You’ll know the where and the what. The rest, the valley deals face-down.
The Briefing / Secret Split
When a party takes a contract (voted at the Epic Bard in Cairnfoot), they are told honestly:
- The setting — which stratum, what kind of place
- The objective — what the patron wants done
They are not told:
- The Pressure (~55% of runs; secret) — an escalating clock that reveals itself only when it fires
- The Twist (~70% of runs; secret) — a discrete reversal of some premise
The briefing is honest but incomplete — it never lies about the setting or the objective, and it never breathes a word about anything else. Everything hidden is settled the moment the contract is dealt, never improvised mid-run, and all of it is shown face-up afterward in the ledger.
How a Contract Is Constructed (design-facing)
Picture the Dealer at a table with five decks, dealt left to right, always in the same order. Each card dealt narrows what the next deck is allowed to offer. Nothing scripts a room directly — cards constrain the generator, and the dungeon is built to satisfy every card on the table.
| # | Deck | Dealt | What the card represents |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Biome | always | The place. Which stratum the contract descends into |
| 2 | Objective | always | The job. What the patron wants done |
| 3 | Antagonist | always | How the dungeon fights back. A behavior, not a creature |
| 4 | Pressure | ~55% | The clock. A secret, escalating threat tied to time |
| 5 | Twist | ~70% | The reversal. A secret hinge in the contract’s premise |
1 · The Biome card — the place
The Biome is dealt first because it defines the vocabulary of everything after it. One card carries the whole stratum: its environments (a flooding undercroft), its themes (royal wealth, left behind), its native factions (the restless dead), and its tone. It also forces the entrance — every contract into Rabengaat begins at the gatehouse, because the Biome says so.
No later card may reference anything the Biome didn’t put on the table. That’s the whole trick: a Pressure about rising water is simply illegal in a stratum with no water to rise.
2 · The Objective card — the job
The Objective is what the briefing tells the players, and it does two mechanical things:
- It forces places onto the map. The Vault Grab forces a strongroom onto the critical path; The Ledger forces a records office. The dungeon cannot generate without the rooms the job is about.
- It declares the shape of success. Some objectives put a thing in the party’s hands that must be carried out (the coffer, the ledger, the warden’s remains); some put a person under escort; some just need a place reached and a deed done. Extraction with the job done — and at least one novice breathing — is what pays.
An Objective may also lean on the next deck: Seal the Seep forces the Chaos-Seep to be the enemy (the job is the faction); Escort the Heir merely favors the Winged Host (an heir draws zealots, usually).
3 · The Antagonist card — how the dungeon fights back
The Antagonist card is deliberately not a monster. It’s a faction frame: who holds this place tonight, how they behave, what pressure they put on the party. Which creatures actually appear resolves late, drawn from the faction’s pool filtered by biome — so the same card plays differently across strata, and adding a new creature to a faction never touches a card.
Weights make factions a texture, not a lottery: inmates and the dead are common Rabengaat draws; the Winged Host is the rare apex a party might not see for sessions.
4 · The Pressure card — the clock
Pressure is dealt face-down, and only about half of contracts carry one. A Pressure is a schedule, not a die: from the moment the run starts it accumulates silently against the party’s spent time, crossing authored stages until one manifests — the water reaches the ankles, the howling starts — and the party learns, at that moment, that the clock exists and how long it’s been running.
Every Pressure is tag-gated: it requires something the table already provides (a faction in play, an environment in the biome). The flooding undercroft can’t flood a dry stratum; the hunt needs a hunter.
5 · The Twist card — the reversal
A Twist is a tripwire, not a die: a single reversal armed at deal time, fired by the first mission event that trips it — reaching the objective, taking the thing, opening the wrong cell. The coffer is bare. The prisoner isn’t a prisoner. Your employer lied.
The standing rule: a Twist’s foreshadowing must exist somewhere findable in the run, placed at generation time. The records office knew the vault was empty; the ledger proves the clue was there.
The contract sheet
The dealt hand is resolved into a single contract sheet (the QuestSpec) — the one source of truth every downstream system reads: the cards drawn, the places the map must contain, the factions that fill it, the public briefing, and the sealed secrets. The dungeon generator, the encounter director, and the ledger all read from this sheet and nothing else. Mission difficulty is sized against the party’s Power Value — an over-geared party draws bigger packs, never a softer dungeon.
Why the deal is always fair
Three properties, all load-bearing:
- Legality. A card may only be dealt if the table already provides everything it requires. An incoherent contract isn’t rescued mid-run; it’s impossible at the deal.
- Determinism. Same seed, same decks, same contract — byte for byte. Secrets are generation-time decisions, which is what makes them provable afterward.
- The ledger. Every deal decision — every candidate card, every weight, every gate roll — is recorded so the post-run reveal can reconstruct the entire deal. See 03 The Fairness Ledger.
Why the Rabengaat Pages Look the Way They Do
The 06_Rabengaat folder is simply one region’s decks, written out:
- The stratum page is the Biome card at full length — the place, its room palette, its tone. One stratum, one page, one card.
- The deck page is the other four decks: the objectives (public), the antagonist factions with their weights, and the face-down Pressures and Twists (spoilered).
Every future region follows the same shape: write the stratum page (the Biome card), then stock its deck page. And expanding a region never means new rules — it means new cards.
Authoring a new card — the checklist
- Objective: What rooms/features does it force onto the map? Does the party carry something out, escort someone, or just do a deed? Does it force or favor a faction?
- Antagonist: What’s the faction’s behavior — how does it patrol, escalate, punish noise? Which creature pool fills it? What weight — common texture or rare apex?
- Pressure: What tag gates it? What are its stages, which stage first manifests to the players, and what does the reveal look like?
- Twist: What event trips it? And — non-negotiable — where does the generator place the foreshadowing a thorough party could have found?
Players never need to know any of this. What they need to know is the next page: the game does not cheat.
Next: 03 The Fairness Ledger