The first playable world contains one Vault and its Hold, one active workshop site, one seeded institution operating under a founding distribution policy, one dungeon core, one contract type, one expedition party, one extracted material, and one persistent expedition history.
HOLD
The player begins with one mage doing useful work manually:
- scry a viable dungeon entrance;
- prepare and offer supplies;
- publish a delving contract;
- process returned material;
- encode a repeated manual action into a rune;
- compose runes into spell-engine automation.
Automation solves real inconveniences. It changes the mage from practitioner to systems engineer without making the original practice irrelevant.
DELVE
Delvers accept a funded contract, choose equipped gear and carried inventory, enter a generated dungeon, encounter its current ecological response, and decide how much promised extraction is worth attempting. Their success, retreat, discoveries, injuries, and losses become persistent world events.
The return stroke
A factory decision must alter a later expedition. The expedition’s lived outcome must return through CultMesh and materially alter factory play. Both paths use typed intents, receipts, and world-owned state rather than client-owned synchronization.