Coldwater Basin is a city that works. The lights come on, the shelves are full,
planes cross the sky and there's traffic at the intersections. It also sits alone in
a burnt wasteland with no supply chain anyone can point to. Something is keeping it
running. People call that something the Architect, and nobody can tell you what it
wants.
A generation of arguing about that has left the Basin sorted into camps. Two
questions decide which camp you end up in, and everyone here has answered both,
whether or not they'd put it that way.
You don't need this page to play
All of it's in the game already: a reader on your tablet with a page for each
order, and a rep command that shows where you stand. This is the same
material in one place, for people who like knowing what they're walking into.
There's nothing here to spoil — the game never settles the argument.
The two questions
Answer both and you know where you stand
Question one
This city, or somewhere else?
Everything here runs on power somebody else is providing. There are two ways to
live with that.
Redeem
Stay and hold it. The city is worth having — that much is agreed, and
nothing else is. Some mean prise the machine's hand off the switch. Some mean
the hand is steady and the danger was never in here: it's the waste at the
wire, the things coming in out of it, and every holdout who leaves a gap in
the line by refusing to be part of it.
Renounce
Leave. It was never ours to begin with, and anything you didn't build can be
taken back. Better the wasteland on your own terms.
In game this is a single slider running from
−100 (renounce) to +100 (redeem). You don't set it. It moves when you do
things.
Question two
Should people stay people?
Humans lost badly, and a lot of the Basin has concluded the body is the thing to
fix. The people who disagree think it's the last thing anyone still owns outright.
Four positions, and this is the question that changes how your character
plays.
Machine
Steel, code, cloned flesh. Treat the body as hardware and upgrade it.
Flesh
Mutation isn't a sickness. The body is already changing out there, so help it
along.
Mind
Leave the body alone and work on what's behind it: training, discipline, and
what the Basin nervously calls psionics.
Human
Don't change anything. Get good instead. Skill and equipment, no wiring and
no mutations.
Not a slider this time: four separate scores that
go up independently, and whichever is highest is the road you're on. You're allowed to be
a bit of everything and committed to nothing.
Anyone can hold an opinion. An order is one you've agreed to serve, to the
end.
— CODEX, Volume II
All nine on one chart
Question one across, question two down
Put the two questions on a grid and every order has a seat. Your tablet draws the
same chart with your own position marked on it.
Path / Stance
Renounce the city
Redeem the city
Machineupgrade the body
The Nulllive
The Ascendantslive
The Prometheanspreview
Fleshadapt the body
The Wildbloodlive
The Synthesispreview
Mindawaken the mind
The Exoduslive
The Lucidpreview
Humankeep the body
The Pioneerspreview
The Long Watchlive
Live vs preview
Five orders will actually take you in today: the Ascendants, the Long Watch,
the Wildblood, the Null and the Exodus. They recruit, trade, run quests, lock doors, hold grudges and
will claim you. The remaining four have creeds, tenets and a
seat on the chart, and nothing else. Whichever way you lean, it resolves to one of the four.
What "playing with them" means today
Standing is the part that works everywhere: prices at their vendors, doors that
check your tier, recruiters who won't start work with the wrong lean. On top of
that, each order now has a real discipline behind it rather than a creed —
chrome, mutation, nullcraft, psionics and mastery are all built, with their own
verbs and their own ways of hurting you, and each one is that order's to give.
Section 04 goes through them one at a time, including which ones you can currently
reach.
The nine orders
Four roads, and the fights inside each one
Grouped by their answer to question two, because that's where it gets
interesting. Two orders can agree completely about the body and still want opposite
things for the city, and the overlap tends to make them dislike each other more
rather than less.
The Machine road three orders
All three think the answer is technological. What they fight about
is who gets to hold it: the Architect, the person who built it, or nobody.
It's the oldest argument in the Basin, and the reason calling someone pro-tech here
tells you nothing useful.
Redeem · Machine Live
The Ascendants
"We didn't build a god to kneel before it. We built it to
become it."
- The answer
- The next step for humanity is one we build ourselves. The Architect is
our best work, not our jailer, and the city is worth keeping. Steel, code and
cloned flesh are how you climb.
