s&box

1.2.2

29 August 2026

The prison is a building now. Stone walls, a barred window across the whole front and an ironbound door, and it goes up the moment there is somebody to lock up: no village keeps an empty jail waiting, and none builds a second one. Before this the cells were an idea with nothing behind them, and a captive simply stood on the grass by the hall
A man serving his term is inside, not on display. He is gone from the map for as long as the sentence lasts, and the building speaks for him: the walls say where he is, the mark says how long he has left
Click the prison and it tells you who is in there and what for: every name, every crime and the months left on each
A prisoner is marked on the map the way a capital is. A barred sign with his name and his remaining months hangs over the village and stays the same size however far you pull back, so a man in the cells can be found from the far view instead of hunted for village by village
Up close he is unmistakable: irons on his head in a colour no banner uses, and grey sacking instead of his king's colours. He wears no crown, no banner and no blade, and among a crowd of coloured shirts that reads at a glance
Execution is a procession, not a number hitting zero. When the months run out the man is brought out of the cells, two of the village walk him across to the block by the hall, and he is put to death there in the open. The body lies on the square for a while afterwards, so the player can walk over and see what happened rather than read about it later

Starting a new world without restarting the game no longer breaks the plotting. A king's schemes, his man on the road and everything built on them kept pointing at the world before, so in every world after the first one of a sitting they quietly did nothing at all: the plot ran, the chronicle reported it, and not one thing happened on the map you were looking at