An expedition is a persistent world object joining one accepted contract, one party, one route into a dungeon region, one accumulating history, and the equipment state captured automatically when the party departs. The run is structured around repeated decisions to continue, divert, rescue, recover, or return.
Party play
Cooperative roles emerge from capabilities and equipment rather than mandatory class slots. Navigation, protection, control, medicine, negotiation, observation, hauling, and magical engineering can overlap. Encounter design should reward communication and recovery without making a fixed party composition the price of admission.
Encounters
Combat is one form of contested delving alongside traversal, hazards, ecological negotiation, rescue, logistics, and discovery. An encounter states its visible affordances, uncertain stakes, opposition, and possible exits. The dungeon owns creatures, routes, traps, and adaptive pressure; a client cannot declare an outcome by describing it.
Exact combat timing, damage mathematics, movement controls, and equipment actions remain prototype decisions. Rune Casting owns the committed spell-construction controls. Their shared acceptance test is behavioral: positioning and cooperation matter; retreat remains possible; equipment interacts with the environment; and the result can be represented as persistent injuries, losses, discoveries, resource changes, and dungeon memory.
Expedition record
The canonical record retains participants, contract, route, the exact equipped and carried items at departure, their condition, modifications, custody and provenance, subsequent item changes, encountered regions, significant actions, observations, resources taken or lost, injuries, rescues, retreat point, and outcome receipts. This evidence remains inspectable for history and diagnosis but is not another preparation screen.