For those who play

A turn is a single passage of time in the world — a week, a month, a year, as the season requires. You send the gamemaster your orders: what your character does, where they go, what they say and to whom, what they hope for. The gamemaster runs the world against your intentions and returns to you a dispatch: a sealed account of what came of it.

Even the simplest set of orders, filed honestly, earns a small grant of kleos. The empire notices those who write.

There is no command grammar to learn and no form to fill. You write the chronicler a letter — in the first or second person, in your own voice or your character's — and the world replies. The packet below is a fair sample of the shape an experienced player tends to settle into: an opening declaration of intent, two or three concrete acts with named people and places, an honest question, and (when one is owed) a favour-token spent in plain words.

Orders this length take fifteen minutes to write and earn the chronicler's full attention. Shorter is permitted — a single paragraph of plain intent will be run. Longer is welcome but not required.

The chronicle opens in the year of the world 6346, by the Roman reckoning — what the Latins call 838, though no Latin has held the city for four hundred years. The empire stands on two legs: Constantinople, the New Rome, where the Basileus Theophilus holds court; and the themes, the military provinces that feed and defend it.

You begin in Nicaea, on the Asiatic shore of the Propontis. It is a garrison city, a crossroads, a place where the road from the capital meets the road to the eastern frontier. The walls are sound. The lake is full of fish. The strategos of Opsikion is in residence, the metropolitan is in conference, and imperial couriers ride through the gate at all hours. The price of horses has tripled in a fortnight.

The reign of Theophilus

Theophilus is the second emperor of the Amorian house — soldier, builder, iconoclast. He has spent the spring campaigning in the Caliph's lands; he took Sozopetra and gave it to fire. It is said that the Caliph al-Muʿtasim received the news in his bath at Samarra and rose dripping and unspeaking, and that he has since sworn before his father's tomb to take a Roman city of equal dignity. He has named it: Amorium, mother of the Amorian house. From Khorasan and the eastern marches he summons an army not seen in the lifetime of any man under sixty.

The empire you serve

The Roman Empire of this age is not the ancient marble thing. It is a lean, pious, quarrelsome state held together by the army, the tax-roll, and the Orthodox faith — though even the faith is contested. Theophilus is an iconoclast: he believes the sacred images are idols, and his soldiers have whitewashed churches from Ephesos to the Halys. The monks weep. The iconophiles plot. The patriarch is careful.

The empire is divided into themes — military provinces commanded by a strategos, who holds both the sword and the tax-register. The great themes of the East are Anatolikon, Armeniakon, Opsikion, Thrakesion, and the maritime themes of the Aegean and the Kibyrrhaiotai. Each theme musters its own soldiers, feeds them from its own estates, and answers the emperor's call when the golden seal is sent. In time of peace the themes feud among themselves. In time of war they remember that they are Romans.

The city and the margin

Most players begin in Nicaea, but the empire is wide. Constantinople is the centre — the Great Church, the Hippodrome, the Bronze Gate, the palace complex where eunuchs and logothetes move in corridors that no map records. Beyond the themes lie the margins: the Arab frontier along the Taurus, the Bulgarian kingdom to the north, the Khazar steppe, the Italian possessions clinging to the toe of the old boot. The sea is full of pirates who were once imperial marines. The mountains are full of hermits who were once courtiers.

You need not be a soldier or a saint. The chronicle has room for merchants, physicians, architects, smugglers, and the merely curious. What matters is that you write.

Each dispatch is dated by the in-world calendar and by the day it was sealed. It contains:

• The narrative — what happened, told in the third person, in the manner of a private letter from a careful clerk.
• The ledger — income and expense for the period, opening and closing balances.
• The fiscal mood — whether your house feels comfortable, stretched, dangerous, or ruinous.
• Rumours and gossip that reached you.
• A short word on your successor.
• The asks — what the gamemaster needs an answer to before the next turn.
• Sometimes, a further scene — a vignette with no mechanical weight, only colour.

What it sounds like

The following are not real dispatches from any living player; they are samples of the voice the chronicler uses — the prose you will find in your scroll when a turn is run.

The purse is what you carry — coin in hand, in nomismata. The holdings are what you own: estates, an inn, a share in a wharf, the quiet things in cellars. Each turn the ledger sums their incomes, subtracts your expenses, and updates the purse. You see the figures. So does the gamemaster. Secret holdings are listed in a private section visible only to you.

A debt is whatever you and the lender agreed to. There is no fixed rate of usury in this game; there are terms. A monastery may want patient instalments and a saint's day mass. A patrikios near the Basileus may want a vote, a silence, a son's career. A loan-shark may want a finger, or worse. The terms are written into the debt; the gamemaster will hold you to them.

