Council is for tables who left the dice behind — and found they had left something else behind with them.

When a crew stops rolling and starts telling, the story runs warmer and the arithmetic goes quiet — and then, one night, a locked door appears that no one at the table happens to be clever enough to open. Under dice, a character rolled to know things their player did not. Take the dice away and that quiet gift goes with them: now a player can learn only what they personally thought to ask, and the keeper is left dangling hints, praying someone guesses the shape of the answer.

Council exists to hand that gift back without handing the dice back. It is a game of insight, consequence, and shared command that runs entirely on words. One question steers every rule in this handbook: how does a soul come to know a thing without guessing the exact right way to ask? All that follows is an answer.

You will not roll to see if you succeed. You will decide what you are willing to pay to find out. — the first principle

Play turns through three stations. A Scene raises a need the table cannot simply declare true. The world answers by one of two roads — the Water (buy insight now, at a price) or the Tide (commit the work, let time carry it) — and whatever comes back walks into the next Scene, changed. That is the entire machine. All else is rigging hung upon it.

Three stations. Two roads. One turning tide. If a rule does not serve the turn, it does not belong aboard.

The fixed vocabulary of the game — the timbers of the hull. These words mean the same at every Council table; a keeper may re-rig the world above, but not rename the timbers below.

{{ p.num }}

{{ p.name }}

{{ p.line }}

Council is a keel, not a world. A table brings its own fiction — a drowned empire, a generation ship, a haunted county — and rigs it to the timbers below. But one timber is not the table's to swap. Landis is fixed. The madman on the sea, real only in water, who sells true answers at a price, stands in every Council game that has been or will be run. He is not a figure in your setting; he is the keel itself, and the crew reach him from inside whatever world they inhabit by finding water and asking with grace.

Change everything you like. Leave me the water. — L.F.