Every Road But One

We told you the world writes it down first

A while back the world stopped deciding what was behind the door after you opened it. It started writing the outcomes down beforehand and sealing them, so that whatever happened next was already true when you chose it.

You had to take our word for that. There was nothing to look at.

Now there is. Your character has a Saga.

A page somebody sat down and drew

It is not a menu and not a list of events. It is a sheet of paper — the working notes of whoever was preparing your story — and everything else in the game is the dark table it is lying on.

Every crossroads you have stood at is inked on it. Out of each one, every road the world had written for you fans out. One of them kept going. The rest stop where they stopped.

The abandoned ones are drawn in full and then struck through. That matters more than it sounds. They were not sketched in faintly as maybes — real work went into them, and then it was crossed out, because you went somewhere else.

The shape of the page is the shape of your choices

The road you walked is not a tidy line down the middle. Where it continued is where the next crossroads sits, so the whole page leans and wanders according to what you actually picked.

If you take the safe option fourteen times, you will see a path that leans the same way fourteen times, with discarded roads piling up untouched on the other side. Nobody has to tell you that you have been playing carefully. You can see it.

Some of it you can read. Some of it you can't.

Step sideways onto a road you didn't take and one of two things happens.

If whoever or whatever it needed is gone — the man is dead, the place is rubble — you can read the whole thing. It cannot happen now, so there is nothing left to protect.

Otherwise it stays sealed. You will see that a road was there, and that it closed, and nothing else. The world wrote down what was waiting down it before you chose, you went another way, and it isn't yours to read. Some of those situations can still come around.

We would rather show you a locked door than spoil the room.

Off the map

Sometimes you did something nobody had written down at all. Those show up as their own road, swinging wider than any prepared one, marked off the map — the moments the world had to answer you instead of reading from its notes.

The sheet counts them. If the number is zero, every single thing you have ever done was already anticipated. Make of that what you will.

And when something comes for you, it now says why

Separately, and in the same spirit: consequences used to arrive without explanation. Someone would turn up wanting your blood and the connection to whatever you did six days ago lived only in the world's private bookkeeping.

That link is now visible in play. When a reckoning finds you, it knows the deed it came from and how long ago it happened, and it will show it. Fewer coincidences. More consequences.

The Saga sits with your character, beside Story So Far. Arrow keys walk it: up and down along the road you took, left and right onto the ones you didn't.