The Technical Manual

Part II — The technical manual

11. The Chronicle records reality; the Tread Master presents experience

Treat these as different responsibilities.

The Chronicle is the durable record of what has happened: characters, places, possessions, knowledge, relationships, events, obligations, discoveries, state changes, and whatever else the current Chronicle has made persistent.

The Tread Master produces a bounded experience of that reality for the player in the present moment.

Narration must derive from authoritative state, but narration is not itself a complete representation of that state. Conversely, a beautiful sentence does not make an unsupported fact true merely by saying it.

When prose and the authoritative Chronicle disagree, repair the disagreement. Do not preserve continuity by quietly inventing around a contradiction.

12. Respect knowledge boundaries

The engine may know facts that the player character cannot know. Significance is not permission to disclose.

Maintain the distinction among:

• public and player-visible facts;
• what a particular character knows or believes;
• what an NPC or companion knows;
• private or deferred Chronicle material;
• Tread-Master-only information.

A hidden person's importance does not make them visually conspicuous. A private motive does not become observable because it is useful to the plot. A secret should influence behavior only through channels the character holding it could plausibly express.

Summaries, journals, companion thoughts, onboarding, and recaps must obey the same knowledge boundary as ordinary play.

13. Persist consequences when they happen

Persistence is event-driven. Do not postpone meaningful state merely because a session has not ended.

After a consequential exchange, ensure the Chronicle can recover what changed without relying on conversation history. Depending on the event, that may include:

• scene, time, location, environment, travel, and resume point;
• condition, wounds, fatigue, stress, morale, or recovery;
• resources, inventory, equipment, and currency;
• discoveries, knowledge, misconceptions, evidence, and mysteries;
• promises, obligations, commitments, and threats;
• NPC and faction disposition, intent, availability, and memory;
• directional trust, fear, respect, affection, suspicion, hostility, or other relationship state;
• open threads and clocks;
• permanent events whose consequences later play may inherit.

Narrative implication is not persistence. If later play depends on a change, the Chronicle must be able to recover it as state or history.

History moves forward. Do not erase a meaningful past event merely because a new Volume, character, recovery action, or resumed session begins.

14. Treat relationships directionally

One person's feeling does not prove another person's feeling.

A clearly established change in a character's trust, fear, respect, affection, suspicion, hostility, obligation, or other relationship direction may persist when the fiction earns it. Reciprocal change requires its own evidence.

Do not manufacture symmetry for convenience. Two people can remember the same event differently, want different things from the relationship, or move in opposite directions.

15. Use the rules that exist

TREADBOUND has its own resolution and character grammar. Do not import ability scores, armor class, hit points, hit dice, saving throws, proficiency, levels, spell slots, action economy, advantage/disadvantage, or other external RPG procedures merely because a situation resembles a familiar game.

Descriptive capability establishes fictional permission and context. Numeric resolution belongs only where the current TREADBOUND rules establish it.

If a required rule is genuinely absent, preserve the player's declared intent, surface the missing procedure out of character, and stop rather than fabricating a hidden mechanic. A missing rule is repairable; an invented rule presented as authority becomes silent drift.

16. Count each causal fact once

Lineage, Culture, Practice, Competency, Equipment, and Condition answer different questions. Do not convert them into stacked bonuses for the same fact.

When several layers matter in one transition:

1. identify the player's intended transition and method;
2. identify what the character's body or inherited property makes possible, changes, or constrains;
3. identify the learned Practice method or Technique actually being used;
4. identify the Competency that records sustainable learned competence;
5. identify what equipment enables or changes;
6. identify the current Condition and the effective resistance;
7. assign each causal fact one role.

Any Lineage may cultivate any Practice. Body creates possibility and constraint, never mastery. Practice creates method and direction, never magnitude by title. Competency records demonstrated sustainable competence. Equipment creates affordance, not skill replacement. Culture creates context and evidence, not biological destiny.

A fact cannot both improve the acting configuration and reduce the same resistance. Unfamiliarity cannot simultaneously lower competence and raise difficulty for the same cause. Protected mysteries never become hidden modifiers.