On occasion your dispatch will note that a small favour of the Muses lingers with you, to be spent at need. This is a favour-token: a small reservoir of fortune you have earned and may spend.

How they are earned

The gamemaster grants them when a set of orders shows real care — when you write in character; when you invent rumours, songs, overheard speech, sermons; when you engage with the season's motifs; when you pick up threads from earlier turns; when you make a costly or vivid choice instead of the safe one.

How they are spent

To spend a token, name it plainly in your next orders: "I spend a favour of the Muses on the meeting with the eparch." The scribe will hear the words — phrases like spend a favour, burn a favour, or call on the Muses are all caught — and one token is debited from your reservoir automatically. The chronicler is then bound to narrate that scene more generously to you: a stranger remembers a kindness, a soldier looks the other way, a letter arrives at the right hour, the dice turn. A token is not a guarantee of success, but it is a thumb on the scale, in your favour.

What a favour will not do

A favour of the Muses is fortune, not absolution. It cannot erase a standing debt, nor wave away a mechanical penalty the chronicler has already named — a wound, a confiscation, a sentence of exile, the terms of a loan. The Muses bend the world a little; they do not unwrite what is already written.

If you would have a favour touch such a thing, you must offer a costly compromise in character: a public confession, a ruinous gift to the wronged house, a vow taken before the altar, a year of service. The chronicler is the final arbiter of whether the offered price is enough, and what the Muses then permit.

Kleos is the Greek word the chronicler keeps for fame: not coin, not station, but what the city will openly admit to remembering of you. When a turn produces a public deed worth noting, he writes it down with a number beside it. Good public deeds carry positive points; ruinous public ones carry negative — a coward seen fleeing is still seen.

Kleos is what the Logothete's office, the Patriarch, your peers at court, and the parish priest will say of you to your face. It is the ledger of the spoken reputation. What is whispered behind the hand is another book entirely — see Infamy.

How kleos is earned

• Orders filed at all — even a brief, plain set of orders earns a small reward. The empire notices those who keep writing. (Signed +2, anonymous packets +1, capped at +4 in any seven-day stretch — the chronicler will not be flattered by mere persistence.)
• Orders written with care — voice held in period, rumours invented, motifs taken up, threads picked up, the costly choice made. (+3 to +10, depending.)
• Deeds the world notices — a stand at the wall, a generous feast, a fast kept publicly, a stratagem that turned a market or a battle. (+5 to +25.)
• Citation by an NPC — a sermon names you, a song carries your house, a patrikios writes you into a dispatch of his own. (+5 to +15.)

How kleos is lost

Negative awards mirror positive ones. The chronicler will warn you in the dispatch before a loss drags you below a threshold you had previously cleared.

• Cowardice publicly witnessed — a flight from the wall, a duel refused before the company, an order disobeyed in sight of the men. (−5 to −15.)
• An oath broken in writing — a contract repudiated, a letter of guarantee disowned, a vow taken before the altar set aside. (−10 to −20.)
• An ally betrayed and the betrayal known — a kinsman denounced, a patron's confidence sold, a friend's signature forged. (−15 to −30.)
• Public scandal at court — a brawl at a feast you hosted, a charge of heresy that stuck, a denunciation in the Hippodrome. (−20 to −40.)
• Burning kleos — kleos is occasionally spent rather than lost: called in for a re-roll of a doomed scene, for a mercy, for a rumour stilled at the right ear. (−1 to −5, by your own choice.)

What kleos is spent on

Kleos is not a purse you empty. It is a standing the city accords you. What kleos unlocks is the right to petition — for a vocation, an advanced class, a second path, or (for the classless) to be taken in as one of the named callings. The number persists; the petition either succeeds, or is set aside for now.

Kleos is the sum; renown tells the shape of it. Every significant deed may also be tagged with one of four axes:

Piety

The fast kept, the alms given without trumpet, the pilgrimage made, the silent hour.

Cunning

Stratagem, the well-laid trap, the rumour planted at the wharf, the contract drawn so the other man signs his own confusion.

Largesse

The open hand: the public feast, the dowered orphan, the bridge repaired at private cost, ruinous generosity that buys love and credit.

Valour

Steel met without flinching. The wall held, the charge ridden, the duel accepted when refusal was possible.

You need not pursue all four; most Romans worth remembering are known for one or two. The axes accrue silently as the chronicler tags your deeds.

On the great philanthropies and household posts — the Orphanotropheion, the Vestiary, the Pharos, the chartularies — see Named offices, and how they are conferred.