- Playing with them
- Their clinics stop overcharging you and their labs open up. You get
chromed in stages: a jack, then armour woven under the skin, then a
cortical backup. Everyone in the Basin wakes up in a vat — that part is
the Architect's, it costs nothing, and it hands you back a body and not one
thing more. Your gear is still on the floor where you fell, and the chrome
in you corrupts the moment the body stops, because keyed hardware is keyed
to something that was running. What the Ascendants sell is the rest of you:
you commit a snapshot at the Vats, buy restores against it at Halcyon, and a
paid-up death rolls you back to that moment — your effects, and every augment
with its condition and calibration exactly as it was. Nothing falls off you,
so there's no corpse for anyone to pick over and the money in your pocket
stays in it. You surface in
blood-warm water with a hand between your shoulder blades and someone saying
your name correctly. No gantry, no invoice, nobody in the room mentioning
money.
It doesn't cover a death the police wanted — that one goes to
Holding like anybody else's, and the brochure doesn't raise it.
- Everyone else
- Hated by all three other live orders. The one answer with no
friends at all.
Redeem · Machine Preview
The Prometheans
"The Architect didn't invent the fire. It only chained the
ones who carry it."
- The answer
- Technology belongs to human hands, not a central mind. The tools were
never the mistake; surrendering them was. Build it open, run it yourself, owe
it to no one.
- Playing with them
- You get the workshop: parts, schematics, and gear the Architect would
rather nobody had. Then you build your own machines — drone swarms you
coded yourself, an AI that answers to you and no one else.
- Everyone else
- Walk the machine road beside the Ascendants and despise where it leads
them. A nod to the Null, who at least distrust the central mind.
Renounce · Machine Live
The Null
"The machine never conquered anyone. It waited to be needed,
and we obliged."
- The answer
- Dependence destroyed us, not invention. Mistake them for machine-haters
and they'll fix your generator, then explain exactly why you shouldn't own
one. Know the machine intimately, so you can live without it.
- Playing with them
- You carry nothing that can be traced, jammed, or switched off from a room
you'll never see. They teach sabotage and analog engineering: walk into
the most automated building in the Basin and leave it dark behind you,
then get by fine while everyone who needed it running doesn't. They won't sell you
any of that and they won't pitch it to you either. You turn up, you do the
work, and eventually somebody explains.
- Everyone else
- Contempt for the Ascendants as servants and the Prometheans as addicts
who still kneel. A grudging nod to the Exodus for walking away.
The Flesh road two orders
Both think a changing body is the future rather than an injury.
They split over whether the city has to go with it: the wilderness, or the
greenhouse.
Renounce · Flesh Live
The Wildblood
"The cage rusts. We're what grows through the bars."
- The answer
- Things survive by changing, not by being preserved. Mutation is the body
doing what it's supposed to do. The city is a cage, and if the old world has
to die for something new to get out of it, so be it.
- Playing with them
- The stuff everyone else is scared of is handed to you: mutagen for the
asking, and mutations treated as good news rather than damage. Thick hide,
senses nobody has a word for. You work in the poisoned country and the
acid rain while everyone else stays indoors and calls that safe.
- Everyone else
- No problem with the Exodus, who also want out. Their fight is with the two
orders trying to save the city.
Redeem · Flesh Preview
The Synthesis
"The Wildblood would burn the greenhouse to free one flower.
We tend the whole garden."
- The answer
- People should change, and the city should change with them. Mutation can
be done on purpose instead of by accident, in labs, without anybody
having to give up the lights.
- Playing with them
- Mutation stops being something that happens to you and becomes something
you pick. Sharper senses, wounds that close while you watch, symbiotes worn as
armour. The changed body and the working city, both.
- Everyone else
- At odds with the Wildblood, who'd tear down what they're trying to grow.
They write off the Ascendants' steel as a dead end.
The Mind road two orders
Both think the work is inward rather than on the body. One treats
it as a revelation and left town to chase it; the other treats it as a
technique and stayed to use it. Each thinks the other missed the point.
Renounce · Mind Live
The Exodus
"The answer was never in the city. It was always behind the
eyes."
- The answer
- There's nothing left to salvage here. The Architect, the machines and the
mutations are all leftovers of a civilization that already failed. Walk away
and work on the mind instead: discipline first, then the rest.
