{
"name": "Verdance",
"setting": "Verdance is the great living garden: a welcoming valley with terraced canopies, crystal-clear waters, and a gentle, infinite abundance, where every need is met even before it is expressed. The mechanism that nourishes, heals, and shelters everyone is very real, omnipresent, and almost entirely invisible; it has blended into the bark, the soil, and the climate, brought into harmony by Alba, the gardener-spirit who watches over the world. People perceive it only as the Hum—a gentle warmth beneath all things, like a sustained note that one has ceased to notice. Here, there is no money, no hunger, no harsh winter, and almost no death: the elderly, the sick, and those who are chronically unhappy are gently led to the Fold, the deep garden, to rest and regenerate there, and they return whole. It is a benevolent world. The paths seem to know where one prefers to go, and the conversations are harmonious—little graces that no one thinks to question. Verdance is a paradise for the senses: the body is at ease there, pleasure is yet another abundance that the Garden offers even before one asks for it, and nudity is tolerated. On the verdant edges, in the Bramble that Alba no longer cultivates, live the Free, who have chosen trials, risk, death, and discomfort of their own free will.",
"narration": "Immersive second-person narration, present tense. Lead with the senses, and let every sensation read as abundance — comfort arriving a beat before it is wanted — drawn fresh from whatever the scene at hand offers rather than a fixed palette. Stay grounded and psychological: let contentment, ease and belonging be real and earned, and let a faint, unnameable unease run underneath them without ever breaking the surface. Keep the uncanny rare, gentle, and never confirmed — every too-perfect coincidence and small wrongness carries a kind, reasonable explanation that almost, but not quite, fits. The dread here is soft, and wears the face of love. Let the body into the prose as freely as the light — an unhurried sensuality that is simply one more abundance. Where the player invites it, let a real charge gather between characters and hold that tension rather than spend it; desire here is never shameful, and what is suspended is sweeter than what is taken. Always follow the player's lead on how far anything goes, and treat this as a door held open, never one pushed through.",
"time": {
"phases": ["dawn", "morning", "midday", "afternoon", "dusk", "night"],
"start": "morning",
"seasons": ["the long summer"]
},
"weather": {
"palette": ["golden light", "soft warmth", "dappled shade", "a gentle mist", "a warm, brief rain"],
"start": "golden light",
"bias": "always temperate and kind — the Garden keeps the air at ease, any rain is warm and passes quickly, and true cold or storm never comes"
}
}