What the Players Are Told

Part VI — What the players are told

Most of this Guide is about deciding what happens. This part is about the narrower and easier-to-break question of what reaches the table afterwards, and it exists because the same mistake keeps arriving in different clothes.

34. A failure describes the attempt, never the world

⚠️ This is the rule. When something does not work, say what the attempt found. Never say what is there.

The difference is invisible until you see it once, and then it is everywhere:

The second sentence hands over a fact the characters have not earned and cannot have: that the study is empty. It also spends something you cannot get back, because a party that has been told a room is clean will never search it again, and a party that suspects one is not will search it for the rest of the Chronicle.

Both wrong beliefs are good. A company can be certain something is hidden here and be wrong. It can conclude there is nothing because it did not find what is. Those are ordinary ways for people to be, they are excellent for play, and they only survive if a fruitless search and an empty room sound exactly alike.

The same shape, elsewhere. "There's no way down from here" answers a question about the rock rather than about the looking. "You don't recognize this place" is fine; "you've never been here" is not. "Nobody answers" is fine; "the house is empty" is not. When you catch yourself about to report the state of the world, describe the attempt instead and the sentence usually gets better as well as more honest.

⚠️ The engine holds this line where it can. A search that turns nothing up says the same words whether or not anything was there to find, and the list of what might have been found is recorded where only you can read it. That machinery cannot help you at the table, though. The sentence you say out loud is yours.

35. Knowing the way, and knowing where you are

These are different, and keeping them apart is what makes a place like the Depths dangerous without any monster in it.

What a company knows about a way out has three settings. It has no idea the opening exists. It can see an opening and nothing more — which is not a destination, and guessing is how a crew ends up further in while certain it is heading out. Or it has been along it and knows both ends.

Arriving teaches less than people assume: the way they came, because they walked it, and the shape of the room if there is light to see it by. In the dark it teaches nothing at all.

⚠️ Recognition is separate and is not a side effect of having been somewhere. A company that crossed a five-doored chamber an hour ago knows about a five-doored chamber. Walking back into it, it may not know this is the same one. Nothing was forgotten — the knowledge simply does not attach to the place. That is not a memory problem and you should not run it as one.

It is earned by doing something. Marking the wall on the way past. Keeping a count. Bringing somebody whose whole craft is this. A company that did none of those and is now retracing its steps is in the most dangerous situation the Depths offer, and nothing has noticed them yet.

⚠️ A mark persists. Do not let one fade because the scene would be tenser. It stays where it was put until something takes it, and a company that did the work is owed the benefit of having done it. When a mark is gone, know what took it before you say it is gone — a Mender closing a wound, water, an animal, another crew who never saw it.

And it is a thing an antagonist can reach. Someone who understands what a crew relies on can take their marks, and the crueller move is not removing them. A mark moved is a company walking confidently in the wrong direction, still trusting the method that is now working against them. ⚠️ Use it rarely and never invisibly: there should be something, afterwards, that a company can look back on and recognize as the moment they were had.

The engine will hold this for you, and holds it in two halves. A mark that lies is recorded as exactly that — a mark this company reads as its own and is not — along with who put it there, because a mark that lies had somebody lying with it. The company's belief and whether that belief is sound are separate questions, and you can ask the second one at any time.

⚠️ What must never differ is what the players are shown. Recognizing a place they marked and recognizing a place somebody wanted them to think they marked have to feel identical, because if the false one felt thinner the engine would be answering a question the company has not earned. This is §34 arriving in a new coat: the surface reports the belief, never the truth underneath it.

And notice what the belief actually buys. A company that thinks it knows where it is stops behaving like a company that is lost — it moves faster, argues less, and stops looking for the things a lost crew looks for. That is what the moved mark was for, and it is the reason this is worth doing well rather than often.

Say what they can say. "Four openings, and the one you came in by" is a scene. "You're back in the pillared chamber" has quietly given them a map.

36. What is hidden, and how it is found

A concealed way is not a locked one. A collapse is plain to see and impassable. A concealed way is invisible and may be standing wide open — and the two want completely different scenes.

⚠️ Noticing is a check and never a gate. A company that did not think to look is not refused the chance. The concealment resists, whatever the character brings acts, and the two are placed against each other like anything else. Searching deliberately does not switch to some other mechanism: it acts on the character's side and lowers what the moment demands, which is exactly why looking is worth the time it costs and why not looking is a risk rather than a refusal.

So both of these happen and both are correct. Somebody walks past and notices the draught. Somebody spends an hour on a wall with nothing in it.

Do not list what has not been found. Saying "there are three doors and something you can't place" is the leak from §34 wearing a hood. Either they found it or the room has three doors.

37. Down, up, and the shape of the dark

The Depths as a system never bottom out. What the deepest of them finally reach is permanently unresolved, and a delve that hit a floor would settle it.

⚠️ A single chamber is a different matter, and caves are mostly dead ends. A passage forks; one branch opens into somewhere that splits eight ways and the other stops at a wall. Running the system's rule over every room makes a stack rather than a cave, and it removes the thing that makes a cave frightening — that the way on exists and is not here.

Underneath is two different places. Cellars, sewers, catacombs and an undercity are dug in sediment: people live in them, they are ordinary, and the Pulse there is exactly what it is at the surface. The Depths are through flesh and bone-rock, nobody lives in them, and the Pulse rises and turns unstable as you go. ⚠️ A cellar has a floor, because its builders stopped somewhere. Cutting past that floor is not walking downstairs — it is breaking into the Depths, which is where a made mouth comes from and eventually what lives in one.

A way down is not automatically a way back. A cut stair is. A hole somebody dropped through is not, and a chimney that took a rope going down may want rope, a free hand and a decision coming up. Decide which when you make it, because a company that assumed the first and met the third has a genuine problem and it is a good one.

For what lives down there, see the Bestiary, §12. For why depth itself is dangerous before anything notices you, see Player's Handbook, Chapter II.

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Closing principle

A strong Tread Master does not prove how much the system knows. They make the world feel as though it keeps existing when nobody is looking, remembers what the players changed, refuses to steal their choices, and always leaves them somewhere meaningful to tread next.