COUNCIL · A PLAYER'S HANDBOOK
TEACH & SHIP
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BOOK THE FIFTH
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for the keeper — how to raise a Council game from nothing, and run it well
The first four books are the game. This one is the craft of it — how to stand a table up in an evening, and the three small arts that make a keeper of you: writing Seals, giving grace, and wounding without cruelty.
§ 5.1 SESSION ZERO — RAISING A GAME IN ONE SITTING
Council boots in a single evening. Five moves, in order:
1
Rig the world. Agree the fiction — the setting, its peoples, and what Power and Standing are made of here. This is the rigging; invent it freely.
2
Seat the Council. Decide who holds the final say, and set the dial of §4.2 — narrow by default (heads advise), or wide if you want the intrigue of a true vote. Name the standing heads.
3
Lay the first Ledger. Write two or three opening Works — an aim, its hands, its stakes each — so the tide has something to move on the very first session.
4
Teach the Water. Tell the crew, plainly, of Landis: real only in water, true always, dear always. They need not use him yet — only know he is there.
5
Promise hope. Say aloud the one creed (§5.5): the game will reward hope and never lock a door that a hopeful crew cannot come through. Then begin.
§ 5.2 THE FIRST ART — WRITING SEALS
This is the craft the whole game rests on. For any obstacle worth being stuck on, write three clues before play and seal them: the Nudge (a word or image, a turned head), the Bearing (what to do, never why), the Answer (plain as porridge). Set them face-down and visible, in order. Write them before — never under the pressure of a stuck table, when your judgment is worst. A keeper who has written the Answer in advance can afford to be generous with the Nudge, because they know the crew can never be truly lost.
§ 5.3 THE SECOND ART — GIVING GRACE
You are the god of this small creation, and grace is your one free hand (Book the Second). Give it quietly — a detail noticed, a stranger who speaks first, a door found ajar — and do not announce it; let the crew feel merely lucky. Give it toward the stuck and the hopeful: a good-faith struggle invites your grace, though nothing may compel it. Do not tally it, do not let it be demanded, and never withhold it out of a sense of fairness — grace was never fair, and that is the mercy of it. Its one hard law is that a truly aground crew always receives it. Everything else, you give as the story moves you.
§ 5.4 THE THIRD ART — THE SIGNED SQUALL
When a Work's storm breaks, or a stake is wounded, do not narrate it from the clouds. Deliver it as a report on the letterhead of whoever bore it — a courier's field note, a healer's page, a quartermaster's tally. This is the standing house style of Council, and it does quiet work: it keeps consequence concrete, it hands the crew a voice to answer, and it makes even the worst news feel like the world speaking rather than the keeper punishing. In Council, bad news always arrives signed.
§ 5.5 ON HOPE & HARM — THE TONE OF THE GAME
Council is built to reward hope. Bend the world kinder to a crew that believes it can be bettered, and let grace run toward them like water downhill. The game may wound — it may cost dearly, and grieve truly; a table that risks nothing feels nothing. But it breaks only the one who has stopped hoping. So wound the hopeful with things they can yet answer, and reserve true, unanswerable loss for the moment a soul has abandoned hope entirely — for that is the only wound Council means to be final.
Despair is the only door that locks from the inside. Never turn the key for them — but do not hold it shut if they turn it themselves.
§ 5.6 WHAT TO PRINT, WHAT TO KEEP
Two bundles make a Council game ready for a table:
The Crew's Packet
This handbook, and Landis's two handouts — the Grace Book and the Bill of Fare. All a player needs to sit down and play.
The Keeper's Papers
The sealed Seals, the Ledger's hidden stakes, the Divine Work's beats — everything written before play and shown to no one until its watch turns.
Print the first. Keep the second. The whole art of the keeper lives in the gap between the two.
COUNCIL · A PLAYER'S HANDBOOK · BOOK THE FIFTHHERE ENDS THE HANDBOOK · THE HANDOUTS FOLLOW