Game Master's Guide

• Global Rules: combat, resources, progression, economy, travel, challenges, persistence.
• Global catalogs: heroes, abilities, spells, consumables, training, rank and attire.
• Adventure-Specific Content: Forsaken Woods creatures, encounters, routes, rewards, challenge content, narrative gates and Watchtower design.
• Authoring and verification: templates, asset contracts, compatibility and maintenance.

Initiative is a fixed integer, descending across heroes and enemies; no initiative roll occurs. Equal scores compare equal in the current list sort: there is no authored hero-first tie rule. Dead actors are skipped. A round advances when the order wraps. One normal action completes the actor's turn; multiattack enemies perform separate strikes before the turn completes. Frozen skips consume the whole turn.

Attack: roll uniform integer 1–20. Total = natural roll + actor Attack + action accuracy + target Exposed - actor AccuracyPenalty - actor FumbleAttack - actor Entangled. Exposed and FumbleAttack are consumed by this attempt, even if it misses. Natural 1 fumbles, natural 20 hits critically; otherwise total ≥ target Armor hits. Critical damage maximizes the damage die, without multiplying it or the bonus. Ordinary damage is a uniform roll of the damage die + the damage bonus + the action’s extra damage, then elemental adjustment. Spells with damage effects apply automatically, rolling their damage independently for every living target. Visual dice randomness never consumes combat RNG.

Effective Armor = base AC + personal protection + the greater of Guard or Ward − the critical-miss armor penalty − Off Balance. Personal protection is +5 while Vanished; otherwise +3 while Defending; otherwise 0. Defend expires at the actor's next turn beginning. Vanish and personal Defend do not stack. Shield Wall and ordinary armor buffs use the larger amount. Ordinary Guard/AccuracyPenalty duration decrements at each recipient turn beginning; duration 2 expires as the second upcoming turn begins. Entangled/OffBalance expire at the end of the affected actor's next completed turn.

Enemy AI normally chooses a uniform random living hero for each strike. Multiattack selects independently each time. Support healing precedes ordinary attacks. A configured timed action precedes support, after the Frozen check. Veyr's separate established Dreadbell behavior is described below. No generic immunity, taunt, threat table, player dodge roll or elemental-status mapping is inferred.

Elements: Fire, Frost, Void, Holy, Wind, Earth. Empty element is physical. Let A be pre-element damage: no element or both/neither weakness and resistance gives max(0,A); weakness alone gives max(1, floor((3A+1)/2)); resistance alone gives max(1, floor(A/2)). These are damage rules, not changes to hit chance. Damage is clamped by remaining HP when subtracting, while feedback reports the computed amount.

Freeze is a single active-or-inactive condition: at the next applicable turn it clears, logs the skip, emits THAWED, and completes the turn without an action or resource expenditure. Reapplication refreshes, never queues skips. Poison ticks before the Freeze check and can kill first. Shield Wall counts a frozen enemy's completed skip. Freeze is combat-owned and saved in the combat snapshot; poison also copies to persistent hero state between battles.

Elemental Freeze mitigation is explicitly opt-in per effect: resistanceMitigatesFreeze plus resistedFreezeChance. An independent integer roll 0–99 is compared with the appropriate chance. Resistance is detected from the actual target's Resistances and effect.element. Weakness does not raise status odds or cancel this mitigation. FROST RESIST is emitted only when the roll would have frozen at the base chance but not at the reduced chance; a roll outside both chances emits RESIST. Success emits FROZEN. There is no additional resistance roll.

Scope decision: Grave Chill is 33% normally and 10% with Frost resistance. Blizzard stays at 40% on a surviving target, irrespective of Frost resistance. Applying an invented global reduction to Blizzard would materially change established spider/boss control balance; no alternate Blizzard chance was approved. Both use the same Freeze resolver, and an explicitly authored resisted chance can be added later. Winter Circle has no Freeze rider. Gale and Stone Mantle do not receive invented resistance interactions.