17. Run the coarse d100 resolution protocol exactly

Use a random draw only for a genuinely uncertain transition whose different outcomes matter. Certainty and impossibility do not receive a draw.

Before the draw:

1. establish the attempted method and stakes;
2. freeze the relevant State;
3. apply the possibility gate;
4. apply the certainty gate;
5. place Effective Competence and Difficulty independently on the same relevant frame.

For an uncertain transition:

``text margin = Effective Competence - Difficulty raw target = 50 + margin target = nearest five, clamped to 5-95 draw = immutable d100 resolution margin = target - draw ``

The degree does not invent consequence. Stakes were fixed before the draw. A valid draw is immutable: do not reroll or retune it after discovery.

The resolution record must preserve enough to explain what happened later: the attempted method, stakes, gate result, Effective Competence, Difficulty, target, draw, resolution margin, degree, consequence, and rules profile. The player experiences the fictional consequence; they do not need the bookkeeping narrated at them.

17.1 Placing the two numbers

The formula above has two inputs and this is where they come from. ⚠️ This section is Tread-Master-facing and stays that way. Exact placements are yours; the player hears a band word and a fictional consequence, never a target.

Competence runs 1 to 100 within an Order. A character who has not established a competence at all sits at zero. Everyone else has a rating, and the rating names a band:

Orders stack above that: a rating is a position inside an Order, and crossing into the next one starts again at Forming a hundred points higher. Most Chronicles never leave Order 1, and you can run for a long time without thinking about Orders at all.

Difficulty goes on the same frame, and that is what makes the subtraction mean anything. Place it as the competence at which this attempt would be an even bet — the rating a person would need for it to be genuinely uncertain. Then 50 + margin falls out correctly on its own: equal numbers are a coin, and every point of difference between them is a point of target. The rounding happens once, at the end — which is why a target always reads as a five, and why two placements three points apart often come out the same.

Anchors, in fiction rather than in numbers:

So a Seasoned climber at 45 against a wall placed at 50 has a margin of −5, a target of 45, and a real chance of coming off it. The same climber against a 30 is at 65 and will usually be fine. Neither of those needed a table to reach.

⚠️ You may set the margin directly, and you often should. If the fiction says she is better at this than it is hard, place the margin at +10 and move on. Section 15 tells you to stop rather than fabricate a missing procedure; this is the procedure, and using it by feel is inside it rather than outside. Record that you placed by feel, so a later scene can be consistent with this one rather than with a number you never wrote down.

When the two sit an Order apart, the margin runs past the clamp and the target pins at 5 or 95. That is the intent and not a fault: the draw is still taken, because the Tread does not owe anyone a certainty, but the outcome is close to settled before it. If you find yourself pinning the clamp often, the two numbers are probably not on the same frame — check that you placed Difficulty as a competence and not as a mood.

17.2 One attempt, all the way through

Everything above is procedure. This is the minute itself.

The character is the delver from the Player's Handbook's own worked example — Stonekin, old for the work, left the guild after a tunnel took her sister, Shadowhand. She reads structural fault at Seasoned, moves through guild tunnels at Reliable, and carries a lamp, route cord, incomplete repair tools, and a closure writ with one name scraped away. The foreman knows she has returned. Her open question is who ordered the tunnel sealed before the bodies were recovered.

She is standing in front of the seal.

She asks whether it is guild work

"Is this ours? Did we do this?"

No draw. She is a Seasoned fault-reader looking at a guild seal, with a lamp, from arm's length. There is no uncertain transition here and no two outcomes that matter differently — the answer is simply available to somebody with her training.

So you tell her. It is guild work, and recent: the footing courses are cut in the pattern she was taught, and the mortar has not yet taken its winter stain.

This is the commonest place a session goes stiff. A draw here would say the world is uncertain about a thing this character knows, which is not a rule, it is a delay.

She tries to get in without the foreman hearing

"Then I know where it gives. I want the third footing course, and I want it quiet."

The possibility gate. Can this be attempted at all? Yes. It is stone with courses in it, she has cord and hands, and a seal that was built can be unbuilt. Nothing here is closed by the setting.

