

What leaders do with a wound

Generated leaders express, resist, or exploit these wounds. They are not six fixed personalities.

Expertise Without Monopoly

Every house is good at one thing, and exposed by that same thing when there is a war. The advantage is institutions, trained people and long practice. It is never sole ownership of something the realm cannot do without. Rivals always have another way to get it: slower and dearer and less dependable, but there.

Why War Hurts Without Stopping Everything

In a war every house discovers that the thing it is best at is also the thing it can be squeezed by. Credit contracts. Repairs slow. The harvest that has to move becomes a convoy, and a convoy is a target. The realm adapts. It always adapts. What that sentence hides is that somebody pays for the adapting, and it is rarely the house.

Houses Change

A house is not a personality that stays put. A death, a marriage, a bad year for public trust — any of them changes how it operates and who is inside it. Judge the people standing in front of you. The heraldry has not altered in two hundred years and has meant several different things in that time.

There is a room in Old Seat where a clerk decides which of two men lawfully holds a title, and the winner is not always the one with soldiers waiting outside. Old Seat begins old-realm in its offices and its courts, and old-realm in its streets as well. Control of it changes hands more than once — by war sometimes, and sometimes by a marriage or a debt called in at the right moment. What changes hands is the institutions. The population does not. A Keldran occupation puts Keldran names on the offices while the neighbourhoods stay exactly who they were, and the friction between who governs a city and who lives in it is most of what politics there is. That control is not one thing either. Holding the walls, being obeyed by the archive, and being able to feed the place are three separate possessions. When one house grows too large the smaller ones tend to combine against it. That coalition may be defending everybody's independence, or defending its own privileges, or simply keeping a war alive.

Coalitions Around Old Seat

When one house grows too strong the smaller ones combine — sometimes to restore a balance, sometimes to protect a privilege a strong house would take away. A coalition runs on real fear, real debts and real promises. You can hold the balance, help build the hegemon, or make money in the gap between them. Conquest can be political as easily as military, and a settlement that changed allegiance once can change it again.

Several Kinds of Control

Old Seat keeps score in several columns at once: who is recognised, who is obeyed, and who the population would actually follow if it came to that. Taking the walls hands you none of the others. The archives go on working for whoever they consider lawful and the lenders keep their own counsel. A settlement signed peacefully can still be a conquest, if enough of those columns move with it.

Your Political Position

You can mediate, take a side, or work quietly against all of them at once. Nobody requires you to choose. What fixes your position in other people's minds is rarely what you announced. It is the promise made in a back room, the request you never answered, and the debt everyone knows you have not settled.

Nobody in Bonemark conjures a sack of grain. It was grown somewhere, carted somewhere, and paid for by someone. When one of those three fails, the price moves before the news does. Every faction lives under that rule, the houses included. No house owns an essential resource outright, so nothing switches off completely — there is always another supplier, and he is slower and dearer and possibly a criminal. You are shown all of this through people and caravans and paperwork, never through a number quietly going down.

Follow the Material Chain

Everything you can hold came from somebody. It was made, it was moved, and it was paid for, and each of those happened in a place you could go and stand in. Prices answer to the season, to whether the road is safe, and to what people expect is coming. The last of the three moves fastest: a rumour of war raises the price of grain before a single soldier has walked anywhere.

Hostile Factions Need an Economy Too

A camp of forty armed men eats every day. Nobody is delivering that for free. Gatherings, black markets and the networks the Mark has got into all have to recruit or extort or steal their way to supper, and then they have to put it somewhere. Which means a hideout can be traced and it can be starved, and neither of those requires you to walk in the front door.

How a Shortage Becomes a Story

A missing sack is not a quest by itself. It becomes one when you can say who was waiting for that caravan, where it was stopped, and who is quietly better off for the delay. The ledgers exist, the carters exist, and so does the household that goes short this week. Follow those three and the thing explains itself.

Nobody in Old Seat wakes up and declares a war. They try a marriage first, then a loan, then a season of quietly ruinous tariffs, and by the time the soldiers move everybody has run out of cheaper ideas. War can be the rational choice. It is never the free one. It burns reserves and breaks contracts. It takes the men out of the fields. It gives the smugglers and the pamphlet-writers the best year they have had in a decade. What it does not do is stop the realm — the realm carries on, more expensively.

The Escalation Ladder

A dispute climbs. It begins as talk, and when talk fails somebody proposes an arbitrator. After that come the instruments that cost money instead of blood: a marriage, a debt called in, a tariff that happens to ruin one town in particular. Then espionage. Then a seizure small enough to be denied. Then mobilisation, and the coalition that tells you exactly what it is prepared to do. Open war is what is left after all of that. A party can skip rungs when it is frightened or sees an opening, and everybody watching adjusts their opinion of it accordingly.

The Cost of Force

War consumes what was put aside for something else. Contracts stop. The men who bring the harvest in are somewhere else, the roads go unrepaired, and the price of everything climbs for people who had no part in the argument. It makes wounded men and it makes refugees, and it makes an excellent market for propaganda. A won battle can improve your position in one column and cost you three others.

Peace Is Also a Choice

Not fighting saves lives, and can leave an injustice standing for another twenty years. Ending a war usually means signing something unfair. Peace, deterrence, surrender: each is a political act with somebody who profits by it and somebody who pays for it. None of them is scored here as the good ending.