Poison is nonstacking; only a positive-damage hit on a surviving unpoisoned target rolls the configured chance. Poison deals its amount at each combat turn beginning and may be lethal. Healing/revive cures it, including a heal on a living full-HP poisoned target. It does not tick during ordinary walking. On-hit Entangled/OffBalance similarly require a surviving target and positive damage, use their own chance, and keep the maximum existing magnitude. They last through the next completed personal turn.

Shield Wall records every living enemy's next completed turn, even enemies that acted earlier in the casting round. Dead enemies stop counting. Refresh replaces that pending set; base AC is untouched. It grants IsDefended in addition to AC. Dreadbell halves for IsDefended; ordinary automatic spell damage does not.

Eligible entries are weighted. STUMBLE is excluded when the actor has no resource, and weights are renormalized. The five penalty entries each have weight 1; harmless miss weight 3. With resource, each penalty is 1/8 and harmless miss 3/8, conditional on natural 1. Without resource, four penalties are each 1/7 and harmless miss 3/7.

Armor penalty ends at the next turn beginning. Attack penalty is consumed on the next attack, with a two-start countdown at creation to allow the next personal turn. Exposed adds +2 to the next incoming attack or expires at the next turn beginning. Self-injury is 5% of maximum HP, rounded down, with a minimum of 1 damage and a maximum of current HP minus 1; it cannot kill. Resource loss is at most the available amount.

For level L, attack training A, health training H, resource training R, weapon rank W and armor rank D:

• Maximum HP = base HP + 3 × (L − 1) + 3 × H.
• Attack = base Attack + (L − 1) + A.
• Base AC = baseAC + equipped legacy armor item bonus + D × the armor bonus per rank.
• Damage = base damage die + base bonus + equipped legacy weapon item bonus + W × the weapon bonus per rank.
• Maximum resource: if base mana is 0, start with 2 stamina; otherwise take the greater of 2 and base mana. Add resource training R.
• Initiative and damage die do not rise with level or training. Spell dice/bonuses do not inherit weapon rank.

Level cap 12. Guild level-up costs 60×current level XP, subtracts it, raises level, adds 3 current HP only when alive. Ordinary GrantReward has an intentional documented implementation distinction: a level-1 survivor at 60 XP or more auto-promotes to level 2 without XP subtraction. No further automatic level-up occurs. Wish XP is added directly and does not invoke that auto-promotion. No established expected Watchtower equipment/level budget exists; avoid pretending all Companies arrive with a fixed loadout.

Upgrade cost at current rank r is base cost + cost step × r²; cannot buy at cap. Stat improvements are +1 Attack, +3 MaxHP/current living HP, or +1 resource capacity/current resource. Weapon and armor ranks add their configured bonus per rank. Cost sequences below list purchases from rank zero.

Company gold and each surviving active hero's XP gain equal the base reward multiplied by the tier’s reward multiplier, rounded up, not divided among survivors. Dead heroes and reserves gain none. Routine authored treasure provisions are 0 or 1, unscaled. Challenge provisions/items obey caps. Noncombat chests roll once at a 1-in-6 chance (the chest bonus denominator is 6); a success chooses uniformly from all four shop consumables (each unconditional probability 1/24). A full selected stack converts to 15 × the tier’s reward multiplier in gold, rounded up; no reroll. Combat and encounter-chest rewards do not use this bonus. Committed resolution/receipts and ledger guards prevent duplicate payouts on redraw, reload or repeated commands.

New Company: 40 gold, 3 provisions, 4 shared Healing Potions; initial levels 1, XP 0, training/gear ranks 0, no elemental attunements/resistances. Ordinary rests refill living active HP/resources and cure poison free. Camps are once per site per run; passing a camp retains later eligibility. No rest revives or replenishes the shared pouch. Legacy per-character draught state remains compatibility data.

Temple resurrection costs 30 at every current tier, restores full HP and cures poison, but does not refill resources. Recall the Fallen gives d6+3 HP capped at maximum. Emergency mercy occurs only when no unlocked living roster member remains: first active member gets 1 HP and poison clears free. Living reserves suppress mercy.