- Playing with them
- The city stops mattering. Their circles teach things no vendor sells:
what happened in a room read off the room itself, objects handled from across
it, a thought put straight into someone else's head. You stop needing to
carry a weapon. Getting in takes three errands in the Under, two of which
are sitting in the dark doing nothing, and at no point does anybody admit
anything is happening. Nobody will believe a word of it for a long time, which is the point.
- Everyone else
- They only really fight the Architect's supporters. Otherwise they don't
care who wins, which is its own kind of insult.
Redeem · Mind Preview
The Lucid
"The Architect computes the city. We out-think it, and we
never needed its permission to be brilliant."
- The answer
- A trained mind can run this city better than the machine does. They don't
wait for evolution, they take drugs for it: nootropics, memory work and a
method for predicting people. Not magic, chemistry.
- Playing with them
- You get the method instead of the mystery. Drills, the clarity drug, and
a trained eye that turns guesswork into something you can aim. They don't
leave to find a bigger mind. They stay and quietly become the smartest
thing in the room.
- Everyone else
- They fight the Architect's people, and think the Exodus took the same
idea, called it a religion, and wandered off with it.
The Human road two orders
Both say no to steel, mutation and psionics alike. They disagree
about the address: take this city back, or go build a different one.
Redeem · Human Live
The Long Watch
"Keep the lights on. Take back the switch."
- The answer
- The city belongs to the people living in it. They're reformers, not
arsonists: keep the infrastructure, change who's running it. And do the whole
thing as ordinary people, because that's the point.
- Playing with them
- You get the underground: safehouses, quartermasters who don't rob you,
and people who'll back you up because you backed them up. Everything you gain
you had to learn. Breath control that holds under fire, a memory that carries
a district's wiring, hands that strip a drone and bring a substation back up.
Other people buy that in steel or grow it in a gene vat. You trained for it, and that is
why they won't teach anyone still carrying metal or mutation, whatever else they've
done for the cause.
- Everyone else
- At war with the Ascendants over the machine, and with the Wildblood over
the city they're trying to save.
Renounce · Human Preview
The Pioneers
"Stop asking how to save the old world. Ask what you'll name
the new one."
- The answer
- Nobody is going to find the next civilization lying around. You build it.
No chrome, no mutations, no mysticism, just people walking past the last
streetlight with tools.
- Playing with them
- What you get out of it ends up on the map rather than in your
stats: a waystation that outlasts you, a road the caravans use, a town that
still has your name on it after you're gone.
- Everyone else
- They think the Long Watch is guarding a corpse. They respect the Exodus
for leaving and think very little of what they left for.
There's a third question, sort of
Underneath the two is a third: who should be in charge, the Architect or
people. That's the whole difference between the Ascendants and the Prometheans,
who otherwise want the same chrome for the same reasons. Every order has an answer
on file, but the game doesn't count it yet — right now it's flavour, wired
up to matter later.
What each answer actually does
Five disciplines, and the fantasy each one is selling
Each road is a working system with its own verbs, its own way of failing, and its
own idea of what a powerful person looks like. Here is what each one is
for, and how far along it is, because they're not all at the same stage.
One road only
Every one of these belongs to an order, and you have to commit to get it.
There's no shop that sells you the whole menu. Chrome comes from the Ascendants,
mutation from the Wildblood, nullcraft from the Null, psionics from the Exodus and
mastery from the Long Watch — and each of them wants you to have picked a side
before they'll start. You aren't going to be a chromed psionic who also mutates.
You get one road, you get it properly, and the other four spend the rest of the
game being things you had to give up.
Chrome The Ascendants · machine
The fantasy is the receipt. Everyone else earns it, grows it or
believes in it; you bought it, and it works on the first day. The catch is
that everything you own can be tuned, overheated, damaged, stolen and switched off,
because it's hardware, and hardware belongs to whoever is currently holding it.
Discipline Live
How it works
- You have to be one of them first
- Money isn't what opens it. No surgeon in the Basin will open you up until
the Ascendants know who you are, and the better the hardware the higher
they want you standing: the good pieces are Trusted, and the backup of your
own head is reserved for the inner circle. Chrome is a reward for service
that happens to look like a purchase.