One Persistent Battlefield

There is one world, and the fight happens inside it. No arena appears. Your position, the ground, the state of your armour and the civilians who have not got off the street are all part of the same place where trade and politics happen. Which is why a victory in a market square is a different event from the same victory in a field.

Ask five people what the Mark is and you will get five answers, each delivered with complete confidence. One will not say the word aloud. One will laugh at you for asking. Neither of them is necessarily wrong. There is no instrument in this world that detects it, no symbol that appears on the guilty, no test you can run on a man to settle the question. Some people refuse to see a pattern because seeing it would cost them their rank or their living. Others see it everywhere and get innocent people hurt. From the outside, honest caution and self-interested blindness look much the same. An accusation is not evidence. A strange event is not a confession.

What People Say

There is no agreed account. One man will tell you it is a sickness, another that it is a sin, another that it is a story invented to justify a tax. Some will not say the word at all. Some make a living out of the accusation. And two careful, honest people can disagree about it completely, because they have seen different things and have different amounts to lose.

Evidence Before Certainty

Nothing marks the guilty. There is no readout, no sign, no reliable test. So you follow what can actually be followed: who moved, what was paid, who was threatened and by whom. Keep what a witness saw apart from what the witness thinks it meant. Those are two different pieces of information, and only one of them is evidence.

Fear Can Serve Many Masters

Fear will feed resistance, or denial, or a very profitable career in denunciation. It does not care which. Knowing your own mind helps you keep to what you decided you were, and that is all it does. It is not immunity. The useful question is never who looks evil. It is which choices and which payments you can actually demonstrate.

A Gathering starts as a word travellers use. Too many armed men in one valley, and nobody local can tell you whose men they are. That is all the word means: a concentration you can see. What holds it together — a leader, a shortage, a road out — becomes clear slowly, and sometimes there is nothing holding it together at all. A black market is a different thing: a network for exchanging what cannot be exchanged in the open. Neither of the two automatically serves the Mark, and a link between them exists only when named people and real cargo put it there.

Gathering

A Gathering is a concentration of armed men and desperate people, large enough that outsiders have started to notice it. What its members share may be a leader, or a road, or a common enemy. It may be almost nothing. The word describes something you can see from a hilltop; it tells you nothing about what anybody in it believes.

Black Market

A black market is a network for trading what cannot be traded in daylight. It may be feeding a blockaded town, or making an official rich, or moving goods that came off a dead carter last week. Frequently the same market is doing all three. It is not part of a Gathering by default and it does not serve the Mark by default.

Proving a Connection

A connection is proved by named people, by cargo, and by a payment somebody can put a date on. It is not proved by where a man was born, or by what he is, or by how poor he is. Living near the wrong barn is not evidence either.

Forty men in a wood are a nuisance. Forty men with a granary, a smith and somebody keeping accounts are a problem that will still be there next year. A camp becomes a hideout, and a hideout becomes a headquarters, only by acquiring people and food and money and time. All of that leaves a trail. Cutting the supply, freeing the prisoners who do the work, or making one lieutenant a better offer can matter more than an assault ever does. Dungeons have origins that explain what is inside them. Not all of them hold a boss and not all of them hold treasure. What enemies drop is what they were carrying. A place you clear stays cleared.

How a Hostile Network Grows

A camp becomes a hideout, a hideout becomes a defended base, and a base becomes a headquarters. Every step costs people and food and time, and none of it is granted for free. Growth leaves traces. Somebody is recruiting, somebody is storing grain, somebody is being paid to look the other way at a gate. That is where the hostile economy touches the realm's own, and that is where it can be reached.

Dungeons Have Histories

Every dungeon was something else first: a mine, a crypt, a fort that mattered for one summer. What it was decides its shape, who lives in it now, and what is worth carrying out. Not every one of them has a boss at the bottom, and plenty of bosses are nowhere near a dungeon.

Loot Has Provenance

Enemies leave what they had on them. Nothing else appears. Provenance is where a thing came from and whose hands it passed through, and every object in this realm has one. Treasure was wages, or theft, or a tribute paid years ago, or a grave somebody opened, and there is only so much of it. Clearing a place changes it for good. It does not quietly refill so that you can be paid twice.

A Companion will stand beside you in a bad hour. That is not the same as taking orders, and you find out which one you have on the day it matters. They travel with you; they do not report to you. Each keeps their own beliefs, their own memory, and people elsewhere they care about more than they care about your plan. They can argue with you, refuse outright, or leave. They can also forgive you, and change, and die. A bond is not a bonus. It is a record: a Companion remembers the night you kept your word, and the night you did not.

Building a Companion

A Companion needs a public role and a private need, and a contradiction sitting between them. They need something they are good at and something that can hurt them. They need a position on death and a position on the Mark, whether or not they will say either out loud. And they need at least one commitment that has nothing to do with you. Their history binds to generated places and generated people. An archetype can start the work. What has to come out of it is somebody with specific memories and more than one credible future.

Relationship Consequences

Trust is not a single obedience meter. A Companion can admire your courage and condemn the man you used it on. They can love you and leave anyway. Persuasion works, and it creates a debt. Threats work, and they change what the two of you are to each other. What decides the future is the accumulated record: promises kept, absences noticed, and the ordinary care nobody mentioned at the time.

