Players exist in the world at one of two levels: as delvers or as independent workshop managers. They do not receive a sovereign strategy-game view of civilization. Events become legible through the verbs available to those roles.
A HOLD player can store, craft, automate, commission, deliberate, vote, and publish contracts. A DELVE player can prepare, accept, travel, investigate, extract, retreat, and return. Persistent-world events must reach players by changing those actions, their risks, or their consequences.
Economic transmission
Geopolitical change propagates through ordinary work before it resolves into a named historical event. If a civilization stops importing dwarven machinery as the international crisis approaches, workshop managers first encounter a price shock. Lost export demand changes margins and inventories. Buyers, suppliers, active workshops, and institutions then redirect capacity toward other markets, substitutes, stockpiles, transport, weapons, and strategic dungeon materials.
The same disturbance reaches DELVE as altered contract volume, equipment shortages, replacement costs, route closures, hazard pay, requisitions, and growing demand for particular extractions. Both player workshops and world institutions transmit that demand. One world event therefore crosses the game through a shared chain:
diplomatic rupture → trade shock → workshop response → contract market → delver experience
Ghostlight owns the foreign decision and external event. Delvehold owns the resulting quantitative trade, capacity, contract, and expedition consequences after admitting the typed response. The game client invents no parallel explanation, and neither simulation rewrites the other’s decision.
Policy reaches the shelves
Institutional policy propagates through the same material chain:
ratified policy → institutional plan → orders, services, reserves, and contracts → material execution → local supply, demand, shortages, and prices
Every institutional action or failure names its institution and governing policy version. Unmet mandates, rationing, cancelled services or contracts, depleted reserves, failed imports, insolvency, aid, recapitalization, policy reversal, and restored throughput become visible through notices and through the underlying inventories, queues, routes, and receipts.
Policy may impose an administered purchase or sale price, tax, subsidy, or ration. Those terms affect transactions but cannot overwrite the observed evidence of scarcity. A cheap public price attached to an empty shelf is not proof that the good remains cheap or available.
The news feed
An in-universe news feed gives players enough context that economic changes do not arrive as arbitrary numbers. It carries trade circulars, guild notices, expedition dispatches, foreign broadsheets, official statements, rumours, and corrections.
The feed is not an omniscient event log. Sources may be delayed, partisan, mistaken, euphemistic, or selectively truthful. Reporting establishes what people claim is happening; prices, inventories, orders, and contracts reveal what the world believes strongly enough to act upon.
A major crisis should usually become visible in stages:
- reports of inspections, missing caravans, or unusual procurement;
- diplomatic statements and officially temporary restrictions;
- cancelled orders and abrupt price movement;
- demand shifting toward stockpiling, transport, weapons, and strategic materials;
- delving contracts becoming more urgent and militarized;
- open mobilization, or increasingly strained claims that mobilization is not occurring.
News items should link to the affected goods, workshops, regions, and contracts wherever possible. Reading becomes part of economic and expedition play rather than a lore intermission.
The feed also carries assembly notices, proposals, public testimony, audits, and results from local-first civic play. It gives workshop managers a direct route into fantasy politics rather than asking them to infer every public conflict from commodity movement.
Markets stay in the background
Prices and inventories remain causal world signals, not the foreground identity of HOLD. They are observed per Hold from local stock, demand, production, institutions, and route-mediated imports rather than published as one Greathold price. The client does not expect players to trade abstract positions, read financial charts, or optimize a fantasy stock market.
A stockpile can still become valuable, impossible to replace, obsolete after a standards change, attractive to requisition, or expensive to keep while an expected crisis fails to arrive. Hoarding therefore has speculative consequences without being presented as a required speculation minigame.
Players who enjoy reading markets may act on those signals. Most players can treat them as material circumstances surrounding the more direct pleasures of making, sharing, contracting, and governing.
Information invariant
News provides interpretation; the economy provides evidence. Neither is complete alone.
Players should receive warning signals before major consequences, but those signals should preserve uncertainty. A price shock might indicate war, sanctions, a failed route, political theatre, ecological disruption, or an attempt to corner a market. Players create social knowledge by comparing reports with prices, contracts, expedition testimony, and conditions in their Hold or among known partners.
Dormant workshops vanish from live Hold discovery, market listings, ordinary news routing, and forecasts in every Hold where they maintain sites. Direct collaborators retain their identity-level shared history and the provenance of the sites through which they dealt; both become available again when the workshop identity reactivates.
The living world is therefore not delivered as exposition. It is inferred through work, then argued about between players.