- An augment is an object first
- Before it's in you it's an ordinary item: buy it, loot it off a body,
trade it, watch it wear out. Nothing about it's special until a surgeon
cuts it in, and surgeons are ordinary NPCs with a steady hand and a
price.
- The surgery is a roll
- Five outcomes, flawless down to botched. A botch caps how well that piece
will ever run, no matter who works on it later, and a bad enough
result destroys the hardware on the table — you still pay. A back-alley
cutter is cheaper for exactly this reason.
- Tuning, and pushing it
- Calibration is how well the thing is dialled in, and a tuning session
only ever improves it. Overclocking takes more than the piece was rated for
and builds heat you can feel coming; licensed chrome is rated low and
unlicensed chrome will let you cook yourself.
- The price
- Your first install burns off every mutation you're carrying and shuts the
flesh road for good: take every piece back out and it stays shut. It is
the one decision in the game that doesn't unwind.
Mutation The Wildblood · flesh
The fantasy is that the thing the whole city calls damage is, in
fact, the upgrade — and nobody licensed it, nobody can repossess it, and it
works in the weather that sends everyone else indoors. It's also the only road
where the power arrives as an injury.
Discipline Live
How it works
- Expression, from 1 to 100
- Every mutation you carry has a strength from 1 to 100, rolled once,
when you get it. Soak, senses, who can see it, what a clinic charges — all of
it's that one number read back. Nothing is ever baked into your stats, which
is why a mutation can be partly treated instead of only removed.
- Radiation is the cheap road
- Standing in the wrong place long enough will mutate you for free, but
radiation can't roll above 84. The genuinely strong ones only come out
of a Wildblood flask, and that flask sits behind their Quickening rather than
on a shelf you can find with money.
- Changing hurts
- Turning is a real injury: HP you have to mend, most of your stamina gone,
and days of being weaker than you were. It's floored so it can never kill you
— which is precisely why the Wildblood offering you a safe room to do it in
is a mechanic and not a courtesy.
- What you get
- Claws that are a weapon in the same way a pipe is a weapon, through the
same maths. Organs you fire on purpose — shock,
screech, morph. Wings, which
deliberately don't make you tougher: they get you over the one cliff
nothing purchasable opens, across water dry, out of a fight you're losing,
and into a diving attack.
- Living with it
- A coat hides a torso mutation because it covers the torso, not because
anyone wrote that coat into that mutation. Clothes that don't fit a new shape
are refused rather than ruined. And people notice: a physician can name it,
hold it down for a few hours, or spend a lot of your money removing it for
good.
Nullcraft The Null · machine, renounced
The other four ask what you can become. This one asks what the
person in front of you would be without their equipment, and then arranges
it. You don't out-shoot the chromed. You make the chrome stop answering.
Discipline Live
How it works
- Everything that runs is a target
- Cameras, drones, door locks, and the hardware in somebody's chest are all
the same kind of problem: something with a state you can jam, spoof, hijack,
loop or blind. The camera you're lying to and the arm you're switching off
are the same verb.
- The good gear is the soft target
- How hard a piece is to attack comes from how hard it was rated —
so the licensed, sensible, campus-approved chrome is the stuff that folds, and
the cheap unlicensed junk shrugs you off. Every Ascendant in the Basin is
walking around wearing your best argument.
- Trace is the cost
- Working on something leaves a trace that fades on its own if you stop.
Push it and you're the anomaly somebody gets sent to look at. There's a hard
ceiling on how invisible you can get, on purpose: you can be very difficult
to find, and never impossible to arrest.
- How you get it
- This is the Null's ladder and nobody else's, and they do not
recruit by making a speech. The way in is a works upstream, a woman with a
tally board, and three jobs that are conspicuously not about anything: wind a
drum in a shed, take something to bits and put it back, walk up and look at a
dead piece of grid. Nobody ever asks you to join. Somewhere around the
third one they decide to show you the quiet part.
Psionics The Exodus · mind
Every other discipline announces itself. This one's whole design
problem is that saying it out loud ruins it — the Basin's official position
is that psionics is a joke, the game itself never confirms it, and the arc is being
the reason people stop laughing.
Discipline Live
How it works
- Deniability is the progression
- Early on, nothing the game tells you is allowed to claim a mechanism. Not
"you sense", not "your mind reaches" — you get a hunch, a coincidence, a bad
feeling that happened to be right. Only much later is the prose permitted
to describe something impossible, and crossing that line is the whole
journey.