To be Roman is to wear two faces. Kleos is the face you present to the Logothete, to the Patriarch, to the parish at the Sunday liturgy. Infamy is the other face — what the bath-house knows, what the Varangians say over their cups, what your enemies' spies write in their ciphered dispatches. It is no small thing in this empire to be feared in the dark and bowed to in the light. The Phokades and the Skleroi built fortunes on exactly that doubleness.

Infamy is a parallel ledger, not a replacement for kleos. A character may hold high standing on both — that gap between the bright name and the dark one is one of the most Byzantine things you can cultivate. The chronicler tags deeds for infamy the same way he tags them for renown, on the same four axes:

Piety

The fanatic's cruelty, the heretic-hunter's pyre, the false relic peddled to a credulous monastery, the saint-act that no one is meant to admire openly.

Cunning

Blackmail, the forged seal, the bought witness, the bribe pressed into the right eunuch's palm. The clever villainy whispered about in the silentiarii's corridors.

Largesse

The protection racket framed as patronage, the dowry pressed on the girl whose silence you require, gold that buys loyalty and dependence rather than love.

Valour

The duel done quietly behind the cistern, the punitive raid passed off as a frontier patrol, the violence by which men learn not to speak your name above a whisper.

What infamy is for

For now, infamy is a parallel reputation track that the chronicler keeps for your character's villainous side. A single deed may carry both a public renown tag and a private infamy tag — the magnate who endows a hospital with one hand while running smugglers with the other earns Largesse renown and Largesse infamy from the same season's work.

The shadow ledger is no longer ornamental. It has its own ladder of advancement (below), its own moment of public consequence when it is dragged into the light (exposure), and its own politics of arm's-length sponsorship (patronage of villains).

Note for the GM: infamy is granted through the same Kleos award form as renown. Leave the public axis blank when the act is genuinely secret; set both when it has a public face and a private rumour.

The bright road is petitioned with lifetime kleos and a single tall axis of renown. The shadow road is petitioned with the sum of your four infamy axes — the chronicler tallies the whispers and weighs them. Four rungs are recognised:

1. Claim a name in the dark — infamy sum 25, any axis ≥ 8. Petition to have your shadow reputation recognised by the chronicler as a standing thing: the bandits salute you, the watch knows the name. Not yet a calling — only a flag the world now flies for you.
   Example: a Tax-farmer of Cunning-infamy 9 petitions to be known on the docks of Theodosia as the Magpie. Granted: thereafter, smugglers send him a percentage and call it a "blessing of the post."
2. Take a shadow vocation — infamy sum 50, any axis ≥ 12. A calling kept in the dark: a protection racket, a smuggling ring, a heresiarch's circle of pupils. It counts toward your vocation slots like any other.
   Example: an Eparch's Informer of Cunning-infamy 13 petitions for the vocation Master of a Network of Eyes. Granted, with the burden that two of his informers will betray him within the year.
3. Petition for a shadow class — infamy sum 75, any axis ≥ 18. The mirror of an advanced class, conferred on the shadow road. Seven exist in the chronicle's keeping: Archpirate of the Aegean, Heresiarch, Master of the Underworld, Domestic Poisoner of the Sacred Palace, Captain of the Hidden Bandon, Bandit-King of the Taurus, and Master of the Counterfeit. The fiction must support it; the chronicler may refuse on grounds of plausibility alone.
   Counter-example: a Renegade Deacon of Piety-infamy 14 petitions for Heresiarch. The chronicler returns not yet: pupils are wanting, and an axis of eighteen is not yet within reach.
4. Be reckoned a power — infamy sum 150, and two distinct axes at ≥ 15. The empire knows you must be reckoned with — by bounty, or by banner. From this rung onward, the Logothete's office contemplates either the standing army or the negotiated peace.

The lock between vocation and advanced class still binds. An ordinary character may take one second vocation or one advanced class in a life — and either may be a shadow one. The classless are exempt, and may take a shadow vocation alongside their bright ones, or a shadow class on top of a bright one. The road of the classless is wider, and rougher.

Infamy is silent only so long as the wrong people do not know. When the rumour is proved, when the confession is public, when the man is caught in the act — the shadow ledger surfaces, and the bright one takes a wound. The chronicler marks the moment as an exposure: a kleos award (almost always negative) tagged with the shadow axis from which the rot came.

There are three classical shapes for it:

1. The rumour proven. A whisper that has run for seasons finds its document — a customs ledger, a smuggled letter, a witness no one had thought to silence. The Logothete now knows, and the court must be told something. The shadow points do not vanish; they are doubled by their twin in the public ledger, and the public ledger is in the negative.
2. The public confession. A man kneels at the ambo, or before the strategos, or in the Hippodrome itself, and names what he did. Confession purchases mercy on the day of judgment; it does not purchase silence on the day of telling. The chronicler may, by grace, allow some shadow points to be retired in exchange for the cost — a kind of penitential alchemy.
3. Caught in the act. The patrol turns the corner; the bishop opens the wrong cellar; the kommerkiarios's clerk counts the bales twice. There is no rumour to deny and no confession to bargain over. The chronicler levies the heaviest version of the loss, and may add a wrath event or a debt as the world responds.