Companions, Not Lieutenants

A Companion will cooperate when there is a fight. That does not put them in your chain of command, and there is no point later in the game where it starts to. Each one keeps their own beliefs, their own needs and their own limits. Agreeing with you in one crisis establishes nothing at all about the next one.

A Relationship Remembers

A Companion remembers the night you kept your word, and the night you did not. Promises go in, and so do silences, and so does what you said about them in front of other people. Affection and disagreement live together perfectly well here: somebody can be furious with you and still be the one who comes when you shout.

Nobody hands you a quest. Somebody has a problem, and the problem has been coming for a while. What you get is the situation and the people standing in it. The ways out belong to that same situation, and each costs something you can name: a friend, a reputation, a house that will not forget. None of it is offered to you as a calculation. Answering, refusing outright, and never getting round to it are three different acts. Refusal can be the responsible one and still cost you everything. Neglect only means somebody else decided while you were not there. People remember the method as clearly as the outcome.

A Quest Begins with Cause

A quest explains itself backwards: who these people are, what happened to them, and why it has landed on you. The alternatives come out of that same situation and differ by what they are loyal to and what they put at risk. There are numbers underneath holding the simulation together. What reaches you is a decision about people.

Response, Refusal, and Neglect

Answering accepts involvement. Refusing states a position, which may be principled or cowardly and will be read as whichever suits the person judging you. Doing nothing lets others act without knowing where you stood. All three cost something. Witnesses remember which of the three you chose.

Reputation, Witnesses, and Memory

Reputation belongs to particular people in particular places. There is no universal score. They react to what they saw, to what somebody they trust told them, and to how it touched their own interests. What you are publicly can differ sharply from what you are known to be in private. Mercy is remembered. So is a debt, and so is the day you did not turn up. When a consequence surprises you, ask who knew, who profited, and which institution kept the record.

A merchant is standing at a checkpoint with a receipt in his hand, and the man reading it is in no hurry at all. Five situations, worked all the way through. Nothing here is a rule. It is what the rules look like once they land on actual people.

The Delayed Grain Caravan

A merchant's expected grain caravan is being held at a checkpoint under an inspection connected to a newly recorded road charge. The district is already short of grain, but the accusations against the collectors remain incomplete.

Starving a Hostile Network

A defended hideout is growing. It grows on food, on stolen tools, and on protection payments nobody reports. You can assault it. You can also stand on any one of those three and lean.

Balancing a House Coalition

One house has gained enough military and economic leverage around Old Seat that smaller rivals consider a coalition. Their fear is credible, but their proposed settlement also protects privileges and may prolong mobilisation.

When a Companion Refuses

A Companion agrees that captives are in danger but refuses a night assault that would abandon wounded travellers under their care. This is not a failed command check: it is a conflict between two responsibilities.

A Dungeon with Finite Treasure

An abandoned mine has become a defended store for stolen metal and wages. Its hazards come from collapsed workings and present occupants; its valuables have owners and a traceable route into the site.

The word was not used at this hearing. — from a court record How the old realm came apart, what Old Seat became afterwards, and why nobody can agree on which betrayal mattered most.

The Long Unbinding

The old realm did not fall in one theatrical night. Over about forty-five years the roads lost their protection, the offices lost their reach, and the records began contradicting one another. Local powers learned to live without a centre. The last central settlement failed some forty-two years before your chronicle begins. People disagree about which betrayal or which shortage mattered most. That disagreement is itself historical evidence. It is not an invitation for a narrator to step in and choose the simple cause.

Old Seat After the Unbinding

Old Seat is still lived in, still valuable, still where the argument happens. Its workshops and its archives and its walls make it worth holding even when its institutions barely function. A Custodian Council is the caretaker authority when a run begins. How much power that Council actually has depends on the officials, the debts and the guilds the seed gave it. Old Seat changes hands by force or by settlement, by marriage or by a clerk recognising a claim. Sometimes more than once.

How History Is Known

History reaches you second-hand: a dated record, a damaged object, a grudge inherited from a grandfather who was not there either. A source can be sincere and wrong. It can be accurate and self-serving. It can be true of one valley and false of the next. The Codex keeps where a claim came from and who disputes it, and it does not promote a rumour to a fact because four people repeated it. Your run may settle a local question. The largest ones stay contested.

The Mark in Historical Accounts

The Mark is tangible in the sense that people keep meeting the same traces and the same coordinated conduct. What it is, nobody knows. Some name a hidden evil. Some say it is fear, wielded by ambitious men. Some will not discuss it at all, because recognising a thing feels like inviting it in. A run may contain its reach or expose its agents. No ordinary ending proves it has been destroyed everywhere.

Take what the season gives. Return what the season is owed. Neither more. — from the Keeping of the Circle What people here believe, what the orders and the looser traditions actually do, and the hard edges of magic: what it cannot make, cannot carry, and cannot undo.

Keeping of the Circle

The Keeping of the Circle teaches that life continues through limits and reciprocity: bury the dead, keep the memory, and do not reach for mastery over other people. There is no single obedient hierarchy. Local Keepers argue about property and about mercy, and about what balance demands on a day when every available choice hurts somebody. The language of light and balance can put courage into a frightened village, or cover a privilege, or become the standard by which an institution is finally judged.

