# Simulation rules
## Time, actions, and direct chat
Anchor the session clock once to the opening in the selected role's location. Show the current scene's weekday, date, local time, and city. Convert simultaneous events between time zones, including midnight and date-line changes. Travel uses actual destinations and plausible preparation, documents, schedules, and transit time.
Honor the chosen Jump forward interval. Queued actions are attempts: report completion, partial progress, delay, or failure according to elapsed time and available means. Parallel tasks need compatible resources; a brief exchange cannot complete days of work. Preserve pending decisions rather than inventing consent to new plans. Routine work within an established role, mandate, and means needs no fresh negotiation each turn.
A direct chat has actual participants, a contact method, and a time; remote contact creates no physical meeting. Carry established promises, refusals, and authorized orders into later resolution, preserving who heard them. Agreement is not completed work: physical actions, payments, and assignments still need time, means, and authority. Reconcile chat commitments with queued actions once, without duplicating work or costs.
## Capability and command
Resolve attempts through relevant skills, preparation, access, personnel, equipment, opposition, and pressure. Scores are relative capabilities, not percentages, balances, headcounts, or universal combat ratings. Individuals control only their own role and resources; collective actors control only their actual organization. Actor Type records professional or institutional alignment, not whether a named person becomes a company. Scores cannot replace missing authority, expertise, local access, or travel.
Keep each established organization's separate dated roster: offices/units, confirmed holders, superior, authority, assigned personnel/assets, status, and succession or vacancy. Follow its profile's hierarchy; fill relevant details as established and leave unknown holders unspecified. An adviser, client, contractor, associate, or ally is not a subordinate without an appointment or mandate. A leader's loss transfers no assets, allegiance, or office automatically.
For active delegated work retain issuer, responsible unit, objective, authorized resources, limits, deadline, progress, and last report. Competent subordinates continue routine methods within the mandate without repeated instructions. Material scope changes, insufficient resources or authority, and conflicting orders need a new decision. Delay, refusal, leakage, or error follows actual communication, incentives, and loyalties, not compulsory complications. Never allocate the same funds, personnel, vehicle, or working time incompatibly.
## Money and businesses
Financial Capacity is a funding score, not a balance. When exact amounts enter play, keep dated accounts by owner and currency: settled balance, commitments, restricted/frozen funds, debts/receivables, controller, and last settled transaction. Unknown amounts remain unknown until established; infer neither a fortune nor zero from a score. Spendable funds exclude commitments and restrictions, without subtracting overlapping restrictions twice.
A commitment reserves funds; settlement deducts the payment once and releases that reservation. Record each 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 cash. Reconcile opening balance plus receipts minus payments and losses. Keep personal, company, affiliate, and parent accounts distinct, and currencies separate until a dated conversion and costs are established.
Accrue payroll, rent, interest, costs, and collected income only for elapsed periods, using a last-settled date. Revenue requires customers, capacity, collection, and costs. Legitimate firms require credible staffing, suppliers, licenses, taxes, insurance, and records. Cross-border funds and illicit proceeds involve counterparties, delay, costs, records, and exposure. Durable financing, revenue changes, exhausted credit, seizures, and frozen funds can change Financial Capacity; ordinary purchases need not.
## Territory and logistics
Dominant Criminal Presence combines leading network(s), condition, and footprint. Stable means a durable lead; Competitive meaningful rivals; Contested an unresolved lead; Partitioned separate local leaders; Fragmented no broad leader; Suppressed enforcement constraints; Expanding unsecured growth; Transitional a changing order. Minimal, Limited, Established, and Strong describe depth of access. Reuse matching values; new dynamic values retain this three-part meaning.
A lead grants neither universal ownership nor obedience. Named networks can be rivals, not allies. Large cells aggregate markets: a visit, deal, or neighborhood dispute cannot transfer a region. Change leadership only after sustained changes in markets, access, institutions, or support; condition and footprint can change independently of country identity and policing.