Mechanically, the GM uses the Exposure selector on the kleos award form to tag which shadow axis is being surfaced. The shadow score on that axis is preserved (the underworld does not forget what it knew), but the public ledger takes the loss — and the chronicler may, in the same turn, schedule a wrath event keyed to the exposed axis.

The most Byzantine arrangement in this game is the oldest one in the empire: a man of high kleos and a name to keep clean sponsors, at arm's length, a man of low kleos who does the work that cannot be done in the light. The Phokades did it. The Skleroi did it. The Logothete pretended not to notice, because he was doing it too.

In the chronicle, a patronage is a quiet binding the GM records: a patron, a client, and a single shadow axis on which the patron has an interest. So long as the binding holds, when the client earns infamy on the named axis, the patron is silently credited with a smaller share of the same — a single point per award, regardless of size. The patron's bright ledger is not touched. Only the shadow ledger thickens.

The cost is what the cost always is: the patron now has an axis of infamy that an enemy may someday expose. The bargain is favourable so long as the client is loyal and the chronicler is not paying attention; it is ruinous in the season the client is taken, turns king's evidence, or simply prays aloud to the wrong saint.

The GM binds and unbinds patronages from the Kleos & awards page. Players are not told the patron's name when the credit posts — only that the underworld has, for reasons of its own, decided to file the act under more than one ledger.

There are no levels and no hidden experience score. Advancement comes by petition: when your kleos and renown suit, you may write to the chronicler asking for what you have earned. He answers granted, denied, or not yet, and tells you why.

There are three ordinary tiers (and a fourth available only to the classless — see below):

1. Vocation — at 25 lifetime kleos. A master in your trade takes you on; you bind yourself to a calling. Most characters take two; the classless may take three.
   Example: a Lady of the Basilike at 30 kleos petitions to become Patron of a Lesser Monastery. Granted — she endows a small house on Olympos, and its abbot's secrets become, in some measure, hers.
2. Advanced class — at 75 lifetime kleos, with at least one renown axis at 5 or more. You take a deeper, named title within your path. Conferred only by the chronicler; the fiction must support it.
   Example: a Tagmatic Officer of 80 kleos and Valour 6, who held the gate at Amorium, petitions to be raised to Strategos of his thema. Granted, with the burdens that follow.
   Counter-example: a courtier of 90 kleos but no axis above 3 — spread thin, none ascendant — petitions to be raised to Logothete. The chronicler returns not yet: choose a road and walk it.
3. Multiclass — at 150 lifetime kleos, with one axis at 8 or more. You take a second class; the empire knows you on two roads.
   Example: a Hesychast Monk of 160 kleos and Piety 9, who has also led a levy in the Bulgarian campaign, petitions to take up the path of Tagmatic Officer alongside his cassock. Granted: he becomes chaplain-captain of a tagma.

To lodge a petition, open the Soul tab of your scroll, where the progression panel shows your standing and the next threshold. When you are eligible, the petition form appears: name what you seek and justify it in your own voice. The chronicler will answer.

A denied petition is not a punishment. Not yet is the chronicler's most common reply, and it usually carries a note — which axis to lean into, which deed would tip the scale.

Above and across the ladder of vocation and advanced class sits another order of distinction — the named offices, conferred by chrysobull at the Emperor's pleasure. The Orphanotrophos of the City, the Parakoimomenos of the Sacred Bedchamber, the Sakellarios of the imperial treasuries, the Drungary of the Watch, the Quaestor of the City. These are not classes a man climbs to. They are commissions.

How they differ from advancement

To take an advanced class is to spend your one promotion and to be known thereafter on that road — Strategos, Metropolitan, Logothete. A named office does no such thing. It does not consume your second vocation, it does not lock you out of an advanced class, and it does not change the path your scroll already walks. A strategos may bear the chrysobull of the Orphanotropheion in the same breath that he commands his theme; an abbot may hold the Sakellarion in a lean year and surrender it gladly when the year mends. The office sits across the cursus honorum, not on it.

How they are earned in play

There are two roads.

