Five days, one drake, three visits
Until 21 September, playing one of the five peoples meant one thing: waiting for a drake, and pressing one key at the right moment when it came. An audit that morning measured how that felt. Between 55 and 95 percent of a defense was spent standing. The decisive press was announced in capitals on the screen, and anyone who pressed a quarter of a second after the capitals appeared lost four of the five defenses, because the real window had opened before the words did.
The owner asked for a list of improvements, then asked what about gathering resources and making armour and weapons, then asked for all of it to be built. By the end of the day there were 37 items in four tiers, every one in the source and under tests.
Fair and paced
The first tier made the defense that existed honest. The announcement is now the moment: the capitals appear on the tick the window opens, and a lower-case warning comes before them. Every window is at least 1.2 seconds. The condition each counter depends on is drawn on the ground, the bell’s ring, the seed bed’s lane, the choke’s footing, dashed while it only matters and lit while the drake is inside it. The top line counts the drake down through the air and says where it is coming from. Every people can call its drake once its sites are ready. A failed attempt restarts from the drake’s takeoff, not from the morning. Fire hurts by distance from the strike’s centre, and a local caught twice is lost.
A place to play, and things to make
The land has nodes to work, six to eight in each home, made from the props that were already there: orchards, the well, outcrops, a fallen beech, heather, a barrow. There are twelve materials with weights, a carrying limit that slows a full pack to a walk, and a bench in every home with 47 recipes. Axes, picks, knives and hammers come in three tiers. There are spears, clubs, war axes, slings and bows, shields, and armour for head, body, hands and feet, each people with a piece of its own. Everything made wears down and can be mended. Locals can be spoken to, sent to shelter, set to watch the stores, asked to help, or given a spare piece. Each land trades what it has for what it lacks.
Something to survive
The fourth tier ties it together. A run is five days, each eight minutes of play with 24 hours in it, and the Dark Elves’ day begins at dusk. The home keeps stores of food, water and fuel, eaten by the hour and brought in by the locals’ work. The drake comes three times, on days one, three and five, with two passes, then three, then three with a feint. Its health carries between visits. What burns burns until morning, and what is lost stays lost. The hurt stay hurt for two mornings, one if someone carries them in. The run ends with what was outlasted, held, lost and made, and the chronicle keeps each people’s best.
Where the list’s own gates were not met, the ledger says so. The pilot reaches second-tier tools on day two or three, not in one day. Nothing reached the mending threshold in a piloted run. Armour is modelled in the rules and not yet in the look. And nobody has played it: the autopilot lives the days, and a person has not.