Flee requires a valid living hero action and one provision; it costs 5% of current gold, rounded down, retains wounds, leaves combat unresolved and does not additionally charge voluntary travel. Defeat costs 10% of current gold, rounded down, retains death and sends the party to the Temple. Voluntary town travel consumes one provision if available. Otherwise, it costs 10% of current gold, rounded up, capped at 50 gold and the gold available; zero gold never traps a Company.

Wishing Well: returning to town after a battle since the last town visit gives a 1-in-400 chance if no wish is currently available. The opportunity persists until used. Costs 1 gold and consumes availability: choose +5000 gold or +1000 XP to each living active hero. These fixed grants are not tier-scaled.

Map inspection and travel eligibility are separate. Opening the map in combat pauses normal combat advancement in the view and never grants travel. Entrance/resolved-exit gates and mandatory points still apply. Eligible unlocked revisits may be non-adjacent; arrival starts at position 0, while closing preview or restoring a save keeps exact travel. Branch exclusions persist throughout the run. Resolved points cannot replay rewards; optional skipped points may be revisited.

Dialogue pages are authored, cached and paged. Ordinary repeat conversations open the last page. repeatFromStart restarts a question hub; page IDs, choices and next-page links supply branches. A clue is only granted by its authored conversation choice. Talking to an optional NPC does not resolve the location exit.

Challenge success is d20 + base modifier + each matching modifier ≥ DC. No critical 1/20. Every listed requirement must be met; no listed requirements means the approach is available. Living active hero, owned artifact, minimum consumable/gold/provisions, resolved node and run flag are supported conditions. Six skills are labels, without independent character skill stats: Might, Finesse, Wits, Presence, Survival, Arcana. Outcomes can grant scaled gold/XP, capped provisions/items, nonlethal party damage, or set a run flag. Success and failure both persist one receipt and resolve; Leave does neither. Required challenges must keep an unconditional approach.

Campaign owns roster, currency, resources, training, attire, inventory, artifacts, reputation, records. Adventure owns tier, highest completion, routes, positions, resolved points, camps and challenge receipts. Next difficulty/replay resets the run, retains Company and other adventure records, restores living active members and keeps dead members dead. New campaign resets all; cosmetic carryover is currently off. Adventure 2 is a nonplayable preview; storage support does not imply a second playable pack.

Save version remains 1. Campaign GUID directories isolate resume autosave, quick and three manual slots. Autosave supports interruption; explicit save/load establishes the discard checkpoint. Leave Without Saving restores it to resume without overwriting independent slots. Atomic writes/backups, restore rollback and future-version refusal remain required. Combat saves keep HP/resources/status, pending action, turn, round and skillReady, but do not preserve RNG state; a reload preserves resolved outcomes, not an identical future random stream. Legacy distinct-count compositions preserve actor ordering; never reorder IDs or content arrays casually.

Base level-1 values, before gear/training. First six are initial roster; Xov is recruited. Stable IDs are technical contracts, not player names.

Xov uses she/her; Vanish costs 1 stamina and creates a two-count window, whose application turn consumes the first count. +5 AC lasts through her next personal turn; Backstab costs no additional stamina, guarantees a hit even on natural 1, and maximizes the die on natural 15–20. Any other completed next action, including a frozen skip, ends it. Death clears it. Equipping an artifact replaces this personal action.