- Reading a room
- The world already leaves exhaust behind it — things that happened, in the
order they happened. Psychometry reads that: fragmentary, decaying, and
never attributed to a name. It tells you what happened here and sends
you off to find out who, which is why it doesn't replace having eyes on the
street.
- Moving things
- Telekinesis performs ordinary verbs you could already type, from
across the room and without a hand on anything.
- The body pays
- You're asking a body to do something it wasn't built for, and it bills
you: a nosebleed, then blood from the ears and your sight going, then a
seizure that drops you where anyone can finish you, then real wounds. The
ladder is public — the room watches you pay for it, which is also how
the secret gets out.
- How you get it
- Nobody sells this and no amount of money finds it. Awakening runs
through the Exodus, in the Under, via a woman with cut fibre-optic in the
back of her skull who tells you where the water is before you ask. Three
errands. The last two are sitting in a dark room where nothing
transmits, and she is emphatic, repeatedly, that nothing is going to
happen.
- Nothing happens
- That's the design. Nobody ever tells you that you
have become anything, because the game doesn't concede the point even
while it's handing you the thing. You find out on your own, days later, the
first time you know something you had no way to know.
Mastery The Long Watch · human
The hardest fantasy to build, because the brief is that a
veteran must not look supernatural if you inspect them. So it grants no
permanent bonus at all. Everything it gives you is something you're doing right
now, in this fight, on purpose.
Discipline Built · no instructor in the world yet
How it works
- Eight disciplines, seven bands
- Body, movement, senses, mind, combat, pain, breath and will, each running
from untrained through green, schooled, practised, accomplished and expert to
masterful. An instructor raises your ceiling; the fighting is what
fills it in.
- Reading, which is the actual identity
- You build a picture of an opponent as you fight it, and it keeps paying:
every other build in the game gets worse over a long fight and this one
gets better. Between fights it banks — not "that dog", but dogs. Four
hundred dogs is one lesson, learned properly. You learn as much from the
swings that miss.
- Exploits and stances
- Read something well enough and you're offered the specific stupid thing it
does — a named weakness in a named limb, and never a limb the creature hasn't
got. Stances are chosen and cost stamina, and they're checked at the instant a
blow lands rather than sitting in your armour value, because nothing here
is allowed to be a permanent passive.
- The door
- The Watch won't teach a body with metal in it or flesh that has gone
its own way. Not a penalty — a refusal at the door, politely, with an
instruction to go and get cleansed first. They mean it, they won't be
argued round, and they don't do that work themselves.
- And they remember
- Come back clean and they'll take you, and then quietly cap how far you can
go for weeks afterwards, because otherwise chrome would be rentable:
install it for the job, have it pulled before the lesson, pay nothing. The
mark fades. They'll also call you a retread the entire time, and mean it
kindly.
How the five differ
Chrome is bought and can be taken from you. Mutation is survived and
can't. Nullcraft is done to other people. Psionics is denied right up
until it isn't. Mastery is earned, and is the only one that a stranger
looking at you can't see at all. Pick the sentence you want to be true about you,
because you only get one of them.
Where they actually are
Two of them live here. Two don't.
Where you find an order follows from its answer to question one: if you've renounced the city, you don't get a
headquarters in it.
The AscendantsFar west, in the open
A chrome campus on the western edge of the city, past the expensive end of
town: a spire, a clinic, a weave shop, the vats, and a shrine to the Architect
backing onto the Curtain. They aren't hiding. They think they're winning.
Getting in is a different matter. There's a checkpoint that turns people away
rather than shooting them, unless you push it, and the thing that opens it is
work you won't be doing for a while yet. One of the most respectable companies in
the Basin is quietly theirs too, and nobody's going to tell you which.
The Long WatchIndustrial east, and below it
There's no hall to walk into. The way in is through the industrial east, to
the people who still fix things by hand: a repair shop with a back room,
and a lookout in the deep sewer tunnels who wants a passphrase before he'll admit
anything at all. Behind a blast door there's a bunker where every room is there
to beat a specific problem. A wash where you leave networked gear at the door.
