What the city is and how it runs. No code, no numbers that matter; those are in the repo.
A walled city on an ash plain. Nobody alive has seen the wall open and nobody is sure what is on the other side. Inside it, people farm, trade, drink, patrol and sleep, and the city gets on with being a city whether or not you do anything about it. You are one more person in it, poor or middle class, with a knife or nothing, and the only thing the city will not do for you is tell you what it is for.
The city has hours. A game hour is a minute and a half, so a full day passes in a little over half an hour of play, and the clock only runs while you are free to act: it stops when you talk, fight, watch a scene or die. Dawn is a slow brightening from five to seven, dusk the reverse from six to eight, and the night in between is long and blue. Shops trade by day. The wastes get louder after dark, and the things in them come closer to the walls. Sleeping in your own bed skips to morning. Lamps come on at dusk; so does whatever you carry.
Shops open at six and close at eight. Work starts at seven. At five most people walk to a bar and drink until ten, when anyone with a home goes indoors until morning. Guards, raiders, scavengers and the barkeep never do.
The sky has its own schedule: sunny, cloudy, rainy, storm, each for a few hours, each with odds of what comes next. Cloud dims the light and drags shadows across the ground, rain empties the streets by half, a storm empties them entirely and throws lightning at the ground somewhere out of reach.
Everyone belongs to a class and a class holds ground. The high class hold the hill and the gate. The middle class hold the dense streets and the farms. The poor hold the scattered city of shacks, and nobody holds the wastes, which is where the raiders and the wolves come in. Standing with each class rises when you do their work and falls when you cross them, and standing is what opens doors: shops, conversations, and in the end the key.
People have days. A farmhand is in the field by seven and at the bar, or the gambling hall, by five; a shopkeeper is behind the counter all day and home by night; nobles promenade the plaza; servants and stewards keep the palace; scavengers never go home because they have none. By night most of them are indoors and the streets belong to the guards and whatever got over the wall. Rain sends half of them home early and a storm sends all of them.
The class rules bite. A noble, tall hat and gold band, will not have a commoner within arm's reach: a shout, and a royal guard walks you to the gate. Draw a weapon in the wrong street and someone shouts for the guard. Let your standing with a class fall below nothing and its people stop shouting: the armed ones come at you the moment they see a blade in your hand, the rest run, and its guards come for you from further off. Put the weapon away and they let you be, for now. The King and the President wear a red marker over their heads and every guard a small pale one, so you know who you are about to make an enemy of before you do it. Walk up the hill as a poor man and the residents turn on you. Guards never start a fight, but they finish one, and they will stand with you against wolves and raiders because that is their job too. Animals are animals: wolves and boars hunt the wastes, deer run, livestock graze and go where they are led.
Paved streets, a town hall, shops with stalls, the bars, your own house if you start with one.
Fenced fields that grow, ponds, a barn, a room over the bar, people who need wolves thinned and sacks carried.
Shacks, dirt, a junk dealer, the only bar the poor can afford, and the start of the worst route to the key.
Lawns, hedges, the palace, the King behind his guards, people who do not want you there.
Stone, a bunker, the console the key fits. There is only ever one.
Ash, ruins, crates beside them, a raider camp, nobody's law. Between the towns in bigger worlds.
A seed draws the whole thing: the shape of every district and its name (grand on the hill, plain in the middle, scrappy in the shacks, bleak in the wastes), every street, every building and the voxels it is made of, every prop, every person and their name, what is in every chest, who hands out work and what the work is. Type the same seed and you get the same city. Under every plaza there are stairs down to a subway that runs beneath the whole map, lit and guarded where the rich live above it and black where the poor do.
Gear is rolled, not stocked. A knife is never just a knife: it comes out Rusty or Keen or Light, with its own numbers and sometimes a surname, and your Luck tilts the roll. Shops stock by district (a grocer, an armourer, a general store, an outfitter on the hill, a junk dealer in the shacks) and prices move with your Charisma. Chests in abandoned houses, crates in the wastes and caches in the subway hold the rest. You wear four things: what is in your hands, what is in the other hand (a shield, or a light), what is on your body and what is on your head. A torch burns down and is gone. A flashlight charges in the sun.
People with work to give carry a mark over their heads; so do the notice boards on every plaza, read out by a crier. The work is small and local: thin the wolves, fetch a part from an empty house across the city, carry a parcel, pass on a message and bring back the answer. Conversations are built from who the person is, where you are and what they have heard, and some choices are rolls against your Charisma, your Luck or a skill, with a way to fail that is usually funnier than the way to succeed. Doing work for a class is how you earn standing with it.
Every district is a town with a name of its own, grand on the hill, plain in the middle, scrappy in the shacks, bleak in the wastes, and the big map only names the ones you have walked. Every town keeps an economy of seven goods: food, drink, medicine, arms, materials, luxuries and the drugs nobody admits to. Farms make food, the dense city makes arms and materials, the hill makes luxuries and medicine, and every town eats; what a town is short of costs more there and what it has too much of costs less. Trading posts hold the ledger and send caravans along the routes between them, a trader with guards and a mule for every few sacks, or a cart by road for a big load. Raiders and the pack go for the mules first. A caravan that never arrives is a shortage somewhere, and a shortage is a tense town. You can carry a load yourself for a post, with a clock on it, or take a mule nobody is guarding and sell it at the next post.
