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.

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.

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.

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

When a scene raises a need the table cannot simply declare true, the world answers in one of two ways, and only two. An answer is either seized — bought with something of your own — or it is given, freely, by the hand that made this world. The first is price. The second is grace.

The keeper is the god of this small creation — not a tyrant, but a maker, who set its laws and largely lets them run. Grace is the maker's one free hand: the single thing in the game not bound by the world's own rules. An answer given as grace is unearned and unpriced.

Grace cannot be bought, banked, or demanded. A good-faith struggle invites it, and hope draws it near — but nothing compels it. It may fall on the crew who tried hardest; it may fall, just as well, on the one who tried least and needed it most. It falls where it will.

Grace is not counted. There is no pool, no token, no tally at the table's edge. It has exactly one law that binds it: mercy. If a crew is truly aground, grace comes, because the maker will not let the story drown.

And grace comes quietly. It is a nudge slid across the table, unremarked. The keeper need not announce it, and mostly should not. The crew will feel they were lucky. Let them.

Grace is not the keeper being kind against the rules. It is the one rule that kindness was allowed to keep.

Where grace is given, price is taken — by you, from you. When you must know a thing now and are willing to bleed for it, you may seize the answer and pay in the only coin the game accepts: something of your own self.

The dearest altar of price is the Water — Landis, real only in water, who trades true answers for pieces of the one who asks. But mark this well: the Water is a rare road, not a daily one. When you do go down to the water, the price climbs with each answer of a single visit:

Price and grace do not invent their answers on the spot. Behind any obstacle worth being stuck on lie three clues, set face-down on the table, in order.

They open in order, one at a time. Price opens the next by paying for it. Grace opens the next by giving it — most often the Nudge, for nothing.

A crew that means to pay has more than one road to the next seal — the Water, being dearest, is the one they should walk least:

Sometimes a crew closes out a whole labour — a Work, a mission, an obstacle worth being stuck on — with its Seals never broken: no price paid, no grace needed. Each Seal left closed is banked as Slack: a due at the Water. The next time the crew comes to Landis, that much of his usual price is simply waived — one price forgiven for every Seal they earned — and he throws in something past the ordinary menu besides, a thing he judges cool enough for the doing, never named in advance. Slack is spent only there, only with him, and does not linger forever unspent.

Solve it yourself, and the madman remembers you the next time you're wet.

A Work is any labour too large for a single scene — a bomb built, a treaty struck, a ruin excavated, a wound healed. It is written on a card the whole table can see, and it carries three lines and no more:

Time in Council comes in like a tide, on its own, needing no one's permission. Every session, every open Work advances one watch — whether the crew touched it or not. Spend a whole scene labouring at a Work, and it takes one watch more. The counts are public.

A Work spends more than time; it spends the crew's finite holdings, pledged under three headings:

A stake cannot be pledged twice — and to wound a pledged stake is to stall everything pledged to it. This is how a single blow lands everywhere.

Every Great Work is declared with one sealed complication — its squall — set face-down beside the card. It breaks at the halfway watch, or sooner if the weave calls for it.

Once per session, a crew may drive a single Work one extra watch by paying one of two coins:

Note the mark of haste: a forced Work always delivers its squall.

A finished Work stops being a card and becomes a plain fact of the world. Between sessions the crew may send Work Orders — written instructions to the hands who do the labour — and the keeper answers in those hands' own voices next the table sits.

Above the Great Work stands one tier more, reserved for labours that span a whole telling. A Divine Work is not a card the crew declares; it is a weather the keeper sets moving beneath everything:

A Divine Work ends not on a watch but on a turning. Even here the one law holds: mercy.

A Council is a body of shared command with a single seat that holds the final say. Its virtue is not efficiency — it is the record. Every vote and every dissent is entered and remembered; a voice overruled is not silenced but minuted.

A king may be wrong in private. A chair may only be wrong in front of the table.

Council does not decree who holds a seat; the table sets that dial when it seats its own Council:

Council seats a narrow table by default, and widens only when a table decides the intrigue of a true vote is worth the pace it costs.

A deputy may hold a Work at its present watch, but may not advance it. To move a Work forward wants a Work Order or a Directive from the seat of command.

An emergency that names a head pulls them off their Work automatically. The card freezes until released, or a deputy steps in to hold it.

Only the seat of final say may keep a pulled head at their task regardless, by issuing a Directive — a truth committed aloud, on the record.

When a head is truly beyond word, the need is met anyway, by whoever stands present, without that head's insight — it shows as something concrete and specific, never a clean sealed squall.

Council boots in a single evening. Five moves, in order:

For any obstacle worth being stuck on, write three clues before play and seal them: the Nudge, the Bearing, the Answer. Write them before — never under the pressure of a stuck table, when your judgment is worst.

Give it quietly. Give it toward the stuck and the hopeful. Do not tally it, do not let it be demanded. Its one hard law is that a truly aground crew always receives it.

Deliver bad news as a report on the letterhead of whoever bore it. In Council, bad news always arrives signed.

Council is built to reward hope. The game may wound — it may cost dearly, and grieve truly. But it breaks only the one who has stopped hoping.

Despair is the only door that locks from the inside.

Two bundles make a Council game ready for a table:

Print the first. Keep the second.