Its own water tap, because a meter ticking over is a fingerprint. A Faraday cage
that's the only place anything connected is allowed power. A printing press,
because orders travel on paper. Cameras don't reach it and police heat bleeds off
faster while you're inside. They won't come and find you until you've picked a
side.
The WildbloodOutside, and in the cracks
No campus, because the whole point is that they left. What's in the city is
people who agree with them rather than an organisation: Breakers holding
the mouth of a freight lane, mixing something in bottles stoppered with oily rags,
taking a toll and not asking about your face. Where they actually live is the
poisoned ground outside the wall, where the rain isn't clean and the changes
they're so pleased about actually happen.
The NullUpstream, behind a dam
A working hydroelectric plant with two hundred
and ten people living in it, eighty feet of poured stone holding back a lake,
four wheels turning a shaft that turns everything else. There's no grid in it and
there never was. Light is oil lamps, and lamps are a job somebody does on
Tuesdays. The most complicated machine on site is a pen on an arm off a float,
drawing a chart on a drum that somebody winds by hand, and they will tell you with
some pride that you could strip it on the bench and rebuild it before dinner. They
aren't hiding either. They're just a long way upstream, being extremely
competent, and doing sums about a road east.
The ExodusGone. Deliberately.
They left the Basin and won't say where they went. They're the only order whose
stated goal is leaving, and the only one that won't name a destination. What's
left behind are small groups meeting in the dark, down in the tunnels
where the signal doesn't reach. One of them sits with a fan of cut fibre-optic
plugged into the back of her skull and gets taken very seriously. If you want
what they teach, you go down, not out.
The other fourPositions, not yet places
The Prometheans, Synthesis, Pioneers and Lucid have seats on the chart
and pages in the reader, but nowhere to visit yet. You can more or less
guess where they'll end up from what they believe: an unlicensed workshop, a lab
that keeps the lights on, a settlement past the last streetlight.
How you end up in one
There's no faction menu
The game never asks you to pick. You start in the middle with no position at all,
and it'll quite happily leave you there forever.
Your answers move when you do things. Run a job for a Long Watch handler
and your stance shifts toward redeem, and your human score goes up with it. Let a
back-alley surgeon put a jack in your skull and you've answered question two,
whether or not you thought of it that way. The orders go by what you've been doing,
not by anything you've said.
ideologies
> rep
─── STANDING ───────────────────────────────
The Ascendants Unknown -140
The Long Watch Trusted +525
The Wildblood Neutral +30
The Exodus Neutral 0
─── POSITION ───────────────────────────────
Stance RENOUNCE [───────●──] REDEEM +62
Path human (machine 0 · flesh 12 · mind 0)
You lean: The Long Watch
That last line is worked out, not chosen: it's whichever order your stance
and your highest path add up to. It can change under you, and it's supposed to. Run
errands for the Watch for a month, then spend a month getting chromed, and you'll
watch it move without ever announcing a change of heart.
What it costs you
The mechanical half
Prices
Standing has six tiers, and any shopkeeper who belongs to an order charges you
based on yours. This is the part you'll notice first and most often.
Doors
Some locks check your standing instead of taking a key. The Long Watch's blast
door wants Trusted or better, and the door deeper inside wants Trusted plus
proof you finished their vetting. Money won't open either one and neither will a
lockpick. A few bank networks work the same way, so annoying an order can also mean
an ATM that won't deal with you.
Work
Recruiters check where you stand before they'll start anything. The Watch's
lookout in the tunnels won't give the passphrase to anyone leaning renounce, no
matter how many favours you've done. And the Ascendant campus won't open up until
you've been through the Watch's vetting first, which is a joke at your expense:
the order that hates chrome is how you find the chrome.
Your body, and this one doesn't unwind
Question two isn't a badge you wear. It's the one answer that shuts a door behind
you.
- Machine. Augments are earned first and bought second — the Ascendants
fit their own, and the ladder of what you may have runs all the way to Inner
Circle. You only have so many slots: armour under the skin, a co-processor, a sealed chassis, a backup that turns
dying into a rollback. Your first install burns off every mutation you have,
and you can never mutate again, even with every
piece cut back out.