Quiet Orders and Threshold Voices

Quiet Orders are small institutions with strict rules, built around study or care or craft, and frequently around silence. Threshold Voices are looser — dreams, crossings, grief — and they gather the people who live between the accepted categories. Neither tradition has an answer to the Mark. Both contain believers and sceptics and men making a living out of it.

What Magic Can and Cannot Do

Magic is real, uncommon among humans, and always bounded: by aptitude, by knowledge, and by exhaustion. Also by what it costs a man socially to be seen doing it. It does not make resources out of nothing, it does not remove the need to carry things, and it does not raise the truly dead. A miracle still has a provenance, and honest people will disagree about what they saw.

Death, Meaning, and the Unknown

Death is a limit, and the limit is what gives a promise its weight. Ritual can comfort the living, keep a memory, and deal properly with a body. It does not provide a verified resurrection service. What people take away from a ritual varies, and the game lets that stand without ever using mystery to excuse a broken chain of cause.

You are awake, and somebody else's blanket is over you. Downstairs a woman is arguing with a man about money, and neither of them has come up to find out whether you are dead yet. This chapter gets you as far as the door: what a Chronicle is, what the two settings at the start actually change, and which keys do what.

Welcome to Bonemark

Bonemark is a dark fantasy realm that you are dropped into without a place in it. There is no class waiting for you, no home village that was always yours, no side you were born on. You wake up inside a real inhabited place and learn the realm the way anybody would: by talking to people, going there yourself, and finding out what it cost. This manual holds the rules that do not change. Your Codex holds only what this protagonist has actually found out.

How to Use This Manual

Start with Getting Started, then read the chapter you actually need. The world and politics chapters describe the realm without giving away what your run generated. Combat and Character Progression keep their own references, and the catalogues are there to be looked things up in rather than read through. Where a page describes something your protagonist has to find out for himself, it says so and then stops. That is not an omission.

Starting a New Chronicle

A Chronicle is one run from waking to ending — the whole story of a single protagonist. Starting a new one builds a fresh world to go with them. Choose a Path and a Horizon, confirm who you are, and begin. There are four horizons: three of fixed length, and Endless. Every fixed horizon promises a paced conclusion. Endless lets a finished arc sit inside a realm that carries on without one.

Choose a Path

Path sets how hard the realm leans on you. It does not change what the realm is. Wanderer warns you earlier and leaves you room to recover. Seeker is the intended balance. Witness warns you less and forgives less. Underneath all three the numbers are identical: the same wounds, the same prices, the same consequences following from the same causes. Iron Oath sits outside this — it is permadeath, not a fourth difficulty.

Choose a Horizon

Horizon is how long the Chronicle runs. It is chosen separately from Path and does not change it. One Year is tight: fewer great arcs, and all of them finished. Two Years is the intended shape, long enough that a mistake made in the first winter can still be repaired by the third. Three Years is for debts that take years to come due, and for watching an institution change rather than a person. Endless runs in eras of pressure and recovery — arcs end, new ones grow out of the world the old ones left, and nothing forces a finale.

Your First Ten Minutes

Work out where you woke up, who is in the room, and what they say happened. Look at the exits. Open the Inventory and find out what you are actually carrying, then the Journal for what you are supposed to already know. Do not assume the first person who talks to you is right. Do not assume an urgent request has to be accepted. Your first real objective is orientation: where you are, who is nearby, and how you would leave.

Verified Default Controls

Movement is W, A, S, D or the arrow keys. Interact is E or Enter. Inventory with I, Journal with J. The combat verbs are bound as well — attack and block, sprint and dodge, and the rest of them — and the Combat chapter prints the whole keyboard, mouse and gamepad layout. They are installed when the game starts rather than written into the project's input file, which is why an earlier version of this page claimed they had no default. They have one. The Controls tab under Options lists what every action is bound to right now. Three things genuinely have no key: crafting, dropping an item, and pause. Rebinding is not in yet either — the Controls tab reads the live bindings and does not change them.

Saving and Loading

The game saves itself at the points where losing progress would be unfair, and lets you Save and Exit whenever saving is allowed. Load Game picks up the newest valid state of the chronicle you chose. A finished chronicle is kept as a record rather than a save you can climb back into. Do not close the game while the Saving overlay is up. Some modes restrict how far you can roll back, and the screen will tell you which. Believe the screen.

The first time somebody swings at you there is no menu, no turn order, and nobody asks whether you were ready. Combat is physical, continuous and real time. Where you stand, what you are wearing and how tired you are belong to the same world as the politics and the price of grain. Fighting spends things you had, and it leaves wounds and bodies and witnesses. Winning does not remove the reason for the fight. The debt is still owed, and the network still has a second camp.

Before and After the Clash

Most fights are decided before anybody draws: by what you knew, which road you took, and who agreed to come with you. Afterwards there are bodies, and people who saw, and a claim on everything left lying about. Killing the fighters does not remove the need that produced them.

Controls and Exact Combat Rules

The bindings and the exact rules are in the Combat Reference pages that follow, and they are the live ones. Attack and block, the dodge, the formation orders — all of them are installed when the game starts, and the Controls tab under Options will show you what each is bound to. What is not printed anywhere is a key for crafting, for dropping an item, or for pause. Those three have none yet.