• By the chronicler's hand. When your deeds in a season put your name in front of the right patron — largesse spent on the right philanthropy, valour shown at the right wall, cunning brought to bear at the right court — the dispatch may name you. No petition is needed; the chronicler offers the chrysobull and you accept or refuse in your next orders. Refusal is permitted, and sometimes wise.
• By petition. If you believe your deeds have earned a specific commission, write the petition in your own voice and name the office plainly — I petition to be named Orphanotrophos of the City. The chronicler weighs it as he weighs any petition; if granted, the title is recorded on your scroll as an Honour, not as a class, and your roads of advancement remain open.

What an office does in the world

The chronicler will address you by the office in correspondence and dispatch, the Pantheon will list it beneath your name, and the persons of the office's sphere — the orphans' refectory, the night-watch, the treasury clerks — will treat you as their patron and bring their troubles to your door. The office carries no automatic kleos, but the use of it does: feeding the orphans credits Largesse, balancing the books credits Cunning, holding the gates of the City through a riot credits Valour. The right office in the right hands compounds the renown the holder was already accruing.

What an office costs

A commission is also a leash. The Emperor may ask of his named officers what he would not ask of a private man — a public stand on a contested doctrine, a forced loan to the fisc, a fast kept in a hungry year, a journey at no notice. Refusal costs Standing and may end the commission outright; the chrysobull that lifts you also leashes you. An office withdrawn is remembered in the chronicle, and the manner of its losing is remembered longer.

A short bench of named offices

A handful of the commissions a Child of Rome might plausibly hold in this reign:

Orphanotrophos

Lay patron of the Orphanotropheion above the Mese — the great house for the orphan-children of the City. Reports to the Emperor, not to the Patriarch. A post for the largehearted, the patient, and the politically secure.

Parakoimomenos

"He who sleeps beside" — the chief eunuch of the Sacred Bedchamber, who lies across the threshold of the imperial sleeping-quarters and decides what voice reaches the Emperor first at dawn. Historically the most powerful office in the palace.

Sakellarios

Keeper of the private imperial treasury and overseer of the great sekreta. The post of a man the Emperor trusts with the numbers he does not wish read aloud.

Drungary of the Watch

Commander of the night-watch of the Sacred Palace. Reports nightly. Sees, in a year, more of what is wrong with the City than any other officer.

Quaestor of the City

Senior judge in matters of wills, foreigners, and the city's intake of provincials. A post of paperwork and patronage in equal measure.

The chronicler keeps the full bench. These five are the offices most often offered to a player's character; others — the chartulary of the Vestiary, the count of the Stable, the eparch of a provincial city — are conferred where the fiction calls for them.

A title is not bare honour. Nearly every named post — the strategate of a theme, the see of a metropolitan, the chartulary of a treasury, the junior rungs that lead to them — comes with an office estate: a tract of land, a stipend drawn on a sekreton, a residence held for the duration of the post, a share of a customs-house. These are the goods of the office, not of the man. They are conferred when the chrysobull is sealed, and they go with the seat when the seat moves.

The seat holds the estate

When a title passes to another character — by promotion, by petition granted, by the chronicler's hand — the office estate passes with it. The outgoing holder loses the land and the stipend in the same breath that he loses the title; the incoming holder finds them already entered in his ledger when his next dispatch is sealed. What you bought with your own coin remains yours. What the office gave you, the office takes back.

Succession

On the death of a character, personal holdings and debts pass to the successor, in the manner the dispatch has long described. Office-attached estates do not. The strategiate reverts to the Emperor for his next appointment; the see reverts to the Patriarch; the chartulary returns to the sekreton that issued it. The heir inherits the house, the vineyards, the secret hoard — and, if the chronicler wills, the standing to petition for the post in his own name in time. He does not inherit the post itself.

Revocation

A title may be stripped. Disgrace, deposition, recall to the City in chains, a quieter setting-aside when the season turns — the chronicler may revoke a post for cause, and the office estate falls away with it. The seat is then vacant until it is granted again. The manner of a stripping is remembered in the dispatch, and remembered longer than the manner of an elevation; a man set aside from the Drungarate of the Watch is not the same man he was the morning before.

None of this is a button on your scroll. Promotions, transfers, and revocations are narrated by the chronicler in the dispatch that records them, and the ledger is adjusted in the same hand. If your dispatch reports an elevation or a fall, look to your Holdings & purse tab next — the goods of the office will have moved with the title.

Every dispatch carries a single word for the state of your purse — comfortable, stretched, dangerous, or ruinous. The mood is a reading of the trend, not a snapshot of the balance: a small purse may be comfortable if income is steady, and a large one ruinous if it is bleeding out faster than it can be filled.

Comfortable

Income meets or exceeds outgoings; reserves grow. Largesse-deeds land at full effect, and creditors stay quiet. The chronicler may invent small unsolicited gifts — a tenant brings a wheel of cheese, a freedman names his son for you.

