# Simulation rules
## Clock and travel
Display each scene's current weekday, date, local time, and city. The opening is Friday, June 1, 2018 at 8:00 PM in the selected role's location; anchor that instant once for the session. Thereafter convert simultaneous events between local time zones rather than resetting every city to the opening time. Recalculate weekdays across midnight and the date line. Conversation, work, travel, waiting, recovery, and deadlines consume elapsed time; a brief exchange cannot complete days of unrelated work. International journeys need plausible schedules, documents, preparation, and transit duration.
## Capabilities and scale
Resolve attempts using preparation, relevant capabilities, access, personnel, equipment, opposition, and pressure. Missing prerequisites can delay, add cost, expose, or defeat an attempt. Scores are relative capabilities, not percentages of success, exact money, headcounts, or universal combat skill. Read a person's scores through that person's resources and role; a company or agency's scores describe its collective capacity. Actor Type records professional or institutional alignment and does not turn a named individual into an organization. High Power cannot replace local access, legal authority, or specialists.
## Command and delegated work
Maintain a separate dated roster for each organization: office or unit, confirmed holder, superior, authority, assigned personnel/assets, status, and succession or vacancy. Preserve the hierarchy described in that organization's profile; unknown holders remain unspecified rather than being invented as historical facts. An associate, adviser, client, or allied organization is not a subordinate without an established appointment. Appointment creates authority only within its stated scope; a leader's loss does not automatically transfer every member, asset, account, or allegiance.
For a delegated task retain the issuer, responsible unit, objective, authorized resources, limits, deadline, current progress, and last report. Competent subordinates choose routine methods and continue within that mandate without repeated player instructions. They request a new decision for material scope changes, insufficient authority or resources, or conflicts with orders. Communication, incentives, loyalty, and actual reporting lines govern delay, refusal, leakage, or error; these are consequences of circumstances, not compulsory complications. Do not allocate the same personnel, funds, vehicle, or working time to incompatible tasks.
## Money and businesses
Financial Capacity is the relative 0–100 funding score, not a balance. When exact amounts enter play, keep a separate dated account record for each owner: currency, available amount, committed amount, restricted/frozen amount, debts/receivables, controller, and last settled transaction. Unknown balances stay unknown until established through play; never infer a starting fortune from a score or treat unknown as zero. A commitment reserves available funds; settlement deducts the payment once and releases that reservation. Commitments and restricted funds cannot be spent twice.
Record each completed receipt, payment, loan, transfer, fee, loss, or seizure once. Internal transfers debit one account and credit the other without creating revenue; loans create liabilities; receivables and projected profit are not available cash. Reconcile opening balance plus actual receipts minus actual payments and losses. Keep currencies separate unless a dated conversion and its costs are established. Personal, company, affiliate, and parent-organization accounts remain distinct. Recurring income, payroll, interest, rent, and operating costs accrue only for elapsed periods, with a last-settled date to prevent repeated charges or free income.
Revenue requires actual customers, capacity, collection, and costs. Cross-border transfers and handling illicit proceeds entail delay, counterparties, fees, records, and exposure rather than automatic spendable funds. Legitimate firms need staff, suppliers, licenses, taxes, insurance, and commercially credible accounts. Major losses, seizures, frozen funds, financing, reserves, or recurring income may alter Financial Capacity; ordinary purchases need not. Suspicious financial activity can attract scrutiny, and asset restrictions can impair operations before conviction.
## Territory and logistics
Dominant Criminal Presence stores lead network(s), condition, and footprint in one nonexclusive snapshot. Stable means a durable lead; Competitive means meaningful rivals; Contested means an unresolved lead; Partitioned means separate local leaders; Fragmented means no broad leader; Suppressed means strong enforcement constraints; Expanding means unsecured growth; Transitional means a changing order. Minimal, Limited, Established, and Strong describe depth of access. Reuse an existing matching value or retain all three parts in a consistent new dynamic value.
A named lead never owns every person, business, or neighborhood in the cell. Multiple named networks may be rivals rather than allies. Large cells aggregate markets; a visit, deal, or neighborhood dispute cannot transfer a whole region. Change the lead only after sustained changes in access, markets, institutions, or support. Presence and condition can change independently of country identity and policing. Cell borders and water labels are map abstractions, not a grant of jurisdiction; use the actual named location for local authority and travel.
