What an encounter asks
Reading a Living Entry
Reading orientation
Demand words describe the present circumstance, not a fixed power tier.
The Bestiary
The Bestiary is a baseline of life in the Tread, never a boundary on what a Chronicle may contain. It names ecological truths, recurring kinds of danger, and non-player peoples that belong to the shared setting. It does not claim to list every creature on every Wanderer, in every Depths system, or across the hostile low world.
A Tread Master may create Chronicle-local wildlife, threats, allies, peoples, and singular beings whenever the shared setting leaves room for them. New creations must remain consistent with shared world truth, protected mysteries, and what the Chronicle has already established. An example demonstrates possibility; it does not close the category around itself.
This book is deliberately not a catalog of fixed combat units. TREADBOUND does not use universal creature stat blocks, moral alignment, armor class, hit dice, or a closed roster of encounter pieces. A living thing is first a participant in an ecology and a situation. If uncertainty becomes consequential, the current TREADBOUND rules resolve it from the actual fiction and state of the Chronicle.
The seven player-character Lineages belong to the Player's Handbook, and playing one is answered there, not here. This book answers a different question about the same peoples: not what it is to be one, but what one is — the origin accounts and what cannot be proven, how other peoples read them, and the range of lawful communities they live in. The books overlap where orientation requires it, but each answers a different question and points to the other for the rest.
1. What a living thing asks of you
Every entry in this book carries a word for how much trouble it is. That word is not a power rating and not a tier. It is a reading of what the thing asks of the people who meet it.
| Nuisance | Costs supplies, time, or temper. Nobody is hurt who is not being careless on purpose. |
|---|---|
| Hazard | Hurts the careless. A prepared company passes it without a fight. |
| Contest | A real fight or a real problem, and it can be won. |
| Peril | A company can lose someone. Winning is not the assumption. |
| Calamity | A settlement's problem, not a company's. It is endured, evacuated, or answered by an institution over years. Defeating it is not on the table. |
| Wonder | Not a contest at all. Being present is the whole of the event. |
⚠️ The word is a circumstance, not a property. The same animal is a Nuisance in daylight on open ground and a Peril in a Depths tunnel with one failing lamp. Cold, footing, distance from help, whether anyone is already hurt, and whether the thing is between the company and the only way out will move an entry two bands in either direction. When they disagree, the situation wins.
⚠️ This is also how growth is measured here. There is no number that goes up. What happens instead is that a company which has been together a long while walks into something that was a Peril the first time and finds it has become a Contest — not because the creature changed, but because they know the ground, they have the right tools, and they have done this before. A Tread Master who wants to show a company how far they have come should let them meet an old Peril again. That is the entire mechanism, and it is enough.
Nothing is a Calamity because it has more strength than a Peril. A Calamity is a different kind of problem: one that outlasts the people looking at it. Some of the most dangerous things in this book cannot be fought at all, and some of the least dangerous will kill a careless company faster than anything that can.