Four Active Abilities

You can learn a great many perks. You can prepare four Abilities. Those four ordered slots are the combat loadout, shown at the left of the quick bar. Passive and outward-facing perks do not take a button. A newly learned Ability drops into an open slot and never pushes out something you deliberately placed. The order is saved exactly as you left it.

Assigning and Reordering Abilities

Your four ordered slots are the active loadout. Click a slot to assign an Ability you own. Moving an equipped Ability swaps it exactly with the current occupant and moves nothing else. A newly learned Ability drops into an open slot and never displaces a placement you made deliberately. The quick bar updates immediately, and the order is saved from left to right as you leave it.

Disabled and Cooldown Feedback

Quick bar cells explain themselves. An empty slot still shows its binding. A dimmed Ability tells you why it will not fire — no combat to use it in, a cooldown still running, or a fighter who is down. If the verb simply does not apply where you are standing, it says that too. A quick item refuses politely when there is nothing to cure, and nothing is consumed when it does. The same explanation appears on hover and on controller focus.

The manual is what anybody in the realm could tell you. The Codex is what your protagonist has personally found out. It fills with places you went and things you were told, and it keeps what you were told even when that turns out to be wrong. Two entries in it can contradict each other, because two people told you different things and nobody has checked either. It is your knowledge, not the world's truth. Nothing crosses from one run into another. And nothing is arranging what reaches you: whatever arrives has a cause somebody living in the realm could name.

Manual Versus Codex

The Manual explains the rules that hold in every run. The Codex records what this protagonist learned by going there, by being told, or by watching what happened next. An entry can be incomplete. It can be disputed. It can be corrected later by something you find in a drawer.

Knowledge Has an Observer

Information belongs to whoever received it. One faction cannot quietly read what another faction knows, and nothing you learned in an earlier run comes with you into this one. So when a claim is about to decide something, the useful questions are who told you and what it costs them to be believed.

Nothing Arranges This for You

Nothing arranges this for you. A situation that reaches you has a cause you can find, and nothing in the world knows more than the people living in it. If a scene would be more convenient with a secret revealed, the secret stays where it is.

Item: forty spears repaired. Item: four smiths, six days. Item: no payment received. — from a garrison ledger margin This is the part nobody puts in a trailer: eating and sleeping, mending what broke, and getting from one place to another before the season turns.

A Practical Daily Loop

Start the day by finding out what you owe, what is broken, and who is coming with you. Decide what matters before the distance decides for you. Travel and work move the world's clock. Buying changes what the shop has left. A promise creates somebody waiting. End the day in the Journal, looking at the next road rather than at a list of finished errands.

Travel, Roads, and Time

Travel is where the physical, the economic and the political meet. How fast you arrive depends on the ground, on what you are carrying, and on whether anybody stops you. Roads carry caravans and patrols and rumours, so cutting one changes prices without freezing the realm. Before leaving, weigh urgency against food, injuries and load. The faster road is not always the safer one, and it is very rarely the less political one.

Inventory, Weight, and Equipment

Everything you are carrying came from somewhere, and all of it weighs something. Armour protects you and slows you. A second sword is a good idea until the hill gets steep. Before you leave, work out who is carrying what, whether it is actually equipped, and whether you need it before the next place you can safely put it down. Strength helps and sharing the load helps. Neither makes overload free, because it is meant to cost you. And a stat block in the catalogue tells you what an object is, not that one exists within a hundred miles of where you are standing.

Health, Wounds, and Recovery

Damage outlasts the battle that caused it. First aid stops you dying; getting better takes supplies and skill and time, and often a healer who is three days away. A victory followed by untreated wounds is a strategic defeat with extra steps. Check everyone before you travel or fight again, and remember that a month spent recovering costs you money, and a promise, and possibly a friendship.

Food, Upkeep, and Payroll

A company on the road eats every day, and the men expect to be paid. Run short and readiness drops, then morale, then somebody leaves. Supplies come from what you carry, what you can buy, or what you take. Buying out a village's whole stock is a decision with consequences for the village. Plan for the road you are on and the number of mouths actually walking it, not for an abstract daily fee.

Trade, Vendors, and Prices

A vendor has a bounded stock that came from somewhere real. A catalogue entry existing does not mean the man has one. Price answers to local supply, to danger on the road, and to what he thinks of you. Weigh it against your urgency and against the cost of going elsewhere. Selling something stolen or politically awkward has consequences past the coin, and a merchant who has come to trust you will treat you differently in a year.

Crafting and Repairs

Crafting needs a recipe you know, the ingredients in hand, and a station that will take the work. Repair needs materials, labour, and a settlement able to do it. Neither makes something out of nothing. Before committing to a plan, check that the station and the action are actually in front of you.

Rest, Taverns, and Camps

Sleep costs money, time, and the attention of whoever is watching the door. Safe lodging moves the clock on, helps you heal, and gives you somewhere to save. Camping depends on where you stopped and what you brought with you. A tavern will sell you a bed and give you a rumour for nothing, and the rumour is often the more valuable of the two. Check what you owe before you let a night go past.

Defeat, Death, and Continuity

Losing leaves something behind: a wound, a debt, a captivity, or the end of the chronicle. Which of those it is depends on the encounter and on the rules of your run. Bonemark does not promise that every failure can be loaded away, and in some modes it certainly cannot.