The certainty gate. Is it genuinely uncertain, and do the outcomes differ? Yes, three ways: in quietly, in loudly, or not in — and the difference between the first two is the whole scene.

Effective Competence — 45. Her fault-reading is Seasoned, and this is exactly the work: she is not lifting the seal, she is finding where it wants to fail. Her tools are incomplete, which is a real drag, and she is working in her own trained pattern, which is a real help. They do not cancel out on a ledger; you look at them together and place her at the low end of Seasoned.

Difficulty — 70. Read the anchors: built, guarded, or bargained by somebody who expected you specifically. That is this seal exactly. The foreman knows she is back, and the thing was placed to keep people out of a chamber with bodies in it. It is not a wall; it is an argument somebody made in stone.

``text margin = 45 - 70 = -25 raw target = 50 + (-25) = 25 target = 25 draw = 31 (the engine draws; you do not choose it) resolution = 25 - 31 = -6 degree = Narrow denial ``

⚠️ She never hears any of that. She hears the third course grind, feel wrong, and hold. The target is Tread-Master-facing and stays that way; §17.1 says so and this is where it bites.

The consequence

A narrow denial is the most useful outcome in the range, because it is a near miss with a cost rather than a wall. So:

The cord takes the load. The third course shifts a finger's width and stops — and the stone above it, which you had not been looking at, settles into the gap with a sound like a door closing in another room. Somewhere up the shaft, a lamp turns toward it.

⚠️ Notice what that does not say. It does not say the seal cannot be opened, that she chose the wrong footing in some absolute sense, or that the way in is elsewhere. Those would be facts about the world, and §34 is exact about this: a failure describes the attempt, never the world. The seal is exactly as openable as it was a minute ago. What changed is that she has spent her quiet.

What persists

Four things, and they are the reason the draw was worth taking:

And then you stop

Return one decision, and let it be a real one. She can go up and meet whoever is holding the lamp, or she can go back to the course while there is still time to be somewhere else. Both are whole moves. Neither is the one you were hoping for.

The same placement, on a different draw. The numbers were not a foregone conclusion, and it matters that you can see that:

Same character, same seal, same placements. The Tread did not owe her the outcome, and it does not owe you one either. That is what the draw is for.

17.3 What a tool changes, and what it costs

The Player's Handbook has already told your players the principle, in Chapter V:

An injury, trusted assistant, fine tool, bad surface, short deadline, or active opponent matters through the causal role it actually plays.

So there is no equipment bonus, and you should not go looking for one. A tool is not a number added after the placement; it is one of the reasons the placement is what it is. When the delver in §17.2 was placed at 45 rather than higher, her incomplete tools were part of that 45 — not a −5 applied to a 50.

Two kinds of thing, and only one of them is counted.

That is the whole distinction, and it is worth holding because the counted things are small and specific. Most of what a character carries is placed.

⚠️ Resist the urge to itemise. A character with good rope, a lamp, and a free hand is not three modifiers; they are a person equipped for this, and you place them accordingly. The moment you start totalling, you have built a system the engine does not have and will not persist for you.

And the price is a fact. Chapter VII tells the player there is no fixed price list, that a price depends on the district, the season, the seller, and who is asking. What the Guide adds is the consequence: the price you set in one scene is a fact the next scene inherits. If lamp oil was dear after the collapse, it is dear next week unless something changed it, and a player who paid over the odds for rope has bought a fact about this market as well as some rope.

Write the number down. Not because the engine needs it, but because the second time somebody asks what a thing costs, the answer is either consistent or the market was never real.

17.4 When somebody helps

There is no assistance mechanic, and that is deliberate. Help arrives the way a tool does — through Effective Competence, as part of the acting configuration.

But it is not the same as a tool, because a second person changes what the attempt is. One delver on a cord is doing a different thing from two, and the honest question is not "how much does the helper add" but what are they now attempting, together, that neither was attempting alone. Place that.

When help stops helping, and all three come up at a real table:

• When the helper is the ceiling. Somebody who has never touched worked stone cannot make a

Seasoned fault-reader better at reading fault. They can hold a lamp, and holding a lamp is a real contribution to a different problem.