The farms grow. Every plot has a crop and a stage, sprout to ripe to stubble, moved along by rain and stalled by a dry spell; farmhands carry the sacks to the barn and the barn is the food. A farmer will pay you by the sack for a day's work at the harvest, and steadier work after that.
There is one god and three ways of following it, one per class, and the names are new every world: the Keepers of the Mended Fence, the Society of the Long Table, the Church of the Open Hand. Each has a greeting, a few customs (one preaches on corners, one walks into the ash to think, one forbids hats indoors and cannot say why), service days and an hour. The hill builds a spired house, the dense city and the farms a chapel, the shacks a ring of benches round a crate. A priest stands at each with a flock. You start with your home town's faith and it is worth something: a perk that grows with your devotion, and devotion grows by standing the services and shrinks by missing them. Stand another faith's services three times and you have changed sides. Priests sell a token of the faith, cure the curse a thing in the tunnels can leave on you, and take you in if you hold with nobody.
Every world rolls two or three drugs of its own, each with a kick, a cost and a comedown. Dealers work the corners by the bars of the poor and middle towns, with their own opinion of you that has nothing to do with your standing: the middle class loving you is a reason for a dealer not to. They hand out jobs with a clock, a parcel for a dealer in the next town, a sale to a regular who will not come to them, and a job that runs very late ends with both dealers wanting you dead. Walk around with a weapon drawn under a guard's eye and you may be searched; drugs found go in the river and every dealer hears about it. Bars and halls are where people buy; the hill is where they shout for the guard.
Some corners have a ranter. Nine lines in ten are nonsense, one in ten is true and worth a crust of bread to hear. Hear one out for three days and they will wade into your fights. Every town has a mood, calm to boiling, pushed up by ranters, shortages, busts and killings and down by services and full bars; a tense town's guards search more and tolerate less, its prices twitch, and past a line its ranters take the plaza. Once an hour each town rolls the dice on something happening: a sickness, a holy day, a guard crackdown, a wolf surge, a drought, a harvest festival. The criers call it, the boards post it, and the street talks about what happened last night instead of the same old lines.
If somebody saw it, it is written down. A guard who saw knows on the spot; a townsperson runs for one. Nobody saw it, nobody knows. Everyone who saw remembers you. Each class keeps a bounty on you, the sum of what it knows; petty things fade, murder and robbery never. Past a line the boards post your description, nobody hires you, guards who see you stop you in the street: pay the fine, go quietly, or fight. Go quietly and a guard walks you to the cells and you sleep the sentence away, a third of your coin and your contraband gone. At a high bounty the class sends hunters.
A meter beside your hit points fills over a day and a half; hungry costs you an action point and some aim, starving drains you and slows you and kills. Bread, stew, a sack of produce or a hot meal at a bar feed you; sleep does not. You sleep in a bed of your own, at an inn for a fee that follows the town's opinion of you, or in a sleeping bag where your class is allowed to lie down, which in the wastes is a gamble. Houses with a sign are for sale at the hall for a price the local economy sets; a home makes you a resident, judged by your standing and not your class, and the hall buys it back. The city saves itself once a minute; Resume on the title screen picks it up.
The best rolls and a chest or two carry a name, Hollow Tooth, Second Regret, and a past: who made it, who first carried it, what it was used for. The past grows while you carry it, every life it takes and every town it passes through, and a shop that buys it tells the story on the shelf.
The story is not a script. It is a set of modules, each a small self-contained plot with the roles left blank: a steward on the hill, a chest in the wastes, a guard who owes money. When a run starts, the seed decides which modules are live and the city fills the blanks with real people and places that exist in that city. The same module is a different story in a different seed because the steward has a different name, the ruin is somewhere else and the guard patrols a different street.
Three modules are always live: the spine, the three ways to the key. A handful of filler modules are drawn per run from a larger pool. The wacky set only appears if you opt in to Off-Script on the title screen, and then the city stops making sense around you. Modules can require the outcome of another, so finishing one can bring a new one to life mid-run, which is the closest thing the city has to consequence. Writing a new one is writing a JSON file; no code needs to know it exists.
The wall has never opened. Somewhere on the hill the King carries the Gate Key, and the key fits a console in the Gate Control hall. Whoever turns it decides whether the gates stay shut or open, and that is the whole game. Walking up the hill and attacking the King gets you killed. There are three ways in, and each starts with being somebody:
Around the spine, the filler: a steward whose hand was the one that stole the palace candlestick; a guard in debt to the armourer; a letter that is not allowed down the hill; a man the census never counts; a sign that is stolen every week; a toll owed to the raider Rook; a well that is not poisoned; two grocers and some stale bread. And if you go Off-Script: a man in a bucket crown who is the real King, a shop that only takes shoes, a talking goat, a door in the plaza that goes down, and a wall that knows your name.
At the console you choose. Two endings, and a stats screen that counts the days you lasted, the people you killed and the coin you made. Then the title again, and a different seed.