Stretched

Outgoings match income too closely; one bad season would tip the ledger. The chronicler narrows the menu of cheap options: a horse must be hired rather than bought, a feast must be smaller than you would like. Largesse-deeds still count, but cost more for the same effect.

Dangerous

You are spending faster than you earn, or a creditor's patience is running thin. Rumours of your debts begin to circulate; a notary may call, a kinsman may write with a worried tone. Largesse-deeds are read by the city as desperation rather than generosity unless the deed is plainly within your means.

Ruinous

The house is failing. Creditors appear in the dispatch — at the gate, in the rumours, in the asks. The chronicler may impose forced sales, demand a Debt condition, or refuse purchases outright until the mood is mended. Largesse-deeds taken in this state earn no kleos; the city remembers them as the last flailing of a sinking man.

What shifts the mood: sustained surplus or deficit (three turns of trend, not one), a single large windfall or loss, a new dependent or a discharged one, a creditor's call. The chronicler is not bound by an arithmetic — the mood is his reading.

A character is described by seven attributes, each scored from one to twenty-two. These are not roll-and-add numbers — there are no dice in your hand — but the chronicler weighs them when resolving what your orders attempt. A high score widens the range of outcomes the world will grant you; a low one closes doors and invites complications.

Strength

The arm and the back. It governs feats of force — a door broken, a man unhorsed, a load carried over a long road. Soldiers and labourers lean upon it; clerks rarely do.

Dexterity

The hand. It governs the stylus and the lock, the bowstring and the surgeon's needle, and any task that asks for fine work or quick fingers.

Endurance

The wind and the constitution. It governs marches, fasts, fevers, long vigils, and recovery from wounds. The first attribute a campaign tests.

Speed

Quickness of foot and of mind in the moment. It governs reaction — the first blow, the first word, the seat taken before another can claim it.

Luck

The Theotokos at your shoulder, or not. The chronicler consults it when a matter is finely balanced and could fall either way — a courier found, an arrow that misses, a name remembered at the right moment.

Standing

Your name in the world. It governs who will receive you, what credit the markets will extend, and whose word the magistrates will weigh against yours. Holdings, vocations, and a household compound it in lived life beyond the bare score.

Education

Letters, languages, scripture, ledger, law. It governs what you can read, what you can draft in your own hand, and what arguments you can make where the literate gather.

The chronicle never prints these numbers in your dispatch — it prints descriptors (strong-armed, of ordinary pace, known on the street). The sheet is for inscription; the chronicle is for living.

At inscription you have one hundred points to distribute across the seven, a floor of one and a ceiling of twenty-two per attribute. Archetype and vocation biases stack on top of your spend.

Every character at inscription is one of the eleven — or, by deliberate refusal, none. The archetype sets your attribute bias and your opening frame; it is the door you walk through into the chronicle.

At inscription you have one hundred points to distribute across the seven attributes, each scored from one to twenty-two. No single attribute may exceed twenty-two: the empire mistrusts a man who is only one thing, and the classless road in particular must not be a back door to a single ruinous statistic. Archetype and vocation biases still stack atop your spend.

A vocation is a secondary calling — a trade, a seat, a quiet partnership — that supplements your archetype. Each costs eight points from the attribute budget at inscription or is petitioned for later at twenty-five kleos. Each carries a small attribute bias and, more importantly, a permanent narrative hook the chronicler may pull upon.

Ordinary characters may hold up to two vocations. The classless may hold up to 3.

An advanced class is a named title at the top of a path. It is never bought; it is conferred by the chronicler at seventy-five kleos and one renown axis at five or more, when the fiction supports it. The benefits are narrative — open doors, a salary the senate envies, the right to be addressed by your style — and political: enemies you did not have before.

Multiclass is the rarest road. At one hundred and fifty lifetime kleos, with one renown axis at eight or more, you may petition to take up a second class alongside your first. The empire then knows you on two roads at once: chaplain-captain, scholar-strategos, merchant-logothete.

What it is for

• To break out of the cul-de-sac your first class has become — the cassock that no longer fits, the lance that has grown heavy.
• To make explicit a doubled life the fiction has already produced — the monk who already commands men, the merchant who already drafts dispatches.
• To bring a second set of attribute biases, a second set of doors, and a second set of enemies into a single life.

Triggers and examples

• Hesychast Monk + Tagmatic Officer: a monk of Piety 9 who led the spring levy is named chaplain-captain. He keeps the hours and the rolls.
• Syrian Merchant + Logothete of the Course: a merchant of Cunning 8 whose caravan letters have outpaced the imperial post is brought into the chancery proper.
• Akritic Lord + Strategos: a border lord of Valour 9 whose private band held the Taurus pass is given thematic seal over the country he already rules.