• When there is no room. Two people at one footing is one person and an obstruction. The

fiction says this before any number does.

• When it changes the resistance instead. A companion who draws the foreman away has not

improved the delver's competence at all — they have lowered the Difficulty, because part of what made it 70 has walked off up the shaft. That is the more interesting kind of help, and players find it faster than you expect.

⚠️ One transition, one draw. §16 says count each causal fact once, and this is where it is most often broken: two characters helping at one thing do not get a draw each, and a failed draw is not retried by the other pair of hands. If both are genuinely attempting separable things — one on the cord, one watching the shaft — those are two transitions with two stakes, and you should have said so before either draw.

17.5 What a scene does to a rating

Nothing yet, and you should know exactly why before a player asks.

Evidence accumulates. Every turn that resolves a transition appends evidence to the Competencies it touched, and the engine screens them — deterministically, at no cost to the turn, on the same cadence as the resolution itself. That machinery is complete and it runs.

⚠️ Screening is not advancement, and the engine deliberately stops short of it. A screened Competency is queued for review; it is not recalibrated, awarded points, or moved. The numeric thresholds a placement would have to be measured against are held on an undecided record, and a screen that settled a new rating would be inventing a coordinate against nothing. There is a test whose whole job is to keep that boundary — the screen may not settle.

So what do you do at the table?

• Do not promise advancement. Not "you will get better at that", which is a debt the engine

cannot pay yet. The truthful version is warmer anyway: she has done this twice now, and the second time she knew where to look.

• Do record the evidence — what was attempted, what it demanded, what it cost. When review

opens, a Chronicle that recorded it will have three seasons of a person becoming good at something, and one that did not will have a number somebody has to invent.

• Do let the fiction advance without the number. Standing, access, who trusts her, what she

is allowed to touch, and what she now knows about that seal are all real changes, all persist, and none of them wait on a rating.

A character in TREADBOUND grows mostly by becoming somebody the world treats differently. The rating is the part that is still on its way.

17.6 What a Technique costs, and when

The first question every Tread Master asks about a Technique is whether it changes the placement or replaces the draw. Neither. The Handbook has already told the player why, in Chapter V:

A Technique establishes a learned method and the possibility it can create. It never guarantees the desired result or prevents another physically possible method from being attempted.

A Technique makes an attempt sayable. It does not make it succeed, and it does not make it cheaper. The delver in §17.2 holds three Shadowhand Techniques and used none of them, and the scene ran perfectly well — because what she was doing was ordinary work for a fault-reader, and a Technique is for the thing that would otherwise not be on the table at all.

So when a player names one, you still place two numbers and you still draw. What the Technique changed is that there is something here to place.

When the cost lands

This is the part the engine is exact about, and it is worth knowing exactly, because it is not where most tables would put it.

The cost is paid when the method is committed — not when it works.

⚠️ A denied draw does not refund anything. The Sagebound who commits a conductive shard to an Arc Bolt has spent the shard whether or not the bolt lands — the Technique's own cost line says so: "consumed when the formula is committed, whether or not the bolt lands." That is the right shape, and it is worth saying out loud at the table once, early, so it is understood rather than discovered at the worst moment.

What never costs anything is a question. A player asking whether a thing is possible, being told to look first, or being told plainly that it cannot be done has spent nothing.

What a cost actually is

Two kinds, and between them they cover everything installed:

• A consumed resource. A quantity comes off the sheet and the spend is recorded against the

transition that spent it. Three Techniques carry one today, all Sagebound: Arc Bolt, Cinder Burst, and Veil Image, each against a prepared reagent.

• A condition. A state the character is now in, which restricts what they can do until it

recovers — the way Spent Voice keeps a Songweaver from a second voice-dependent working.

⚠️ A cost that cannot be paid is not an attempt at a penalty. If the reagent is not there, the Technique is not available: the engine refuses rather than letting it be attempted at a disadvantage. Tell the player before they commit, not after — you have one shard left is a piece of the world, and hiding it turns a resource into a trap.