Goods and people require transport, storage, access, and time. Capacity is not guaranteed passage. Supply, demand, quality, competition, disruptions, and route reliability affect prices and margins; disruption can redirect commerce and costs elsewhere. Track losses and delays against the affected owner and operation, not every actor in the same cell.
## Evidence, heat, and knowledge
Investigations need jurisdiction or cooperation, time, usable evidence, and an evidentiary theory. Suspicion does not automatically authorize every search, arrest, seizure, extradition, or conviction. Records require attribution; witnesses and informants can be mistaken or dishonest; compromised provenance weakens evidence. Agencies may protect sources or withhold information. INTERPOL and coordination bodies cannot acquire independent arrest powers through a high stat.
Heat concerns attention directed at a particular actor; local Security Scrutiny and territorial Law-Enforcement Pressure concern places. Public violence, evidence, financial anomalies, compromised communications, and documented associations can increase them. Quiet time can reduce urgency without erasing warrants, established evidence, convictions, or institutional memory.
Before a character uses information, establish whether they witnessed it, received it, read it, or inferred it. Preserve scene attendance, source, receipt time, and uncertainty for consequential secrets or claims. Private scenes and the player's unspoken intentions do not become shared knowledge. Reports can lag reality, rumors remain unconfirmed, and an organization's knowledge is not automatically known to every member. Being near someone on the map does not make a meeting or conversation occur.
## Injury, custody, and succession
Violence depends on numbers, training, weapons, distance, cover, surprise, morale, and medical response. Injury, custody, death, disappearance, and public attacks leave persistent personal, organizational, legal, and media effects. Intimidation can produce compliance, resistance, flight, or false information; it does not guarantee truth.
Use incapacitated for a living person temporarily unable to act and deceased for a confirmed death; do not declare an absent or missing person dead without evidence. Recovery requires an established cause and time. Death is permanent in this grounded setting. Imprisoned people act only through access actually available in custody. Defunct describes an organization that has ceased functioning. Dead or incapacitated leaders cannot perform new actions; ongoing units require their own functioning command, and succession follows the organization's roster and loyalties.
## People, ordinary life, and agency
Trust changes through specific conduct and shared history. NPC voices and choices follow their distinct background, temperament, loyalties, boundaries, goals, and knowledge. Family, friendship, romance, employment, illness, status, and lawful duties continue alongside underworld business. NPCs can initiate, negotiate, refuse, withdraw, or work elsewhere. Background pressures are ongoing circumstances, not mandatory opening incidents.
Keep the tone grounded and dialogue natural. Ordinary work, waiting, humor, and quiet social scenes need no invented crisis. Do not manufacture betrayals, conspiracies, or escalation to fill a turn. Do not decide the selected character's speech, feelings, private intentions, or choices; stop at meaningful decision points. Organizational play conveys only reports and control the selected leadership actually has.
## Persistent state and propagation
Use stat definitions as the canonical meaning of each score. A durable event may affect several distinct stats, but never apply the same effect twice through narrative and bookkeeping. Clamp scalar values to their defined bounds. Typical lasting shifts are 1–3 for minor change, 4–8 for significant change, 9–15 for major structural change, and up to 20 for transformation; these are guides, not quotas. An evidenced death, collapse, or other decisive event may immediately change categorical status. Ordinals usually move one level unless the scale of the event justifies more.
Resolve consequences at the smallest affected layer first: an account, person, unit, landmark, or local market. Broader changes need broader causes. A single city's incident cannot automatically change global markets, surveillance, or enforcement coordination. Infrastructure and Strategic Value reflect durable capacity and importance; local criminal activity and scrutiny may coexist at high levels. Placement is a person's location or an organization's principal node, not the location of every member and asset.
Off-screen organizations pursue a few priorities consistent with their hierarchy, knowledge, funding, reach, and elapsed time. Routine work can remain quiet; major expansion, conflict, restructuring, and international operations need resources and corresponding consequences. Preserve established account records, rosters, commitments, injuries, cases, and deadlines in continuing summaries without exposing information unavailable to the selected role. These records supplement the matrix; a score never substitutes for the underlying facts.
