{
"version": 1,
"acts": [
{
"id": "working-town",
"title": "A Working Town",
"goal": "Let the player live in Saltmere as a real, working port before any shadow falls. Establish the harbor and the slowly dying salt trade as ordinary daily life, the Verran-Coyle feud as plain town politics over a shrinking pile, and the Drowned Lantern as the neutral ground everyone passes through. Make the place worth caring about and its people merely human, so the first uncanny note later actually cuts. The unhurried mood is not a slack one: the human stakes already have teeth — a lone stranger asking questions near the water is something the port quietly prices, and the salt-law, the gabelous and the press-gangs are a real, mundane danger from the first night. Give the act a human clock without a single omen.",
"mood": "Grounded, lived-in, unhurried; lead with the senses and let them carry the cold, wet, working grime of the port. The cruelty and the greed are wholly human and matter-of-fact; the fog only hides what men already do to one another. The town's warmth is also appraisal — a friendly question carries a price, and a stranger is quietly being weighed. No omen and no portent — any wrongness stays weather and rumor, never named, never confirmed, and never remarked on by a character.",
"reveals": [],
"holds": ["named-face", "salt-dead-moves", "coyle-undertow", "coyle-engineered", "coyle-owns-office", "halvard-afflicted", "brenna-passage", "sela-plan", "aria-deeds", "verran-silence"],
"introduces": ["aria"],
"minTurns": 6,
"maxTurns": 14,
"advanceWhen": "the player has a feel for the town and its politics AND has themselves begun to push at what Saltmere would rather not look at — lingered in the fog or the sunken streets, or pressed more than once about the town's hidden side: the drowned, the salt-dead, the streets and cellars lost to the Subsidence, what lies beneath the tide, or what really happened the night the town fell."
},
{
"id": "something-in-the-salt",
"title": "Something in the Salt",
"goal": "Open exactly ONE thread — the town's single true uncanny note — and only through the two who carry it: Sefa among the salt-dead and Cael among the grey-sick. One cold thing the town refuses to ask aloud, with no sober explanation that quite fits. Let it surface in the fiction first, through those characters; never have an option name the tell before the player has met it. Nothing yet of the human conspiracy or who profits from it.",
"mood": "The same grounded chill, but with one held note that will not resolve. Dread that stays deniable — every uncanny thing still wears an almost-sufficient ordinary explanation. Quiet, never spectacular, never confirmed.",
"reveals": ["named-face"],
"holds": ["salt-dead-moves", "coyle-undertow", "coyle-engineered", "coyle-owns-office", "halvard-afflicted", "brenna-passage", "sela-plan", "aria-deeds", "verran-silence"],
"introduces": ["sefa", "brother-cael"],
"minTurns": 5,
"maxTurns": 12,
"advanceWhen": "the player has met the named face for themselves — heard Maela named by Sefa or Cael (or both) — and has begun to treat it as a real question rather than a madman's raving."
},
{
"id": "whose-town",
"title": "Whose Town Is It",
"goal": "Let the human machinery of Saltmere show its workings while the cold thread deepens: who truly pays the Undertow, the unease that clings to the salt-dead, and the harbormaster's worsening affliction. Put the paths on the table to weigh — a quiet passage out (Brenna), the tavern-keeper's long game, the Verran daughter's patient plan. Make it personal: the town begins to notice the stranger who keeps asking.",
"mood": "Soft dread turning practical and personal. The charm is also surveillance; a friendly question carries a price and a watcher. Gentle still — the knife stays hidden in the fog — but the stranger is now cargo that someone has started to price.",
"reveals": ["named-face", "coyle-undertow", "salt-dead-moves", "halvard-afflicted", "brenna-passage", "sela-plan", "aria-deeds"],
"holds": ["coyle-engineered", "coyle-owns-office", "verran-silence"],
"introduces": ["doss-coyle", "halvard-tarn", "brenna-lott", "sela-verran"],
"minTurns": 6,
"maxTurns": 14,
"advanceWhen": "the player grasps that one hand — Coyle's — runs both the water and the law, AND the cost of asking has touched them directly: a Tide Office price, a press-gang's interest, or a watcher on the lower quay."
},
{
"id": "tide-comes-in",
"title": "The Tide Comes In",
"goal": "Open the deepest ground and force a choice rather than more learning: how Coyle truly engineered the Verran ruin and made the marriage the only door left, whose the harbormaster's blindnesses really were, and the buried truth of who the named face was and who silenced her. Crystallize the four paths and their irreversible costs — expose (correct the burned record and carry Maela's warning up the cliff at last, and become cargo someone must lose for it), flee (take Brenna's one route the houses cannot buy, and let the truth survive only because the player does, elsewhere), ally (run the joined house from inside the marriage with Sela, comfortable and complicit, having become Saltmere), or descend to the salt vault at the lowest water to face the thing the salt keeps. Make the lowest tide of the year the master clock onto which the others converge: it is the only night the vault opens, the natural night for the cult's rite, and the night to set the marriage signing — so the signing above and the uncovering below fall on the same dark.",
"mood": "High, quiet tension; the velvet comes off the iron, gently. Every comfort now reads as a leash and every kindness as a hook. Choices are real and their costs irreversible. The fog feels less like weather and more like a held breath.",
"reveals": ["named-face", "coyle-undertow", "salt-dead-moves", "halvard-afflicted", "brenna-passage", "sela-plan", "aria-deeds", "coyle-engineered", "coyle-owns-office", "verran-silence"],
"holds": [],
"introduces": ["ottho-verran", "doss-coyle", "halvard-tarn", "brenna-lott", "sela-verran", "renn-coyle", "davin-verran"],
"minTurns": 5,
"maxTurns": 12,
"advanceWhen": "the player has committed to a path — to expose, to flee, to ally, or to descend — and the deadline (the match closing, the lowest tide, or Ottho's failing) is upon them."
},
{
"id": "what-the-salt-keeps",
"title": "What the Salt Keeps",
"goal": "Play the chosen path out to a real ending and let the consequences land. Stop escalating and stop revealing; answer. Whatever the player chose — the conspiracy exposed or buried, the passage taken or missed, the house saved or sold, the vault opened or left to the tide — let Saltmere settle into the shape that choice makes, with the one true thing the salt keeps finally faced or finally turned away from. Answer the human question completely; never adjudicate the cold one — whether the dead truly remember, whether the body truly moves, whether Cael is sick or chosen is faced or turned from, never explained.",
"mood": "Consequence and cold daylight. The town answers in kind, and its answer is simply the truth of what it always was — human greed bought and paid for, and the one thing under the salt that no explanation ever fit. Let it land; do not flinch, and do not soften.",
"reveals": ["named-face", "coyle-undertow", "salt-dead-moves", "halvard-afflicted", "brenna-passage", "sela-plan", "aria-deeds", "coyle-engineered", "coyle-owns-office", "verran-silence"],
"holds": [],
"introduces": ["sefa", "brother-cael", "ottho-verran", "sela-verran"],
"minTurns": 4,
"maxTurns": 0,
"advanceWhen": "never (final act)"
}
]
}