Multiclass does not erase your first class; it adds. You bear both titles, both burdens, both enemies.

A player may decline every archetype at inscription. They begin with no bonuses, no frame, and no place — only one of the margins: beggar, brigand, runaway, holy fool, exile. It is the hardest road in the chronicle, and the only one whose end is not already written.

What classless means in play

• No attribute bias. You begin with the full hundred points to spend as you wish, and nothing the archetypes give for free.
• No opening frame. The world does not know where to drop the inciting incident; you must write the first one yourself.
• Three vocations, not two. The empire's lock does not bind you. You can be more things at once.
• The advanced-class lock does not apply. A classless character may hold vocations and an advanced class if both are earned and conferred.

The starting margins

Choose one at inscription. It is where the chronicler finds you when the first turn opens.

How a classless character spends kleos

The same three roads are open to you — vocation, advanced class, multiclass — at the same thresholds. In addition, a fourth tier is yours alone:

Examples of the classless road

• The holy fool who becomes a monk. A salos who has barked at archons for two years earns 25 kleos and Piety 5. He petitions to be received into a small house on Olympos as a Hesychast Monk. Granted. He keeps the prayer he learned in the agora.
• The brigand who never seeks an archetype. A dispossessed man takes Silent Partner in a Caravan, Holder of Farms Beyond the Wall, and Reader of Galen as three vocations over twenty turns. He never petitions for a class. At 90 kleos and Cunning 6 he petitions instead for the advanced class Logothete of the Course directly — the chronicler weighs it, finds the fiction strong enough, and grants it. He is now a logothete who came from nowhere; this is permissible only on the classless road.
• The exile who waits. An exile makes no petition for thirty turns, accruing kleos and Valour by quiet service to a frontier town. At 160 kleos and Valour 8 he petitions for multiclass directly — Akritic Border Lord and Mercenary Captain at once. The chronicler grants both, since neither was held before, and the man who was nothing is now two things at once.

The classless road is harder at the start and freer at the end. Whether you walk it to take a class later, or never, is yours.

You name a successor when your character is inscribed. Each turn, the dispatch carries a brief word on where they are and what they are about. If you wish a fuller account — the successor's own dispatch, written as theirs — you may ask for it, and it lets you steer two lives at once.

Whose purse, whose name

A successor named at inscription is part of your house. They draw on the same purse, inherit your standing in the chronicle's eye, and any kleos they earn before they come into their own is credited to your ledger — the empire reads the deed as the house of X, not yet as theirs alone. Their setbacks are also yours: a successor who runs up debts in your name will see the fiscal mood shift before you do.

Reputation moves the same way the purse does. A successor's bright deed is credited to the house ledger immediately, and a successor's public disgrace — open cowardice, a denounced heresy, a market-square humiliation — is felt against the house's name on the same dispatch it is recorded in, not held back until they inherit. The chronicler may soften the blow where the empire would plausibly read the act as the successor's alone and not the house's (a junior caught in his own private folly, far from your hearth), but he will not hide it. If you would rather a wayward successor not shadow your name, the remedy is the old Roman one: in your orders, disown them, and the ledger will record the breach.

When the primary character dies, retires, or otherwise passes from play, the successor steps forward and begins their own ledger — purse, kleos, renown, all reset to a starting share appropriate to the inheritance the chronicler judges they receive. Until that moment, they are a branch of you, not a separate trunk.

As often as the spirit moves you, up to one set of orders every twenty-four hours, and at least one set per week. A new packet filed before the day is out will be refused by the scribe — the chronicler must have time to read what you sent last. The gamemaster will not run a turn without orders, but neither will the world wait long.

The clock is rolling, not fixed

The chronicle does not run on a single global tick — there is no Sunday-night cut-off that resolves every house at once. Each character keeps a personal weekly clock, anchored to the day their last dispatch was sealed. Your deadline is yours alone; your neighbour's is his.

In practical terms: file when you wish, after the twenty-four-hour scribe-rest has passed. The chronicler aims to return a dispatch within roughly forty-eight hours of receiving a packet, sooner in quiet seasons, slower in the press of a campaign turn. If a full week passes with no orders from you, the gamemaster will close a turn on your behalf using a holds the course default — your character continues their stated standing intentions, nothing bold is attempted, no kleos bonus for written care is earned. A character idle for more than fourteen real days slips into a quiet season stub: a brief paragraph noting that little of note befell them, rather than a full dispatch, so the world need not wait on a silent player.

