LENS — Reference Layer

The run-mode layer — the pages you keep open beside your game while you play. The teaching chapters explain why these rules work; this section is for using them at speed.

R1 · Session Zero — set up once, then play

Do these once, before the first roll. Most take a line.

1. Source. What is the character moving through — a module, a dungeon or hex, a solo tool/oracle, or your own three sentences? The richer the source, the lighter your prep (see R12).

1. Character. Any character who can perceive and can have a gut-feeling qualifies. Bring one detail with bite — a fact the situation can land against.
2. The d10/d12 toggle — chosen per roll, not here. Worth knowing at setup, but it is not a session switch: each roll you pick the die. Reach for the d10 for a grounded read; reach for the d12 when the moment could admit the uncanny, which opens results 11–12 for that one roll. It is a moment-by-moment call, the same shape as Follow/Resist — uncanny here, ordinary again a breath later. (L21 is uncanny throughout, so it sits on the d12 whenever it fires; L20 turns uncanny only in its upper range.)
3. Palette (optional). A genre reading-layer for the table results. Pick one if it helps; it changes flavour, never mechanics.
4. Name the first clock. Phrase your character’s want as a question (R5). This is the only Ignition output you cannot skip.
5. Set World Pressure. Size the session-level clock to how long you want the arc to run (R5 sizing).

R2 · The Lens Loop

The whole engine, in order. Run it whenever a moment has pressure; the rest of the time, just play your game.

1. Golden Question. Whose eyes am I behind — and what is objectively true?

6. Pick the table. Which kind of moment is this? Your judgement, not a roll (see R10).
7. Roll. d10 (grounded) or d12 (uncanny). Add a First Sign d6 only if the result needs something concrete to catch on.
8. Read the four parts. Tell → Impression → Impulse → Tag.
9. Follow or Resist the Impulse (R3).
10. Mark the clock. Add the Tag’s number as Beats; add one more, untagged, if you Resisted.
11. Check the fill. Full? Run the Commit Procedure (R4) before you narrate on.
12. Hand off to your game. If the fiction surfaced something discrete and uncertain — a save, a check, a fight — your RPG resolves it. The clock does not care whether it succeeds.
13. Continue, from inside the character. Lens fires again when the next moment has pressure.

Read it. Do it. Mark it. Move on.

R3 · Follow or Resist

A Lens roll hands you the character’s gut as a small action — the thing a Game Master narrates on your behalf: as you turn to leave, something catches your eye; you flatten to the wall. The Impulse is that gut, narrated for you.

• Follow — you receive the moment and act on it. This is the default, it is free, and most rolls are Follows. Following hands control straight back to your game.
• Resist — you take the pen. For this one beat you overrule the gut and author the character’s response against the grain. That is yours to do; it is your character. It costs one Beat (untagged): the world tightens because you steered it. You may Resist for any reason — a competing instinct, a value, even something you the player know.

The firewall is the Belief, not the action. Whatever you make the character do, the Belief you later write must still come only from what they actually felt, saw, or rolled (R4). Steer the conduct if you must; you cannot give the character knowledge they have not earned. The Beat prices the authorship; the Belief keeps the character honest. And a Resist never escapes consequence — it adds a Beat, so the Commit only comes sooner.

One exception — L16 (Temptation). There, resisting needs an in-fiction reason as well as the Beat: refusing your own want for no reason the character holds is not a beat the table will fund. Everywhere else, the Beat and the Belief are enough.

R4 · The Commit Procedure

When a Pressure Clock fills, run this before narrating on. A full clock is not success or failure — your RPG resolves the action; the Commit says what the world does in response to the pressure that built.

1. Find the Dominant Tag. The tag with the highest combined value in the record. If two tie, the most recently rolled of them wins; the earlier one stays on the Card but does not shape this Commit. Untagged fill never counts.

14. Shape it. If the change isn’t obvious, roll Turn Spark (d6): 1–2 Commitment, 3–4 Escalation, 5–6 Revelation. If the tag record is empty — every tag targeted or resisted away — the Commit is shaped by Turn Spark alone.
15. State the Commit. One concrete world-state change, on screen or off. It is a fact now; it goes on the Card.
16. Write the Belief. What the character now takes to be true — drawn only from what they actually felt, saw, or rolled. The test: could the character have known this from what they experienced? If no, write the smaller Belief. The gap between Commit and Belief is where the tension lives.
17. Advance the clock above by +1, carrying this clock’s Dominant Tag (untagged if there was none). See R5.
18. Open the next clock. The Commit usually writes it; name it as a question and size it.

No dead ends (investigation). If the clock asked a question you still can’t answer, the Commit delivers a Lead (a concrete next direction) and a Consequence (the Dominant Tag as a cost). Never a wall.

