Your margin: what kind of thing could Landis give when Slack is due? Slack already waives price; the ‘something extra’ should be a thing money/price can’t buy — strange, true, and never named in advance. A keeper’s stock to draw from:

• A name not yet earned — the true name of a person, ship, or thing the crew hasn’t met.
• A glimpse down the tide — one honest image of a Work’s next squall before it breaks.
• A ward — a one-time ‘this once, the water lies for you’: a single future price refunded.
• A door — the location of still water somewhere it shouldn’t be (behind enemy lines, aboard a ship).
• A dead man’s sentence — the last true thing someone said before the crew could ask.

Rule of thumb: the gift is knowledge or leverage, never raw Power — Landis deals in truth, not drones.

You decided a watch is fictional time, not table time. Open question from your margin (p.12): how many watches does a session pass? My recommendation — don’t hard-quantify it; give the keeper three anchors and let fiction do the rest:

• Sleep = 1 watch. A night’s rest always turns one.
• Travel by distance. A hop across the city = 0. A trip off-world and back = 1. A long expedition = 2–3, keeper’s call.
• A full scene of labour = +1 to the Work worked (already in the rules).

So a quiet session might pass one watch; a session that sleeps, travels, and labours might pass three. Your boxed note (“multiple Works per session, keeper’s discretion”) is already true under this: turning a watch advances every open Work at once. The thing to decide is whether players can ever force the keeper to turn a watch — I’d say no; only the fiction turns it, and Forcing (§3.5) is the one player lever on pace.

Your notes (p.2 “needs meat,” p.11 “quantified … city resource management”) and your answer both point the same way. Proposed split:

• Hands & Power are counted, and public. Give the expedition a pool — e.g. Hands as named departments/teams, Power as concrete stores (ZPM charge, C4, jumpers, drones). A Work pledges specific units; the crew can always see what’s committed and what’s free. This is the ‘city resource management’ layer.
• Standing is not a number the players see. Per your answer: the keeper tracks each people’s regard (Genii, Hoffan, Athosian…) on a hidden scale; players must intuit it from how factions behave. The keeper knows whether a faction will lift a hand; the crew has to read the room.

Open sub-question I’d flag: do you want Standing tracked per-faction as a small hidden dial (e.g. −2…+2), or purely as keeper prose? A dial makes “will they help?” rulings consistent; prose keeps it loose. I lean hidden dial, prose to the players.

You struck ‘sealed’ and asked what is there to seal? Two clean readings — pick one:

• (a) Sealed = undefined-until-called. The favor has no named price now; the keeper writes it face-down and reveals it whenever they call it due. What’s ‘sealed’ is the cost. (Keeps the dread; matches Squalls.)
• (b) Drop the seal. A favor owed is just an IOU the keeper can call anytime — no envelope, no mystery. Simpler at the table.

I lean (a): it makes ‘a favor owed’ scarier than ‘a truth’ and gives you a sealed prop to hand over, which fits Council’s whole reveal aesthetic.

Your green note (p.13): a way for things to progress between sessions without wrecking the timeline, and encouraging between-session play. Work Orders already point here; proposed expansion:

• Between sessions, any player may file Standing Orders to the hands they command — written instructions (build, scout, treat, dig).
• These don’t turn extra watches (the timeline is safe): they resolve as of the next watch the fiction turns, and the keeper answers in the hands’ own voice (letterhead) at session start.
• A player who files orders may open the session already mid-scene on their result — the reward for playing between sessions.

This is a natural fit for the Council website: orders in, letterhead replies out.

You don’t have the shape yet and asked for options. Here’s a model that fits ‘The Storm shouldn’t tick until the Genii are ready to be enemies.’

The idea. A Divine Work is a chain of beats. A beat does nothing until its Trigger is met. When it fires, that beat’s watch-clock starts counting — and only then does time bite.

A beat has three lines: Trigger (the fictional condition that arms it), Clock (how many watches once armed), Break (what the beat does — usually a signed squall, sometimes a rewrite of the card).

‘Non-step-able’ means two guarantees: (1) an un-armed beat can’t be advanced, forced, or grace’d forward — no lever moves a clock that hasn’t started; (2) once armed, the clock is the keeper’s, not the tide’s default — it ticks on its own terms.

What arms a trigger? Options (mix freely): a story condition the keeper watches for (Genii reach striking distance); a completed/failed Work (the well is poisoned); a date on the hidden countdown (§3.7, ‘even if one is quietly kept’); or a player action that pokes the sleeping thing.

Storm, worked example: Beat I Outer Bands — Trigger: Genii gain a foothold · Clock: none (mood only). Beat III Eye — Trigger: storm makes landfall on Atlantis · Clock: 3 watches · Break: shield fails, signed by Radek. Beat IV — Trigger: Beat III resolves · Break: Earth’s ship arrives with McKay + partial ZPM. The early beats set weather; the clock only bites once the fiction says it’s time.