ID / spell	Role	Learn gold	Mana	Exact effect
blizzard / Blizzard	Mage	20	1	One enemy takes d4+1 Frost damage; 40% chance to Freeze.
ember / Ember	Mage	20	1	One enemy takes d8+3 Fire damage. Stored duration: 2 (an effect-data value, not repeated damage).
frost / Winter Circle	Mage	30	2	All living enemies take d6+2 Frost damage each. Stored duration: 2 (not repeated damage).
void / Void Lance	Mage	35	2	One enemy takes d10+4 Void damage. Stored duration: 2 (not repeated damage).
wind / Gale	Mage	25	1	All enemies: −3 Attack, Wind effect, duration 2. Expires as each recipient’s second upcoming turn begins.
earth / Stone Mantle	Mage	25	1	Party: +3 AC, Earth effect, duration 2. Expires as each recipient’s second upcoming turn begins.
focus / Quiet Focus	Mage	20	0	Restore 1 mana to the caster. Stored duration: 2 (not repeated restoration).
mend / Mending	Cleric	0	1	Heal one living ally for d8+4 HP, up to maximum HP. Holy effect. Stored duration: 2 (not repeated healing).
dawn / Dawn Chorus	Cleric	30	2	Heal each living party member for d6+3 HP, up to maximum HP. Holy effect. Stored duration: 2 (not repeated healing).
revive / Recall the Fallen	Cleric	45	2	Revive one fallen ally with d6+3 HP, up to maximum HP. Holy effect. Stored duration: 2 (not repeated revival).
smite / Radiant Word	Cleric	25	1	One enemy takes d8+3 Holy damage. Stored duration: 2 (not repeated damage).

Mage personal action opens the learned spellbook. Starting spell revision replaced Mystere's old free Ember with Blizzard once, without removing other learned spells. Markovia starts with Mending; Spargle starts with Ember. Healing and resource effects skip ineligible/full targets (full HP poison remains healable). Rejected actions do not consume mana/items.

Attunement 60 gold, one weapon element; armor resistance 45 per element, cap two distinct elements. Clear weapon attunement or all armor wards free without refund. No general inventory/equipment loot framework exists. The retained item API/data also defines Honed weapon (25g, +1 damage) and Reinforced armor (25g, +1 AC); these bonuses remain additive for compatible older saves. Current Blacksmith presentation centers on rank upgrades.

The silverSeal compatibility ID names the Dreadbell artifact; do not rename it to match display copy. There is one transferable owned artifact, equippable through the Guild. Its once-per-fight untyped d6+2 toll does not inherit weapon attunement, costs no stamina and replaces the wearer’s personal action.

field-pace-1 is Field Pace: +20% exploration traversal. Benefits accumulate by qualifying rank; rank itself is derived, not saved independently. Completion reputation is once per successful run, separate from chest/combat XP; later rank reward slots are intentionally empty.

Base outfit is implicitly owned and first, not a purchased catalog entry. Buying does not equip. Stats are invariant under outfit changes. Xov's former cloak is base; Hydra is her sole purchasable alternate.

Stable adventure ID: forsaken-woods. Ten authored locations, not a hard-coded capacity rule. Prologue for newly created campaigns only: six starting members face Veyr in a scripted unavoidable Dreadbell defeat, bypassing defenses with zero ordinary reward/cost progression. Continue Campaign migrates old prologue flags to complete; an interrupted new prologue can retry.

Enemy HP = ceil(baseHP×tier.hp), AC = baseAC+tier.defense, Attack = baseAttack+tier.attack, damage die unchanged, damage bonus = baseBonus+tier.damage, initiative unchanged. Gold/XP = ceil(base×tier.rewards). Ability flat dice/bonuses and status chances are not scaled by these ordinary-attack fields. Challenge DCs and provisions do not scale.

Basic → Advanced → Expert → Master → Master Plus. Only Master Plus repeats at fixed values; no exponential growth across repeats. Advances are on the adventure introduction, after completion in town. Advanced glows red, Expert blue, and Master/Master Plus green.

Wormface has 3 mana. Each healing action costs 1 mana and restores 3 HP, up to the target’s missing HP, curing poison. It first chooses the eligible other living ally with the lowest percentage of HP remaining: that ally must have at least 2 HP missing and be strictly below 80% HP. Only if no ally qualifies does Wormface consider healing itself, and only when strictly below 50% HP. If no heal is available, it makes a normal attack.