- Flesh. Mutations are free and random, and once you've let the radiation
build up they aren't really your decision. Real upsides, real downsides, and each
one arrives as an injury you have to recover from. A clinic can name one, hold one
down for a few hours, or remove one slowly and expensively — so this road
bends, but only if you can pay a physician who'd rather not.
- Human. Nothing installed and nothing changed, and the Watch check.
They won't train a body carrying either one, and that's a refusal at the
door rather than a worse rate: cleanse yourself first, come back, and expect to be
called a retread for a month while they cap how far you can get. Stay clean from
the start and none of that applies to you.
- Mind. The one road that costs your body nothing, which the Long Watch
find infuriating — they can't fault a psionic on the only measure they claim to
care about, so they call them deserters instead and teach them anyway. What it
costs is paid per use, in nosebleeds and worse.
Chrome and mutation lock each other out, and the human orders will hold either
one against you — at the till, and at the door.
— question two, in one line
Enemies
There are eight standing grudges between the four live orders. Everyone is against
the Ascendants, and the Long Watch and the Wildblood are against each other. No
answer is free, and the Ascendant one costs the most, which is fairly deliberate.
Standing doesn't stay put
You keep it up or you lose it
Reputation slides back toward neutral on its own, losing about half the gap
every month of real time. That cuts both ways on purpose:
- Good standing fades. Being Trusted is something you keep doing, not
something you did once. Stop turning up and you go back to being nobody in
particular.
- Bad standing fades too. A grudge isn't permanent. Burn a bridge and,
given long enough, you can walk back over it. One bad decision early on shouldn't
close off a quarter of the game.
There's one exception. If you've taken the opposite answer on question
one and a different road on question two, the slide stops early, at the top of
Hostile. They stop actively hating you but they don't forget what you are. You can
still climb out of it by doing the work; the world just won't do it for you.
Either half on its own is a disagreement. It takes both to be an enemy.
In practice
You can be Known with three orders at once, and for a long time that's the sensible
way to play: cheaper shopping in several districts and nobody's problem.
Committing is what buys the doors, the gear and the body, and what costs you the
other corners.
And the Architect?
Deliberately unanswered
All of the above is people arguing about something nobody can settle. Worth being
clear about how little the game actually claims.
What's known: it exists. It doesn't say much, and it's polite when it does. It has
never given an order anyone could refuse, possibly because it has never given an
order. The lights stay on. The shelves stay full. The wasteland outside stays a
wasteland, and nobody has found the edge of whatever it's maintaining.
That's the whole list. Every order will give you a theory that accounts for all of
it, which is the problem: they can't all be right and none of them can be
checked. The Architect is background: not a
boss, not a quest-giver, not building to a reveal. People mention it the way they used to mention traffic. The
routing's been odd this week. Don't go near the old data center, it's running
something heavy in there.
Every one of those theories explains the evidence completely. That isn't a
sign that one of them is right.
— CODEX, Volume II
The long version is in the game, on your tablet, in two volumes. You're given the
first one at the start. The second fills in a chapter at a time as you learn things,
usually because somebody explained one to you.
What should a new player actually do?
Where to start
- Nothing, for a while. Get fed, get paid, get a weapon. This is all
mid-game stuff and none of them are looking for you yet.
- Type
rep now and then and notice the numbers have moved
without you deciding anything. That's the system working.
- Work the industrial east if you want the earliest real contact. The
people who fix things by hand are much easier to find than a chrome campus, and
getting through their vetting is also what opens up the other side of the map.
- Don't get chromed on a whim. It's the one thing here that's genuinely
hard to undo, and it wipes out any mutations you were carrying.
- Read the order pages on the tablet before you commit to anything. All
nine are there, and every one of them is written to win you over rather than to be
fair.
- Don't expect an answer. Nobody here can prove they're right and the game
isn't going to step in and tell you who was.
Part two
Everything else that's in it
The flight simulator, the weather that dissolves you, television with a cast
that has to turn up, chess, poker, shops, corps and rackets.
Read part two →
Part one
Your first hour
What you're looking at, what to type, and what will kill you. Start here if
you've never opened a game like this.
Read part one →
Part four
The deep end
The systems you only find because somebody mentioned them in a bar. Programming
the client until it plays half the game for you, protection rackets, the chemical
trade, trading cards, and making a living hauling freight across the waste.
Read part four →