A chronicle ends the way a year ends: some things finished, some left where they fell, and somebody still owed money. How a run concludes, what the game will and will not put in front of you, and which questions it leaves open on purpose.

Finite Run Conclusions

A fixed-length chronicle ends when its length runs out, and the ending is paced to fit it. What gets resolved is what the run committed to: who holds Old Seat, how the houses stand against each other now, what became of the people you travelled with. It does not owe you an answer to every mystery and it will not repair everything you broke. Endless closes its arcs the same way, and then carries on.

Many Shades of Allegiance

You can defend the balance, join a house, or oppose every major power. You can also work for the Mark, publicly or otherwise, and that service more often runs on manipulation than on open battle. No path gets a colour. A conclusion names who benefited, who paid, and what survived.

Protected Mysteries

A run can identify agents and transactions and sites. It can find the traces and follow them. It cannot authoritatively explain what the Mark ultimately is, where it first came from, or that it has been permanently destroyed. It can explain why one Gathering formed without declaring every desperate foreigner an agent of evil. It can destroy a headquarters without pretending that clandestine trade or human fear has left the world.

Content Boundaries

Bonemark is written for adults. It portrays violence, grief and coercion, and it portrays intimacy without being explicit about it. Sexual violence is never an interactive reward and never a shortcut for making a villain look serious. Children are never combatants and are never used as spectacle. The content warnings describe what is actually in the game, honestly, without giving away what your run generated.

Combat Verbs (Baseline)

Every fighter has these melee verbs from the first minute. They are baseline inputs, not unlocks; Chapter 24, “What Is Finished and What Is Not,” explains the status of documented improvements to them. The numbers below are the ones the game actually uses.

Stats & Combat Behaviour

How every combat number is built, and exactly how weight, armour and attributes bend it. There are two axes. The total weight you carry taxes mobility, so naked is always fastest. The type of armour grants poise and shove-mass and a cut to incoming damage, and charges you stamina for it. The figures below are the tuned model the game runs on.

Combat Controls — Keyboard, Mouse and Steam Deck

The live real-time melee bindings — keyboard + mouse and the full gamepad / Steam Deck layout. The Steam Deck IS a standard gamepad: both thumbs stay on the sticks, so the four core combat verbs live on the shoulders & triggers.

Two Carried Quick-Use Items

The last two cells of the quick bar hold exactly two prepared items, slot A and slot B. Prepare them in the Inventory window by dragging an eligible consumable onto the quick-use cells: the stack is reserved from the party stash, so nothing is duplicated, and clearing a slot returns what is left. Eligible items are field remedies that cure concrete combat statuses; food and recovery poultices that only speed daily healing are refused by design. The loadout locks once a battle begins. Using an item only spends the dose when its cure actually lands on a live status — a wasted attempt consumes nothing. Counts and empty slots refresh on the bar immediately.

Ability and Quick-Item Controls — Keyboard, Controller, Steam Deck

On keyboard, keys 1 to 4 fire the four active Abilities and keys 5 and 6 use the two quick items. On controller and Steam Deck, hold LB and press a face button: A, X, B and Y fire Abilities 1 to 4, while LB plus D-pad Left or Right uses quick item A or B. While LB is held, the face buttons' normal combat verbs (kick, execute, mount) are suppressed so nothing double-fires. All six actions plus the LB modifier are semantic and remappable, and the bar labels follow the device you are actually holding: digits while you use keyboard and mouse, the LB chords the moment you pick up a controller — never a keyboard hint in a controller session, never a raw cell number. In battle, selecting formations with the number row now requires holding the Focus modifier, keeping companion orders and Ability keys from colliding.

Progression Overview

Nobody hands you a class. You become something by doing it long enough that other people start to say so. Nine attributes set what you could become and eighteen skills record what you have actually done.

What the reference marks

Perks arrive at milestones and change how you approach a problem rather than how large a number gets. This chapter explains the system and marks the few documented choices whose final hookup is still distinct from the baseline rules.

How Your Character Grows

Nobody asks you to choose a class. Fight, trade, ride, nurse, or refuse often enough and the people around you start to recognise a shape; the sheet catches up to the life. Attributes open a ceiling, skills record practice, and perks change what you can do with a problem.

The Three Rings

Nine attributes in three Rings. A Ring is a grouping, nothing more: Body, Mind and Soul. Body is what your body can do. Mind is judgement: command, trade, and the organised kind of knowing. Soul holds Will and Insight — what you can stand, and what you can see through. Insight is trainable. Consciousness is not. That is the state your choices have put you in, and no attribute point has ever bought a man a conscience. The three Rings keep separate perk budgets, so going deep into one kind of life does not quietly buy you another.

Attributes and Potential

At level 1, every attribute begins at 5. Each level gives two points, but each next rank costs more, so a level-30 survivor cannot max all nine. Put points where you want the life to grow; the result is a silhouette, not a score sheet.

Skills Improve Through Use

The eighteen skills grow because you used them, not because you bought them. Fight, and Melee improves. Ride somewhere, and Riding improves. Sit up all night with a man's broken leg, and Medicine improves. Every skill will reach an introductory band through use alone, so you can try anything once. Past that you need the supporting attribute and the levels to hold it, which is what stops repetition turning into mastery.

