Onboarding introduces one world through a particular practice. A new player chooses a DELVE or HOLD entry without choosing a separate history, server, or lesser mode. The player joins a viable Hold inside the Greathold, may later change the workshop’s civic home, and can establish workshop sites in other Holds without creating another identity or seal.
First-session sequence
- Establish the Greathold as a lived place and show one immediate, local need.
- Let the player perform the chosen role’s physical verb: prepare and enter an expedition, or work and commit a workshop process.
- Show the other role as a visible dependency through offered gear, repair or refit service, material, contract, report, or returning consequence.
- Reveal persistence by letting the first action alter a later state rather than resetting after the tutorial.
- Introduce civic and external-world pressure only after the player can identify who owns the local decision.
Tutorial protection may simplify risk and presentation, but it cannot create a private tutorial economy or noncanonical outcome. Any authored starter state enters through the same Delvehold authority as later play.
Settlement recommendations favour Holds with healthy institutions, useful collaborators, or room for active community growth. Friends and established relationships remain visible choices. Recommendations never force relocation, merge quiet Holds, or present a Vault as an infrastructure server.
Content authority
- Authored anchors own canon: Greathold history and institutions, peoples, dungeon principles, named places, core revelations, crisis premises, and the allowed ontology supplied to Ghostlight.
- Delvehold simulation owns local occurrences and consequences: workshops, expeditions, dungeon responses, civic action, contracts, material state, and admitted foreign effects.
- Ghostlight simulation owns external actors’ private state, choices, relationships, pressures, events, and attributed news within the authored ontology.
- Clients and narrative presentation select viewpoint, pacing, wording, staging, and disclosure from canonical facts and scoped knowledge. They cannot invent a committed event, private belief, item, route, or consequence.
Generated elaboration may supply names, descriptions, dialogue, rumours, and local texture when its provenance and knowledge scope are retained. It cannot contradict an authored anchor or silently promote a rumour, prediction, or model suggestion into world truth. New durable canon requires admission by the content authority that owns the affected subject.
Onboarding is successful when a player can state what they do, why the other mode matters, what persisted, and which visible pressure came from beyond the Greathold without being taught that every signal is omniscient truth.