What Is Really Going On

This chapter contains the ending.

The question the campaign is asking

A first-through is the most important person in human space for about seven years, and then it stops, and nobody has ever worked out what happens next.

That is the whole engine. Everything else is the setting it runs in.

Three people answer that question, and the campaign is the player choosing between them.

The Three Answers
Who	What they are
Rill	The warning. Twenty-one, frayed out, taking money from the only man who ever offered her a plan.
Calloway	The answer. Aged out at forty-one, runs a desk, and is the happiest and most loved person in the setting.
The Quorum	The refusal. The best first-through who ever lived, who would not accept being landlocked, and paid for it with everything that made him a person.

In Act Three the Quorum offers the player exactly what he took. By then they will have wanted it since the first session, they will have watched what it did to Rill, and they will know what Calloway chose instead.

The acts

Act One — the Nine. Making the player love this place and these people, and learning the job in their own hands. Light for two beats, then the hardest night of their life. Takes: a few days each off four hundred named lives, freely given, because the player stood in a hall and asked for them.

Act Two — Kapteyn’s. The wonder, and the first hard truth. Twenty-four generations alone behind a buried door — and then the discovery that the stray which opened it was predictable, and that somebody predicted it. Takes: Rill. She runs out during this act, in front of the player, and it is nobody’s fault and entirely avoidable and both of those are true.

Act Three — the Quorum. The villain, the temptation, and the answer. He is courteous, tired, physically unremarkable, and in more than one place. He does not want to rule anything. He wants to keep travelling, and he found the only way, and it cost him being a person.

The climax is a race. LHS 1140’s door arrives — the first new door in twenty-five years and the first in history to open onto a living world. He intends to be the first mind through it. A fifteen-year-old with a fetch intends otherwise.

It ends with a door opening, honestly, with a child standing in it.

The lie the setting is built on

There is a fact everybody in the Causeway believes, and it is wrong, and breaking it is the spine of Acts Two and Three:

Straying is random and cannot be predicted.

It is not random. A door is pinned to a gravitational potential, and a potential reshapes with the orbits around it, and orbits are the most predictable things in the universe. Anywhere somebody has kept a long enough record, the pattern is sitting in it, unread.

The reason nobody knows is not conspiracy. It is that nobody logs a sticky door, because an inconvenience that resolves itself is the definition of the thing nobody writes down — and the only people who keep records long enough to show the cycle are people nobody has ever asked for them.

Which is also what the campaign is about, underneath: information that exists, is available, and goes unread. Pell Ivor’s board. Sep Anwar’s four reports. A child teaching herself to read flash off a stool. Two hundred years of handwriting in a shed at Ladder.

If a player ever picks one of those up and reads it, give them everything. That is the game working.

What is in the sealed files

lore/gm-secret/ holds the Quorum, what Tolk is, and the outline of Acts Three to Five. None of it is needed to run Act One and all of it is worth having read once, because Act One is full of small things that will matter later and that you will only place correctly if you know where this is going.