THE COUNCIL DOESN'T SAY HOW
A job starts at the Keep with four things: what the settlement needs, why it needs it this week, what 843 Acres already thinks it knows about the place, and what will count as done.
That is all you get. The Council says what is needed and it does not say how. The route, the kit, the layer, the hour, who goes and who stays — all of that is the crew's, and so is what happens because of it.
ISSUE BOOK — I. BARROW
Rifle ×1. Rounds ×6. Carried by Okafor. Six out, six back or say why.
You are one of about forty people the settlement trusts to go outside, and everybody knows your name. You have a Build, because a Big Out-Waller carries a boat and a Small one gets through a gap he never will. You have a Load, set when the crew packs, which decides which layers you can use at all.
You have two Abilities, written by you, each with a limit somebody can see. And you have a Truth: one fact about you the world cannot ignore, with a note on exactly who it reaches. A face nobody forgets. A brand. Having had the Fever and lived.
And you have somebody you come home for. That is a question on the sheet, and it is not optional.
TWO DICE / NOTHING ADDED
Two six-sided dice, read in four bands: 2–3, 4–6, 7–9, 10–12. Nothing is added to the roll — not a stat, not a skill, not a bonus.
The dice only come out when two things are true at once: the outcome is genuinely uncertain, and failing would cost something. Otherwise the GM says what happens and play moves on. A character who would obviously know a thing knows it, and nobody rolls to find out.
CRIB SHEET
DROVERS — nothing. do not stop, do not speak.
No hit points. No initiative. No damage. A wound is written on your sheet in plain words — Broken Wrist, Two Fingers Gone, Can't Stop Listening — and it is kept, rewritten or crossed out according to whether it is still true.
Some moments are Fatal, which means nothing could have caught you. Some are Critical, which means something might, if your crew does it now. A Critical wound puts you on a track that moves every scene nobody is looking after you, and the people looking after you are the other players.
Every expedition ends the same way. The three questions, a healer's hands on anyone who waded, and three weeks in the watch-house for anyone who might be carrying the Fever. Then the crew reports at the Gathering, in public, in front of the people who decide whether it goes out again.
And it goes in the Gate Book, under five headings. One of them is what 843 Acres now believes, which is not always what happened. That book is the campaign: the next job is nearly always already written in it.
Everything above is in the book, and the book needs nothing except two dice, pencils and people.
The website keeps the things a table forgets to keep: the sheets, the Gate Book, Heat, situations, and one district of New York mapped on all four layers. It does not roll for you, it does not decide anything, and it does not hold what the GM decided is secret anywhere a player can reach it.