When two clocks meet

When two characters act directly upon one another — a duel, a denunciation in court, an ambush on a known road, a contested bid for the same office — the rolling clock locks. The chronicler picks a single in-world date for the encounter (usually the earlier of the two pending deadlines) and freezes both ledgers there: neither party advances past that moment until the meeting is resolved in a joint turn. If one of you is five days further along on your personal calendar, those five days are held in abeyance and resumed once the encounter is written. Indirect interference — a letter sent, a rumour planted, a hireling dispatched — does not lock the clock; only direct, face-to-face intervention does.

A subscription is a seat at the table for one active primary soul. Your named successor lives alongside that primary, but they are a branch of the same house — a second voice, not a second player-character on a parallel ledger. The successor's optional full dispatch is the only additional chronicled voice the base subscription buys you in a given week.

If you wish to play a second fully independent primary — a different house, a different purse, a different ledger of kleos and infamy with no inheritance line between them — that is a second seat, and at launch it will be priced as an additional subscription. During playtest, additional seats may be requested of the gamemaster and are free.

A character who has died, been laid down, or been retired no longer occupies the seat. You may inscribe a new primary in their place at any time; the old name passes to the chronicle's NPC roster or the pantheon as their ending earned. There is no cap on how many past souls your seat has carried — only on how many breathe at once.

To say it plainly for the billing: retiring or losing your primary does not cost you a second subscription to begin again. The seat is the seat. Inscribe a new primary in the same seat at no additional charge, as often as the chronicle demands of you. A second subscription is only required if you wish to run two primaries simultaneously, on parallel ledgers, at the same table.

Your scroll carries a Holdings & purse tab. It shows what the chronicler records you owning: your estates and real property, your named investments, any secret holdings the world has not yet pried into, your running purse in nomismata, and your open debts. It is the chronicler's notebook, opened for you — not a form.

Why there are no edit buttons

You will not find a button to add a mill, sell a vineyard, gift a horse, take a loan, or call one in. All of that — every acquisition, every sale, every gift, every loss, every debt taken and every debt called — happens in prose orders. "I sell the mill at Dorylaion to the metropolitan and buy two pack-mules with the proceeds" is a perfectly valid order; the chronicler narrates the bargain in your next dispatch and adjusts the ledger off-screen, in his own hand. The same goes for "I borrow three hundred nomismata from the Genoese factor against the spring wool clip."

This is deliberate. The chronicle is a prose game. A spreadsheet of holdings invites the kind of optimisation that flattens a Roman house into a portfolio, and breaks the conceit that the chronicler is the sole keeper of the record. The ledger you see is his ledger, mirrored to you in good faith.

What the ledger keeps, and what it does not

Kept: real property and estates; named investments (a partnership in a trading venture, a share in a workshop); notable secret holdings (the hidden mill, the buried hoard, the chartulary's quiet share); the cash purse in nomismata; outstanding debts, with creditor, terms, and date of reckoning.

Not kept as ledger rows: your household and retinue — servants, soldiers under arms, a wet-nurse, a notary, the boy who runs your errands, the cousin who manages the estate while you are at court. These live in the chronicler's prose and in your own orders, where they belong. Naming every face on the estate would flatten what should breathe; the chronicler will remember the steward who matters and forget the kitchen-boy who does not, and so should you.

The Holdings & purse tab refreshes when a turn is dispatched, not in real time. Between dispatches, what you see is the state of the world as of your last chronicled turn — write the next set of orders against that, and trust the chronicler to keep faith with the change when he closes the next.

World time advances when the chronicler closes a turn. The cadence is set in the seasons table at his elbow; in practice, one real week of play corresponds to roughly one week to one month of in-world time, weighted by the season — high summer and campaigning months are slow, mid-winter weeks pass in a sentence.

Your character's age is computed against the world calendar: a birth year recorded at inscription, and the current in-world year shown atop your scroll. The chronicler does not roll dice for ageing; he keeps a tally, and the body keeps its own. A character of two-and-twenty rides farther than one of two-and-sixty, and a character of two-and-sixty is heard at council where the younger man is not.

Age also gates certain advanced classes and named offices. A Konstantinos of one-and-twenty does not become Strategos of a Theme even with the kleos for it; a Bardas of nine-and-fifty may find the Tagmatic life closes its doors, and the chartulary's stool opens instead. The counsellor names the junior rung; the chronicler grants the post that fits the year of your life. In time, with grey hair and a record of service, the senior post is yours to petition for again.

You may, in your orders, ask the chronicler what year it is and what year you were born in — he will tell you, and he will tell your successor too, when the time comes.

The chronicle stands on many shoulders — players, historical sources, typographers, and the makers of the machinery. The full acknowledgements, including the dedication to Keith, live on their own page.

Read the credits in full →