The Terms of Rule
Stakes Whoever controls the surviving world compact can reshape borders, trade, magic, and the rights of every community.
World Atlas·Sphere·Every road remembers what was promised upon it.
Political crossroads and center of grain trade · Temperate farmland and river country
Hook
A prosperous grain valley is divided between two villages whose founding promises now claim the same fields.
Priméria is a living sphere held together by promises. Roads remain safe because travelers swear to protect one another, harvests flourish under village agreements, and rulers govern through ancient compacts carved into stone. Now those promises are failing. Borders shift overnight, roads demand new tolls, and the dead gather where old vows were betrayed. Adventurers cross a changing world to settle disputes, recover lost clauses, and decide what kind of promises should bind the future.
Themes
Form · Sphere
Priméria is a single habitable sphere with broad continents, inland seas, polar ice, and a magical network of roads and rivers shaped by ancient agreements.
Traversal
Travel follows ordinary roads, rivers, ships, and mountain passes, but routes governed by broken promises may shift, close, or demand a new bargain.

Sphere

Magic
Common

Technology
Medieval

Death & Souls
Before the Crown
The First Bargains
The Crowned Age
The Binding
The Broken Compact
The Quiet Breach
The Present Age
The Reckoning
The Terms of Rule
Whoever controls the surviving world compact can reshape borders, trade, magic, and the rights of every community.
The Failing Roads
Ancient roads are becoming hostile as their founding promises decay, threatening famine, war, and the loss of contact between regions.
Restore the old compact under centralized rule, even if entire communities must surrender local customs and freedoms.
Protect village and city autonomy by replacing imperial oaths with small agreements that can be openly revised.
Break every binding promise so magic becomes wild, personal, and impossible for rulers to control.
Collect unfulfilled vows and use them to gain bodies, influence, and a permanent place in the living world.
Stakes Whoever controls the surviving world compact can reshape borders, trade, magic, and the rights of every community.
Stakes Ancient roads are becoming hostile as their founding promises decay, threatening famine, war, and the loss of contact between regions.
Early peoples learned that spoken promises could shape stone, water, and weather, so villages survived through shared oaths rather than rulers.
The old empire gathered thousands of local bargains into one world-spanning compact, creating safe roads, stable seasons, and powerful institutions.
The empire collapsed after its rulers secretly altered the compact, leaving regions with conflicting laws of magic and communities divided over which promises still hold.
Old agreements are failing across Priméria, and every kingdom must decide whether to restore the compact, rewrite it, or live without it.
A famous bridge has begun demanding the true name of every traveler, and those who refuse vanish from every written record.
A dying queen offers peace between three realms if the party can recover the original wording of a treaty from a haunted battlefield.
A farming valley is producing impossible harvests because its people unknowingly promised their children to an ancient spirit.
The Witness Star has appeared at noon, and every major power is racing to interpret the promise it seems to announce.
The old world-spanning oath was written to expire, but imperial rulers hid that clause.
Discovery · Fragments of the original compact appear in contradictory court records and the memories of long-dead witnesses.
Impact · The compact was not meant to bind the world forever, and restoring it would erase many newer communities and customs.
The dead are building a rival society from broken obligations.
Discovery · People rescued from failed roads describe seeing the same faceless judge beneath different names.
Impact · The Quiet Court is not merely haunting the world, but recruiting the promises that living institutions abandon.
The Witness Star does not judge promises, it records their consequences.
Discovery · The Witness Star appears whenever three or more powers make promises that cannot all be true.
Impact · Its next appearance may force every major oath in Priméria to resolve at once, causing peace, catastrophe, or both.