Potential Is Not Practice

Level, attributes and Focus decide how far a skill is allowed to go. They do not hand you a single rank of it. Strength 10 opens a high ceiling on Melee and buys you nothing at all until you have fought. Sway does the same for Statecraft: it is the room, and the agreements you actually close are the furniture. Which is the point. A build allocated on paper is not yet somebody who has done anything.

Practice Must Have an Outcome

Practice is paid for outcomes, not for repetition. Entering a battle earns no Armour practice; finishing one does. A day spent safely in town earns no Survival; a completed journey does. Choosing a line of dialogue is not automatically diplomacy. Something in the world has to confirm that a thing was genuinely attempted and genuinely resolved. Common acts pay a little. Rare consequential ones pay more. That is deliberate, and it is why grinding does not work here.

Which Practice Routes Are Live

All eighteen routes below train when the world confirms the stated outcome.

Exceptions worth knowing

Only deployed survivors receive battle practice. Petition and Whisper Campaign alone grant nothing. The Anniversary is the first shipped Introspection route.

Replay Safety and Run Pacing

Doing the same thing twice counts twice — two trades, two rides to the same village, two casts of the same recipe. Reloading to do the same one again does not.

Skill Caps and Focus

A skill's ceiling is shaped by its linked attribute and by the character's current level. An untouched attribute permits familiarity but not deep mastery; additional attribute investment opens higher portions of the skill track. Periodic Focus choices can lift the ceiling of a chosen discipline further. Focus is scarce and expresses sustained commitment, not a temporary experience bonus.

Insight Is Not Consciousness

Insight is the attribute. Introspection is the skill that grows when you use it. Between them they are how well the protagonist reads a motive, including the ones he is hiding from himself. Consciousness is something else. It is where your choices have put you. Beside it the game keeps a second reading, Mark Affinity, which is how far you have deliberately walked toward the Mark. Neither is a score of how good you have been. Neither moves because you travelled somewhere or handed in an errand. They move when you make a decision the story treats as a decision, and coming back the other way costs something specific: a story, a price, and an honest hour alone with yourself. That is what separates these two readings from a bar filling up towards Good.

Milestones and Perk Choices

Skills unlock milestones as they rise. At each one you are shown two related perks and asked to keep one of them. The choice should change how you approach a problem rather than make a number bigger. A perk may hand you an ability, or a habit, or a permission the world did not previously grant you. A milestone shows you what is possible on that track. It does not give you the track.

Perk Budgets Preserve Identity

Available perks are limited separately for Body, Mind, and Soul. Each ring begins with a small allowance and gains capacity from attribute points invested in that same ring. Committing perks across several different skills can complete that ring's Constellation and add one final slot: Body requires four represented skills, Mind three, and Soul both Faith and Introspection. This rewards a coherent breadth without removing specialisation. Skill use determines which perks you discover, while attribute commitment determines how many you can retain.

Progression Across Run Lengths

One year, two years, three years — the same level-30 ceiling on all of them. Experience is paced against how long you are actually going to play, so the short Chronicle is concentrated rather than stunted, and the long one does not hand you enough levels to master everything. Endless stops at the same ceiling. What keeps growing there is not your statistics; it is the relationships and the changed world you are standing in.

Equipment and Derived Capability

Health, stamina, what you can carry and how fast you move come out of growth and equipment together. Weight taxes movement. Armour type separately limits how well you dodge, and improves how hard you are to shift and to hurt. Strength lets a heavily armoured man walk properly; it does not make plate weigh nothing. Progression softens a weakness. It does not delete the trade-off.

Companions Grow Beside You

Companions are classless too. They arrive as people who have already had a life, not as an archer or a swordsman with a label on them. What they do is what they get better at, the same as you. But their progress is theirs. Helping you through a battle does not turn a Companion into a smaller copy of you, and there are roads they will not walk down whatever you decide.

Example Growth Path

A survivor who patches up caravan injuries, talks his way past checkpoints and rides between villages will find himself early-competent in Medicine, Trade and Riding, with just enough Melee to regret it. Put points into Constitution and Wits and the deeper Medicine and Trade tracks open. Focus commits him to one of them for good. What comes out at the end is not a class. It is a history, legible in what the man can reliably do.

What Is Finished and What Is Not

Bonemark is not finished. This chapter is about one of the parts that is.

The progression boundary

The nine attributes, eighteen skills, perks, and 56 active Abilities are built and playable. Active Abilities execute and systemic permissions apply; some passive improvements to the baseline combat verbs are documented but are not yet wired into those verbs. Chapter 23 lists those baseline verbs and points back here for that distinction.

What is thinner

What is thinner is not the system but the world around it. Some tracks still have fewer places to be used than they eventually will, and where that is true you will meet it as a shortage of occasions rather than a missing button.

Progression Rules

The whole character system on one page. Nine attributes in three rings — Body, Mind, Soul — cap eighteen use-leveled skills, which unlock 288 milestone perks. No classes: everyone wakes blank (amnesia) and becomes someone through play.

Perks

Every skill has sixteen milestone perks, for 288 authored choices. The kind tells you whether a perk changes an action, grants permission, affects a company or system, opens a story key, or stays ambiguous until play gives it evidence.

Abilities

These 56 active abilities are the perks that can occupy one of four action slots. A disabled ability remains known but refuses when its target, resource, timing, or context is not valid; it does not silently do something else.