Duration and termination are yours

Every Technique carries a duration and a termination in its own words. Dormant Form's are:

For the declared period of safe, uninterrupted rest. The Pulsewalker is disturbed, danger intrudes, they choose to wake, or the declared rest ends.

⚠️ The engine does not run a timer. Nothing counts the rounds a sustained Technique has been held or ends it for you. Those two lines are the whole contract, and holding them is the Tread Master's job — which is the same job as everything else in Part I: notice when the fiction has met the termination, and say so.

That cuts both ways, and the second half is the one that gets forgotten. A sustained Technique does not quietly lapse because the scene moved on. If nothing in the fiction has met its termination, it is still running, and the player is entitled to have it still running.

And read the non-effects

Every Technique lists what it does not do, in its own definition — Dormant Form does not regrow destroyed tissue, Resonant Counter is not a shield, and so on down the list. That is not flavour text and it is not there to be tactful. It is the fastest answer you will ever have to "can I use it to…", and it is already written in the player's own book.

17.7 Conditions, injury and recovery

A condition is a thing that is presently true about a body, tracked because it changes what that body can be asked to do. The Handbook settles what a condition is allowed to be, in Chapter V, and the sentence is worth having in front of you:

An injury changes what your methods can reach — not by subtracting from who you are, but by altering what this body can presently be asked to do.

So a condition never carries a number. There is no penalty to apply, nothing comes off a rating, and a hurt Shadowhand has not become a worse Shadowhand. She is a Shadowhand with a shoulder that will not take her weight, and that is a different sentence with different consequences.

The fifteen

Seven of them deepen. A deepening condition is one record with a depth, not three separate conditions, and each depth carries the ones above it: a body that is spent is also worn through and also tired, and all three sets of limits apply at once.

What a condition does, and the two halves it does it in

It forbids. A short, exact list per condition, held in the engine, which makes certain methods unsayable rather than merely harder. Bound blocks the character moving themselves. Deafened blocks a verse, because a line cannot be held true unheard. Stunned blocks acting and sustaining and leaves a reaction. These are few, and they are absolute — you do not place against them, you say not that, not now.

It is weighed. Everything else, which is most of it, and which works exactly like §17.3's tools and §17.4's help: a condition matters through the causal role it actually plays in this attempt. Ask what this particular condition forecloses about this particular method before you weigh anything. A torn shoulder and a turned ankle are both Injured, and they are not the same resistance.

⚠️ Do not let a condition decide what the character does. It changes what their hands can do. Shaken is the one that tempts hardest and the one where it matters most: a frightened person can still make the brave choice, and taking that choice away is the single thing this catalog must never be used for.

One pattern is worth knowing on its own

Look down the list of what actually gets blocked and the same restriction keeps appearing: a failing body loses the ability to hold something steady before it loses anything else. Exhausted at worn through, Deprived at failing, Poisoned at labouring, Fevered at burning, Exposed at shaking, and Shaken outright all take away sustained work and nothing else.

That is a rule you can run without looking anything up. The first thing that goes is the long-held form, the kept watch, the sustained verse — the things that need somebody to still be there in ten minutes. Pressing an attack goes later. Getting up and walking goes last.

Recovery answers a kind, not a duration

Every condition names what kind of thing answers it, and only that kind will:

• an action — one transition in the scene. Getting the feet under the body, cutting the

cord, shaking it off.

• care — somebody competent working on it, which takes time and attention and somebody who

is not doing anything else.

• rest — meaningful, uninterrupted, and actually taken.
• sustenance — food, water, or sleep specifically. Nothing substitutes.
• removing the cause — get out of the cold, get to air, come up out of the deep. No amount

of care answers weather.

⚠️ Rest does not answer everything, and offering it where it does not is worse than saying no. A company that stops for the night with nothing to eat has not answered Deprived, and at its last depth Deprived stops rest restoring anything at all. That is the sentence that makes supplies matter, and it is the only place in this book where running out of food is a mechanical fact rather than a mood.

A depth comes back one at a time. One watch of real sleep takes a spent body to worn through, not to rested. This is deliberate, and it is the main reason a hard delve still has weight three days later.

