Example of play¶
The rules take ten minutes to read. This takes two, and it is probably the faster way in.
Three people at a table. Jess is the Narrator. Priya plays Wren, a clockmaker's apprentice — Body d8, Mind d12, Soul d4. Theo plays Bram, who works the docks — Body d12, Mind d4, Soul d8.
They want a ledger out of a print shop that closed three hours ago.
Jess There's a man on a stool by the shutter. Not a guard, exactly. He's eating chips out of paper and he has seen you.
Theo Bram walks straight up. We're not sneaking past a man who's already looking at us. I'll tell him we're collecting for the printers' benevolent fund.
Jess That's Spiritual, and he's bored rather than stupid. I'll make it a d12.
Narrator wins.
Jess He looks at you for a while. "There's no benevolent fund." He doesn't get up and he doesn't shout. He just keeps looking, and now he'll remember your face.
Theo Fine. Bram keeps talking to him about nothing, loudly.
Priya While that's happening — can Wren look at the back of the building? She grew up over a shop. She knows how they're shut.
Jess That's Mental, and it's the thing she'd know. d6.
Wren wins.
Jess The back window has a catch that lifts instead of turning, and whoever closed it tonight was in a hurry. It isn't seated.
Priya She goes through it.
Jess Physical. The frame is swollen and the gap is small — d8.
A tie. Both sides get something.
Jess You're in. You're also on the floor, because the window gave all at once and you went through it faster than you meant to. Something in your shoulder is wrong. Tell me what it costs you.
Priya She can't reach above her head. Not on that side.
Jess Good. The ledgers are on the top shelf.
What happened there¶
Losing didn't stop anything. Bram failed his roll and the scene kept going — it just got harder, and now a man remembers his face. A loss that ends the evening is a Narrator problem, not a rules problem.
The tie is the whole game. Wren got through the window and hurt her shoulder, and thirty seconds later the shoulder was the scene. Most systems would have given her a yes or a no. This one gave her a story, and it did it by accident, because two dice landed on five.
Nobody looked anything up. Three rolls, three stats, one number each side. That is the core procedure, and everything else builds on it.
If you want to feel the tie rather than read about it, the roller on the Basic Rules page rolls real dice, and the odds page has how often each pairing lands there — it is more often than people expect.