Book the first — being the whole of the game, set down plain, that any hand aboard may read it.
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
Crews who have already drifted. Long campaigns that quietly abandoned sheets and initiative and now live on narration and trust. Council names what they are already doing and gives it teeth.
Keepers weary of dangling hints. Game masters who love the shared story but keep striking the reef where a puzzle stalls because no one has yet said the magic thing.
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.
And whatever the world returns walks back into the next Scene, changed.
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.
| № | Timber | What it names |
|---|---|---|
| I | The Water | Landis, real only in water, who sells true answers at a price. |
| II | The Council | Shared command with a final say; every vote and dissent minuted. |
| III | Works | What a crew sets in motion between scenes: an aim, the hands, the stakes. |
| IV | The Tide | Time itself. The keeper turns the watch; a session may pass one, or several. |
| V | The Ledger | What a Work spends: Hands, Power, Standing. Nothing pinned twice. |
| VI | Squalls | Sealed complications carried by the larger Works, breaking when the weave turns against you. |
| VII | The Seals | Pre-written clues — Nudge, Bearing, Answer — sealed and shown, in order. |
| VIII | Price & Grace | The two ways an answer comes: seized with a piece of self, or given freely. |
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.
The keel — fixed. Landis & the Water. The eight timbers and their names. The turn of the tide. Price and grace. The Seals. Mercy.
The rigging — yours. The world, its peoples, what Power and Standing are made of, what the riddles guard.
Change everything you like. Leave me the water. — L.F.