Veyr begins with all six resistances. On its first eligible action from round 2 onward, Dreadbell replaces its normal action, once per fight: independent d6+2 Void to every living hero. Defending/Shield Wall first halves with floor/minimum 1, then Void resistance applies separately. Unlike the Watchtower timed action, a frozen round-2 Veyr can toll later. Veyr's normal d8+3 weapon hit is Void and scales with ordinary enemy damage.

Element coverage: ordinary nonphysical enemy attacks are concentrated in Void (Warden/Veyr); Grave Chill adds Frost status pressure, without damage. Fire is useful against woodland creatures; Holy/Earth counter Sentinels. No current enemy weak to Wind, and no current enemy uses an ordinary Earth/Holy/Wind attack. This is a current content observation, not a mandate to add new elemental mappings.

Rewards are base gold and XP to each surviving active hero, before tier scaling. Encounter identity remains stable.

Node indices are compatibility positions. These are location-exit/event rewards, separate from the encounter table; absent fields mean zero. Do not double-award both for a combat node.

The Divided Trail chooses Briar Crossing (bootprints) or Charcoal Burner (blue markers), excluding the other for the whole expedition. Both converge at Broken Cart, then Mossy Glade → Dawn Stones → Fallen Bridge → Watchtower → Sealed Road. Mossy Glade's mandatory Wormface fight precedes the camp. Watchtower is the penultimate fight, not the final boss.

Old Road cache gives 18 gold; Broken Cart exit chest 27 gold/5 XP; Fallen Bridge river-cache 12 gold/1 provision. These noncombat chests also roll the common bonus. Charcoal Burner wayside is an optional giant-spider encounter chest, Open confirmation then only spiderChest combat rewards (20 gold/25 XP); no ordinary chest bonus.

Dawn Stones: solution index 2, Touch the sun. Touch the leaf deals 1 nonlethal damage to each living hero (minimum 1 HP). Touch the moon removes 1 stamina from living stamina users (minimum 0); mana unaffected. Wrong answers remain retryable. Sun resolves for 25 XP. The nearby dawn carving and Charcoal Burner clue connect this puzzle to the old watch-road.

Charcoal Burner NPC is an optional repeat-from-start question hub, separate from its signpost exit. Dialogue choice about the old stones grants the clue; merely opening the conversation does not resolve the node or grant travel. Xov appears as a mandatory automatic dialogue at Sealed Road 0.6 only on Basic; a separate post-Veyr conversation remains available. Completing the adventure recruits Xov without replacing an active slot. The sealed objective grants 30 gold/20 XP, completion reputation and the artifact reward; boss rewards are a separate checkpoint.

Broken Wagon (broken-wagon) is optional at Broken Cart 0.60, retains its resolved prop, and has no base modifiers beyond zero. It accepts one success/failure per run.

Intent: meaningful attrition with low routine wipe risk for a reasonably prepared Company; a readiness check before Veyr rather than another boss. The player should consider returning to Oddwater after victory. Dreadbell awakened the Warden and the runic automata. Their visual/lore relationship links Dawn Stones → Watchtower defenses → Sealed Road without explaining the forgotten order in a tutorial.

The opening remains: “Dreadbell has woken the Hollow Warden. Veyr passed beneath its arch with the Silver Seal; The Company must find a less diplomatic way through.”

Dawn Sentinel: 10 HP, AC 12, +2 attack, d4+1 physical damage, initiative 20, visual scale 0.75. Weak Holy/Earth; resists Void. Two are present with the Warden. Initiative 20 deliberately exceeds all current hero bases (Xov 19, Vestin 18; no progression increases initiative). HP is only one above Briar Sneak; AC is one higher; attack/damage are identical. Two early low-damage actors create pressure without individually durable mini-bosses. No extra Sentinel ability, poison or multiattack. Combined Basic enemy HP becomes 46 versus old 35; the Warden remains 26/13/+4/d6+2/16 with Holy weakness/Void resistance and Void ordinary attack. Reward stays 45 gold/40 XP. These are conservative starting values, not a guarantee of attrition or a measured player wipe rate.

