Six stats sit under almost every roll a hero makes: Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, Intelligence, Spirit, and Charisma. Rolling also banks experience, a little for a fumble and more for a clean success. On its own that experience does nothing at all. It is the currency for a single command.

That command is meditate. It is where a hero rests, deepens a stat, pushes a skill into its next tier, or argues its way back from the dead. Three of its six forms are settled by an AI judge reading what the crowd wrote, and the three cards below run that same judge, live. The other three decide themselves, and they are at the end of this chapter.

Deepen a stat

Meditating on a stat means writing what that stat means to this hero: meditate strength ! my grip is iron, and what I strike does not rise again. The judge scores how squarely the mantra sits inside that stat's own territory, which is why a beautiful line about the wrong stat scores badly. Land it and the hero takes a permanent point, sometimes two, as long as this level's ten-point budget still has room. The cost is experience, and it rises as the stat does: the stat's current value, plus the hero's level, plus six.

Advance a skill

A verb is shared: every hero can go, search, or punch. A skill is not. It is one word minted for a single hero as that hero is created, it resolves as its own kind of roll, and it is written in five tiers from the day it exists. Heroes start at tier 1.

Advancing does not trade the skill in for a different one. The next tier renames it, redescribes what the hero can do with it, may resolve as a completely different roll type, and every tier above the first adds ten to the roll. The tiers already passed stay unlocked for good, so join:1 still calls the earlier version up when it suits the moment better.

Here is the part that makes this strange, and it is deliberate. All five tiers are written when the skill is minted, and the game shows a hero only the tier it stands on plus the ones behind it. The next tier exists, word for word, and the game never puts it in front of the people voting. To advance, the crowd writes what it believes the skill is turning into, and the judge scores that guess against the sentence it cannot see. The meter has to reach about 70%.

The command is meditate join ! what you think it becomes, and the text after ! is required. If several voters write different reflections in the same round, they are blended into one guess before the judge reads it. The price is the steepest in the game: 500 experience for every tier the hero currently holds, counted across all of its skills, so each advance makes the next one dearer. Experience is taken only when the guess lands. A miss costs nothing, there is no cooldown, and the crowd can write a better guess and vote it again immediately. Tier 5 is the ceiling; a skill that reaches it is finished growing, and meditating on it is refused.

Return from death

A hero dies when its health reaches zero. It drops out of the location it was standing in, it stops counting as a body in the fight, and it does not heal on its own however long it lies there. Nothing is taken from its pack and its gear stays put: death costs a hero time, experience, and position, never what it carries.

The voting does not stop. What changes is that exactly one command will execute while the hero is down, meditate live ! why it comes back. Everything else, including say and tell, is refused with a note saying as much.

This judge does not score, it decides: yes or no, on the reflection alone. It is handed those words and nothing else, not even how the hero fell, so the reason has to carry itself. The price is experience equal to the hero's level, and it is checked before the judge is ever called. A hero holding less than that cannot return, and no wording changes it. That is how a death turns permanent: a dead hero cannot act, so it can never earn the experience it is short of.

A yes moves the hero to the nearest safe haven in the same world, counted in steps across the grid, and it stands back up with its health, stamina, and mana full. A no spends nothing at all. There is no cooldown and no cap on attempts, so the crowd can sharpen the reason and vote it again on the very next round.

Three forms decide themselves

Rest, level-up, and world-forging never reach a judge. There is nothing to write and nothing to score, so what they do is fixed:

As the story runs, the narrator sets the hero objectives: defeat a particular foe, reach a place, use a specific item on something. The goal is improvised. The payoff is not. Take the matching action, succeed the roll, and the objective pays out one of three permanent rewards:

• An inventory slot. +1 to how many things your hero can carry (you start at 30). Permanent. This is pack space, not power: only your four equipped gear pieces add to rolls.
• A stat-growth rebate. Refunds one point of this level's stat budget (ten per level), letting you raise one extra permanent stat point before you level up.
• A mantra reset (rare). Resets one stat's meditation mantra to its beginner form, so deepening that stat is cheap again.

None of the three wear off, and nothing in the world takes them back.