s&box

1.2.1

28 August 2026

The cells. A man sent to do a king's dirty work no longer simply dies when he fails. If a guard is standing there he is taken alive, and from that moment he is a person on the map with a name, a crime and a date: he stands by the hall of the village he came to rob, in grey rags instead of his king's colours, with a steel mark over his head
Getting caught now has four different endings instead of one. The dice decide whether the deed was done, the guard decides whether he walks away. No guard and a clean strike, and he is gone before anyone learns who sent him. No guard and a botched one, and the crowd cuts him down in the street. A guard and a botched strike, and he is taken before he can act. A guard and a clean strike, and the king is dead and his killer is in irons all the same
A plot that leaked is a plot that is expected. If word got out, the town is waiting for him whether or not a single soldier happens to be standing in the square
The sentence fits the crime. Three months for the blood of a king or for powder, six for arson or plague, a full year for a hand in the treasury. His card says who holds him, what he was taken for and how many months he has left, and his health says the rest
Public execution. When the months run out he is put to death in front of the hall. The village that holds him enjoys the spectacle, his own village hears of it and does not, and the two crowns hate each other twenty points more than they did. More than once that is the last push into open war
The answer comes at once. The crown that caught him does not spend a year making up its mind: a weaker victim sends a killer of its own, a stronger one declares war, and one in between sends fire
Three ways to walk out alive, and not one of them can be bought. A god's touch snaps the irons and the man goes home. The village holding him falls to another crown. The village holding him dies. In the last two he leaves with nothing and nobody, which is exactly how men end up in the woods with a knife

A world down to a single crown is no longer a world without schemes. Once the last rival was swallowed, kings stopped plotting entirely: five kinds of plot out of ten quietly switched off, and the late game went silent for centuries at a time. Now the crown looks inward and moves against the governor of its least loyal village, with the same waiting, the same man on the road and the same cells at the end of it
A man in irons is no longer counted as a spear. The village he came from stops listing him among its defenders and stops marching him out to wars he cannot reach

Loading a save no longer renames the whole world. Every name was worked out from where the person happened to sit in memory, and saving shuffles that, so each load handed fresh names to every living soul, kings included. The chronicle went on talking about people who no longer answered to those names. A name now belongs to the person and survives the save