Decision I need: is a beat’s clock visible to players once armed (a ticking dread they can race) or hidden (they feel the squeeze but don’t see the number)? I’d make it the keeper’s choice per beat — visible clocks create urgency, hidden ones create unease.

You want these as guidance, not a rigid parallel to Small/Work/Great. Proposed as a keeper sidebar:

• An Episode — one session’s worth; a single strong beat. Ex: the dying ZPM on the children’s planet.
• An Arc — spans several sessions; a handful of chained beats. Ex: The Storm; poisoning the well; the first Wraith siege.
• A Saga — one or more seasons; beats that sleep for a long time between arming. Ex: the Wraith threat; Taxe’s Federation; powering the city and getting home.

Same engine (beats + triggers) at every tier — only the span and the patience differ.

This was my jargon; here’s the plain version. A Divine Work is weather the players can’t grab directly. A dependent visible Work is an ordinary Work card the storm throws off that they can grab — the handhold. The Storm (Divine) can’t be ‘solved’; but Shield’s Heart, Project Hammer, and The Catch are visible Works the crew can pour Hands into to change how the storm lands. My recommendation, not a hard rule: every armed beat should expose at least one visible Work the players can act on — otherwise the beat is something that happens to them, which is railroading by another name. Make it a keeper habit, not a law.

Your p.15 note: call the single-seat holder the one who holds the Fasces, rotating each session, and — like the Roman consuls — the others in rotation may veto. Proposed optional rule:

• The final-say seat rotates each session among those eligible.
• Any other rotation-holder may spend a veto to block a single ruling (once per session), forcing a Council vote instead.

Your wide/narrow question: yes — at a wide table the keeper can absolutely take the Fasces on some sessions (an in-fiction chair, not the GM hat), which is a lovely way to put the keeper’s avatar on the record. At a narrow table, rotation is usually just among the player-principals and the keeper stays the world. Tie it to the §4.2 dial.

You circled ‘on the record’ (§4.5) and asked if minuting is practical — can we use voice memos? Proposed light system, The Minute: after any vote, override, or Directive, one line goes in the log — who decided, what, who dissented. That’s all ‘minuted’ needs to mean. A phone voice-memo is a perfectly good Minute.

On tooling — straight answer: I can’t transcribe an audio file directly in this workspace (no speech-to-text here). But the loop you want works fine: run tonight’s recording through any transcription app, upload the transcript (txt/doc), and I’ll keep a running game log and a formal Council Minutes ledger from it — votes, Directives, Works advanced, squalls broken. If you’d rather, dictate a recap (like you just did) and I’ll minute that. I’d suggest we start a Council_Minutes.md in the project and append after each session.

Your p.15 question: without a deputy, does a pulled Work revert one step each watch? I think your instinct is the right rule, and it’s better than a flat ‘freeze’ — it gives interrupts real teeth. Proposed:

• A Work whose head is pulled (§4.4) and left unheld slips back one watch each watch that passes — the labour decays without its hand.
• A deputy holding it stops the slip (freeze at present watch) but can’t advance it.
• A Directive (§4.5) keeps the head on task, so it neither slips nor pauses.

This answers your ‘what about Carson pinned on the Hoffan cure?’ — pull Carson to an emergency and, unless Keely (deputy) holds it, the cure work rots a watch at a time until he’s back or you Directive him to stay. That’s a real cost, which is the point. (Edit E14 in §4.4 already wires this in.)

You flagged this as thin. It’s the twin of Interrupts: Interrupts pull a head who’s here; Absence covers a head who is simply unreachable (off-world, ascended, missing). Proposed replacement text:The distinction to keep: Interrupt = freeze/slip (they’re here, just busy); Absence = it happens anyway, badly (they’re gone).

Two things land here. First, your ‘write a poetic creed’ — a first swing, to be said aloud at Session Zero (§5.1, move 5):Second, move 3 (‘Lay the first Ledger’) needs expanding once P2 lands — it should walk the keeper through setting starting Hands/Power pools and, if you want them, research tiers (what the expedition can build now vs. what needs a Work first). Flagging; I’ll draft it after you rule on P2.

Your p.17 note: clues can come from many sources — prep them too, at least which source and which letterhead. Proposed addition to §5.2:

• When you seal a clue, also note its source — who knows it, and how it would reach the crew.
• Give it a letterhead: a clue from Beckett arrives as a medical note; from the Genii, as an intercept; from Landis, as a line in still water. Same clue, different voice, different trust.

This dovetails with the Signed Squall (§5.4): in Council, everything that arrives — good news or bad — arrives signed.