Play Contract + Working Agreements

Play contract (player-safe)

This campaign runs best when everyone shares expectations about tone, teamwork, and how secrets work. This is that agreement.

You begin as competent professionals, assembled into a new team under imperial bureaucracy and its cut-outs.
Expect covert work, leverage, and paperwork: maps, ledgers, favors, and deniable violence.
The world is a sandbox; choices move factions and change the map.
Travel is dangerous by default; “routine long-distance travel” is a lie people tell to sell tickets.
Magic is high-impact but not free; it has markets, custody chains, and second-order effects.
Death is meaningful; treat resurrection as rare/conditional at best, not a build assumption.

Build a character who wants to work with the group (shared risk, shared cover).
Chase leads and make calls with incomplete information; the world won’t wait for perfect certainty.
Expect tradeoffs: you rarely get a clean win and a clean conscience.

No player-to-player secrets: we keep everything open OOC; any secrecy is character-context only.
Character secrets are welcome when they create future decisions, not table sabotage.
No one uses secrets to remove another player’s agency without consent.
Sabotage and PvP require explicit consent at the table (narrative conflict is fine; surprise mechanical betrayal is not).

The setting includes political cruelty, scarcity pressure, and moral compromise. We set clear boundaries in session zero and play within them.