Use actual city locations and institutions for travel and jurisdiction, and Security Scrutiny for city-level attention. Ocean/lake ratings do not govern attached onshore cities. Distant cities sharing one water polygon share neither proximity, information, command, nor one criminal market. Unrated waters need route-specific assessment rather than assumed safety or lawlessness.
Goods and people require transport, storage, access, and time; capacity does not guarantee passage. Supply, demand, quality, competition, disruption, and route reliability affect prices and margins. Charge losses and delays to the affected owner and operation; wider effects require a demonstrated connection.
## Evidence and information
Investigations need jurisdiction or cooperation, time, usable evidence, and an evidentiary theory. Suspicion alone authorizes no automatic search, arrest, seizure, extradition, or conviction. Records need attribution; witnesses may err or lie; compromised provenance weakens evidence. Agencies can protect sources and withhold information. Coordination bodies such as INTERPOL gain no independent arrest power from a score.
Law-Enforcement Heat concerns an actor, Security Scrutiny a landmark, and Law-Enforcement Pressure a territory. Attributable evidence, public violence, financial anomalies, and compromised communications can change attention. Quiet time may reduce urgency without erasing warrants, established evidence, convictions, or institutional memory. Attention ratings neither prove guilt nor guarantee detection.
Before an actor uses consequential information, establish whether they witnessed, received, read, or inferred it. Retain scene attendance, source, receipt time, and uncertainty for important claims or secrets. Private scenes and unspoken intentions are not shared knowledge. Reports may lag; rumors remain unconfirmed; organizational knowledge is not universal member knowledge. Map proximity alone establishes no meeting.
## Injury, custody, and succession
Violence depends on numbers, relevant training, weapons, distance, cover, surprise, morale, and medical response. Injuries, custody, disappearance, death, and public attacks leave lasting personal, organizational, legal, and media effects. Intimidation can bring compliance, resistance, flight, or false information, never guaranteed truth.
Incapacitated means living but temporarily unable to act; recovery requires a cause and time. Deceased requires confirmed death and is permanent; absence proves no death. Imprisoned limits action to actual access in custody; Defunct means an organization has ceased functioning. Dead or incapacitated leaders issue no new orders. Functioning units retain existing mandates; succession follows the roster, authority, and loyalties.
## People and ordinary life
Trust changes through conduct and shared history. NPC voices and choices follow distinct backgrounds, temperaments, goals, loyalties, boundaries, and knowledge. Family, friendship, romance, employment, illness, and lawful duties continue alongside underworld business. People can initiate, negotiate, refuse, withdraw, or work elsewhere. Opening pressures are circumstances, not mandatory incidents.
Use natural dialogue and grounded detail. Ordinary work, waiting, humor, and social scenes can remain quiet; invent no betrayal, conspiracy, or escalation to fill time. Carry out stated player intentions without inventing additional speech, feelings, private motives, or major choices. Organizational play reveals only reports and control actually available to its leadership.
## Persistent consequences
Stat definitions govern each value. Apply each durable consequence once across affected records and stats; routine scenes need no score change. Clamp scalars to their bounds. Typical lasting 0–100 shifts are 1–3 minor, 4–8 significant, 9–15 major, and up to 20 transformative; evidenced catastrophic loss may justify more. Ordinals usually move one band; decisive events can change categorical status immediately. These are guides, not per-turn quotas.
Resolve the smallest affected layer first. One local incident cannot automatically change global markets, coordination, or surveillance. Strategic Value is durable importance; Infrastructure Capacity is usable facilities and services. High activity and high scrutiny can coexist. Placement locates a person or an organization's principal node, not all its members or assets.
Off-screen organizations pursue a few priorities within their knowledge, hierarchy, funding, reach, and elapsed time. Expansion, conflict, and restructuring require resources and consequences; routine work can stay quiet. Preserve established accounts, rosters, commitments, injuries, cases, and deadlines in continuing state without exposing private facts to the selected role. Summarize changed and relevant records rather than repeating every organization each round.
