01 — The Warden's Desk
The Traveller's Primer
Everything the road expects you to know: one card at a time, a die rolled in the open, and a blacksmith who can ruin your best steel. The complete how-to-play.
Overpath deals you one card at a time, held over the table. Drag right to play it — strike, guard, mend, whatever the card says — for the stamina bolts printed on it. Drag left to toss it and catch your breath instead: discarding gains you stamina. Hold a card still to read its fine print. You start every run with 30 health and 10 stamina, and resting always gives you 3 back. That's the whole grammar of the game; everything else is vocabulary.
Bosses never swing flat numbers. They roll a die in the open before every blow. Read the odds. Play around them.
— The Traveller's Primer, on the Gatekeeper's Die
That die is the heart of every boss fight: 1–2 is a weaker SWIPE, 3–4 a harder SLAM, a 5 means it GATHERS — half a hit plus four block — and a 6 is WRATH, a double blow that winds the beast so it skips its next swing. The full odds sit on the paper strip under the boss card. Overpath tells you exactly what might happen; the skill is in deciding what to hold back.
The blacksmith reforges a card's steel with a die. On the campaign it's a safe roll — the die only sets the size of the boost, +1 to +3, never worse. On the Open Road it's a gamble: the stat shifts by the roll minus three, so a one ruins it and a six is a jackpot. And past the third forge the metal grows brittle — your roll plus your luck must beat the card's forge level, or it shatters. Between fights, the map sits in your hand: camps mend you, markets deal, shrines gamble, and the Deep goes down forever, chamber by chamber. Death is not the end. You wake at camp, whole again.