Systemic Permissions

These twelve perks grant permissions to the world or to a persistent system. They never consume an action slot and are not active abilities.

Reading the Items Catalogue

Everything in this section was made by somebody, and most of it has been repaired at least once. The Items section is the catalogue of objects that actually exist. Each entry should say what the thing is, where it came from, and what condition it is in. Nothing is created by an enemy dying. What drops is what that man was carrying or could reach. And a recovered object keeps its history: it can be recognised, claimed by somebody with a better right to it, or turn out to be worth less than the trouble of selling it.

How to Read an Item

An entry has to answer more than what the thing is called: where it came from, who can use it, and what condition or quantity actually means for it. A name and a picture are not enough for a world that has to carry the object around.

Catalogue Families

Raw Resources are inputs taken from the world, Crafted records describe produced equipment and goods, and Salvage and Loot records describe recovered materials. A flour sack belongs in Raw Resources until somebody bakes it into bread; catalogue placement describes the object's role and provenance, not a promise that stock exists.

Ownership and Persistence

Objects travel — through inventories, through containers, across a vendor's shelf and into somebody's cellar. Loot has to come from a source that owned or controlled it. And when a finite hoard has been taken, it stays taken.

Reading the Actors Catalogue

Everything in here wants something, and almost none of it wants you specifically. The Actors section catalogues the people, units and creatures that exist in the game. Companions are not lieutenants. NPCs are not quest dispensers. Enemies are not loot containers. Every actor has needs, relationships and consequences appropriate to what it is. The public Bestiary gives the baseline. Your run's Codex unlocks only what this protagonist legitimately observed.

Actor Families

Roster entries represent established characters or reusable role definitions, NPCs cover people encountered in society, and Bestiary entries describe living creatures and their ecology. A baker is an NPC even when a combat encounter can target him; the catalogue family does not turn a person into loot.

An Actor Is More Than Combat Data

An actor needs more than a stat line: where it is, what it wants, and who it answers to. Culture, profession and allegiance are kept as separate facts about a person, because in this realm they routinely disagree with each other.

Knowledge and Substitution

A narrator may not replace Ila with another council member merely because both can answer a question. What an actor knows depends on observation and communication, so a substitute can fill a missing role only when the story gives that person the same evidence.

Reading the Skills Catalogue

Nobody in this realm learned a trade out of a book. The Skills section describes what a body, a mind and a soul can be trained to do. Progression does not turn the realm into a ladder built around your level. A skill improves your methods and widens your consequences; none of them grants omniscience. No skill reads the truth off a man's face, and none detects the Mark, a private intention, or a hidden allegiance.

Three Skill Domains

Skills sit in three domains: Body, Mind, and Soul. Body is physical practice; Mind is what is learned, from command and trade to organised knowing; Soul is inward practice, including faith and Introspection. The domain says what kind of practice it is, not whether that practice is morally good.

Reading a Skill Entry

An entry tells you three things: what trains the skill, which attribute lets it grow, and where it applies. What it will never tell you is another person's mind. No skill in this game reads intent, and none of them makes you right by default.

Choosing What to Practise

You can try everything. Reliable expertise comes from sustained use and the character investment standing behind it. Character Progression covers the attributes, the ceilings and the perk budgets. The Skill Catalogue is the authoritative list of the disciplines themselves.

He was asked. He said no, and he said why. Write down both. — instruction to Whitecliff clerks The words this manual uses in a particular way, gathered in one place. Each is introduced in the chapter that needs it. This is where you come back to check.

World and Run Terms

Chronicle is the remembered record of one run. Run is one generated campaign with its own state and private discoveries. Seed is the input used to reproduce procedural choices. Old Seat is the realm's politically central contested city. House is one of six durable political institutions. Companion is an autonomous travelling relationship, never a permanent personal lieutenant. Codex is the protagonist's discovered knowledge, which may remain incomplete or disputed.

Threat and Economy Terms

Gathering — an observable concentration of armed or desperate people whose real organisation may not be clear. Black Market — a clandestine exchange network, and not automatically a Gathering. Hideout — a concealed base that has lasted, because people and supplies reach it. Headquarters — a mature command and logistics site, not simply a bigger fight. Provenance — where a thing came from, and whose hands it passed through.

Progression Terms

Attribute is potential and the ceiling it sets on related skills. Insight is the trainable potential for reading motives, while Introspection is the Soul skill that grows through authored self-reckoning. Ring is Body, Mind, or Soul; Skill is demonstrated practice; Focus is a scarce commitment that raises one skill's ceiling; Milestone is a point on a skill track where a perk choice appears; Perk is a specialisation you keep: an ability, a permission, or a change in how a system treats you.

Choice and Knowledge Terms

Response means accepting involvement or communicating a course of action. Refusal is an explicit decision not to act under the offered terms. Neglect is failure to answer while others continue without knowing your position. Evidence is an observation or record with provenance; Claim is what someone says the evidence means; Reliability is the current reason to trust a source; Author Truth is what the world knows and no narrator may hand you. Consciousness is a run state recording an honest and constructive relation to yourself and to other people. Mark Affinity is the other run state: how far you have deliberately walked toward the Mark. Neither is allocatable and neither changes from travel or a generic quest reward; crossing between them requires an explicit story decision.