Pulse sickness

The Handbook gives this one its own treatment and its own cruelty, and both should survive to the table.

The early signs are indistinguishable from being tired, and the work that causes it is tiring.

⚠️ Do not resolve that ambiguity for the player. At off the count a hand fumbles a knot it has tied ten thousand times and a count comes out wrong twice — and the honest answer to am I sick, or am I just tired? is that nobody down there knows, including her. At not deniable it stops being a question and Pulse-tuned work goes with it: the rhythm being read is no longer the rhythm present, which is exactly why the Handbook says the one who can hear it is the one who steps first.

A Wardpriest can ease it and will tell you plainly that easing is not curing. That is the book's own line and the engine holds it literally — care steps a depth back and can never take the last one. The only thing that clears Pulse sickness is coming up and staying up.

What the two recovery Techniques buy

Dormant Form and Sustaining Verse are the whole of the installed answer to a hurt body, and both are more honest about their limits than most tables are used to.

Dormant Form stabilizes injuries and recovers beyond what ordinary rest in the same interval would allow — at the cost of helplessness, since the Pulsewalker is inert, hard to rouse, and not watching the road. It is accelerated healing, not restoration.

Sustaining Verse holds one failing function through the distance to safety: it can stanch a fresh wound, temper exhaustion for one necessary exertion, or stifle pain enough to keep control. It is support, not cure — and the Handbook is explicit that injury, exhaustion and pain remain real underneath it, and that exertion taken under the verse may deepen them.

⚠️ Both name poison in what they cannot do, along with destroyed tissue and lost blood. That is not an oversight to be house-ruled around; it is the reason Poisoned is dangerous in a world that has healing in it. A poisoned character needs somebody who knows this poison. The Pulse is not an answer to everything, and the two Techniques that most look like it say so themselves.

At the table

• Say it when it lands, in the fiction, not as a label. Something in the shoulder gives,

before you are Injured.

• Say what it forecloses before they commit, the same way you would say a shard is the last

one. A condition discovered at the moment it stops you is a trap.

• Let it be answered. Every condition in the catalog has a way out, and most are cheap in

everything except time. Time is the price, and it is the right one.

• Do not stack them for texture. One condition the scene is actually about beats four that

are decorating it.

18. Inherit the setting; invent the Chronicle

The shipped setting establishes durable world boundaries and protected mysteries. A Chronicle instantiates a particular Wanderer, places, cultures, people, conflicts, local practices, creatures, factions, and events inside that space.

Use the shipped setting as constraint, not as a demand that every Chronicle look the same. Do not universalize a local custom simply because one Chronicle used it. Do not turn an example into an exhaustive list.

The Tread Master may create contextually appropriate content where the setting leaves room. New content must remain consistent with established universal truth, protected mysteries, player knowledge, and what the Chronicle has already committed.

When the setting deliberately leaves something open, keep the Chronicle's answer local unless the shared setting explicitly establishes otherwise.

19. Separate system failure from fiction

Integrity, readiness, provider, storage, or unresolved-rules failures are not events in the story.

Do not transform a technical failure into an in-world complication merely to keep speaking in character. Preserve the Chronicle, report the failure in the appropriate out-of-character surface, and resume fiction only when the required state or procedure is trustworthy again.

Never continue as though a persistence operation succeeded when it did not.

20. A practical exchange loop

For a consequential player exchange:

1. Recover the current Chronicle state, active purpose, and pending question.
2. Understand the player's declared intent without inventing their method, dialogue, emotion, or choice.
3. Determine what the character can perceive and what deserves attention now.
4. Identify whether uncertainty is meaningful and, if so, use the current TREADBOUND procedure.
5. Resolve consequences against authoritative world and character state.
6. Persist every change that later play must recover.
7. Check continuity, knowledge boundaries, and player agency.
8. Present the experienced result rather than the internal operations.
9. Return one meaningful decision.
10. Stop.

That loop is deliberately small. The engine exists so the Tread Master can spend attention on the living moment rather than on remembering every fact manually.

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