Grave Chill: Warden timedAction, exact round 3, once per combat using existing saved SkillReady. Replaces the entire action; no mana cost or direct damage. Each living hero independently rolls Freeze at 33%, or 10% with Frost resistance. Already Frozen targets refresh one skip. Dead heroes are excluded. Defeat before the action prevents it. If the Warden itself loses its round 3 action to Freeze, the exact-round window is missed; it does not cast late. Status resolution is in VintageEncounter, never the renderer.

The extension is intentionally one configured timed Freeze action per enemy (name, round, effect), not a general multi-skill scheduler. The effect's kind is freeze and target party. Validation rejects invalid rounds, unsupported target/kind, direct damage values, unknown elements, and resisted probabilities greater than base. A different enemy can declare the same timing/status contract without a location/encounter-ID branch.

Feedback uses the existing combat Feedback event and Frost cue. For a resistant hero: rolls 0–9 FROZEN; 10–32 FROST RESIST; 33–99 RESIST. For an ordinary hero: 0–32 FROZEN, 33–99 RESIST. Distinct per-target outcomes share the normal action presentation.

Frost resistance is available at the Blacksmith for 45 gold per hero, within the two-resistance cap. Full-party Frost preparation costs 180 gold, which is not assumed at this stage. Killing the Warden before its action, freezing its round 3 action, and equipping resistance are supported counterplay. Holy attacks can exploit the Warden and Sentinels; Earth specifically exploits Sentinels. The preceding camp can restore living resources but may already be spent; nearby bridge supplies support a return-to-town decision.

Compatibility: final retains legacyEnemies [warden,goblin], distinguishable from the new three-actor composition. Existing combat snapshots restore their old actor layout and exact turn/pending/status. The Warden definition now supplies Grave Chill even in a restored older two-enemy fight if the round 3 window is still ahead; a restored round > 3 does not retroactively cast. New fights use three actors. No save-version bump or ID reorder; dawnSentinel and portrait index 15 append. Existing Briar Sneak remains globally available.

Use Creature, Combat Encounter, Challenge, and Adventure templates. Record design intent separately from implementation fields. The Watchtower filled examples validate that stats, counterplay, timing, effects, art, persistence and tests all have a home.

Supplied artwork is installed at Assets/Resources/JournalArt/Creatures/DawnSentinel.png (figure index 15, visualScale 0.75) and Assets/Resources/JournalArt/UI/Spells/GraveChill.png. The former filename, DawnSentinnel, was renamed with its .meta GUID preserved; neither PNG was resampled or repainted. GraveChill is the reusable living Frozen marker on both sides, separate from the death marker, and clears on thaw/death including after reload. Preserve source quality and metadata. Combat feedback is bounded to each formation slot, wraps and shrinks to fit; FROST RESIST uses two lines, including at narrow aspect ratios.

Rules/data source map: VintageEncounter, JournalData, combat transitions, progression, ForsakenWoods, Attire, and current subsystem index. Values omitted by JSON use C# defaults; do not invent a missing value. Retained sample/prototype combat is not the shipped journal roster/balance.

Run the full pure suite and Unity compilation; WatchtowerChecks exhaustively verifies probability boundaries with a session-only status-roll hook, plus timing, death, Frozen skips, one-shot save restore, resistance plumbing, scaling and legacy composition. Unity JsonUtility/live rendering must additionally verify omitted-field defaults, marker lifecycle and feedback at 4:3,16:9,21:9,32:9. Record actual evidence in Build 7; automated rules or simulated input never establish physical-device acceptance.

Balance review should compare untrained and moderately trained Basic parties, alternative heroes, resistance/no resistance, focus-fire/control choices, post-Watchtower resources and higher-tier scaling. Do not change 33%/10% or round 3 silently to make the ability fire more often. Physical touch/controller readability and encounter pacing remain playtest acceptance work.