R5 · Pressure Clocks and World Pressure

Marking the clock. Every roll marks the clock it serves — that is the always-on tempo, not a cost — unless it is an informational read of an NPC or alternate viewpoint, which adds nothing to any clock (see Ch5, the three dispositions). On a roll that does mark a clock: add the result’s Tag value as Beats, and record the Tag — a tag you rolled, whether you Follow or Resist; it can become the Dominant Tag. If you Resisted the Impulse, add one more Beat, untagged — the price of taking the pen (the rolled Tag still applies on top). The clock a roll serves is normally your own character’s; a non-PC perspective takes Beats only if you have opened a clock for it (Ch5, Disposition Three), and then they go there, never on yours. Untagged Beats — the Resist’s +1, a tag struck by Targeting, or a child clock that committed tagless — fill the clock but never feed the Dominant Tag. When the clock fills, Commit (R4): the Dominant Tag — highest-valued tag in the record, ties to the most recent — shapes what lands.

A Pressure Clock is a question in the character’s voice, a size, and a row of boxes that fill with Beats. It measures movement toward consequence, not progress toward success. It is always there — even in calm it waits as the standing question above your play, stirring only when you roll; a Beat is the tempo and countdown you came for, not a cost, and if it fills faster than the scene wants, size it bigger.

Everything is a Pressure Clock at some scale. Local clocks fill from Lens rolls. When any clock fills and Commits, it adds +1 to the clock one level up, and that Beat carries the filling clock’s Dominant Tag (or is untagged, if it committed on Turn Spark alone). World Pressure is simply that next level up — it builds a tag record from the dominant tags of the local clocks beneath it, and when it fills it Commits by the same procedure (R4) and may feed a clock above it. Stack as many levels as you like — local, World, campaign, saga — and size each to taste, even to 1.

One rule at every scale: a clock fills from below, Commits, and feeds the clock above.

Untagged fill. Beats that fill a clock but never enter its tag record. Three sources: a Resisted Impulse, a tag removed by Targeting, and a tag-less child clock feeding its parent. They move pace; they never shape the Commit.

The timeline guard. No clock, at any level, may move an authored timeline. When the fiction fixes the climax to its own calendar — the vote on the third day, the duel at dawn, the tide that will not wait — that scheduled event is the confrontation, on its schedule, whatever the clocks read. The clocks produce the escalations that build toward it; they never reschedule it. Where the fiction has no fixed climax, the Stake is the off-ramp: confrontation is called when the Stake comes due.

Sizing a local clock

Social and investigative play runs on +1s and wants room: a single social scene 0/4–0/5; a social or political arc 0/6–0/8 or chained; a scene of investigation 0/4–0/6.

Sizing World Pressure

Teaching note: meet this at two levels first — local clocks feeding one World Pressure — and treat deeper nesting as an option. The rule is one rule; the newcomer meets it as “World Pressure is just a bigger clock.”

R6 · Targeting a rising tag

When a tag is climbing toward dominance and the character does not want the world to commit in that shape, they can target it.

1. Name it, concretely, in the fiction. The rising Exposure is the cameras on the gantry; the building Threat is the dog off its chain.

19. Act against it with your game’s rules — a shot, a check, a Yes/No roll if the fiction is open.
20. On a hit: the tag is struck from the record — it can no longer be the Dominant Tag. Its Beats stay on the clock as untagged fill. Pace is untouched; the clock commits on schedule, just in a different shape (or on Turn Spark alone if the record is now empty). Target a tag and the whole tag goes — several Beats of one tag are the same pressure growing, not separate sources, so clearing it clears them all.
21. On a miss: the pressure worsens — add a Beat to that tag (+1). A miss is the only time Targeting moves the clock’s pace.

Scope. Targeting reaches only a tag building on the current clock. A Commit already on the Card is a fact the world won’t take back; you live with it, you don’t Target it. And remember the act is real — the shot that kills the cameras is heard, and may earn its own Lens roll and a new tag. The world answers what you do to it.

R7 · The Pressure Card

One card per clock; any notepad or index card works. It is the canonical session log — the world made concrete and inarguable.

Read the Card as an oracle mid-session: a Commit is true whether the character knows it or not; a Belief that contradicts a Commit means the character is simply wrong, and that is story.

R8 · The Eight Conflict Tags

Tone-neutral: the name is constant, the fiction fits your world. Threat in horror is something hunting you; in a pastoral game it is the ward wandered too far from the path.

R9 · Ignition — the opening checklist

Build a playable first moment from what you have. For a module, skip the Hook and start at the Aim — the page already hands you most of it.

• Hook (skip for modules) — Anchor: “If I have [detail], the world has [implied fact].” Trigger: “Right now, ___.” Keep it about who you are, not the objective.
• Aim — one shape: Recovery, Protection, Acquisition, Investigation, or Obligation. “Right now I must ___.”
• Friction — “I’m trying to [Aim], but [Friction],” sharpened with without (a resource), before (a deadline), or while (a complication already running).
• Stake — “If I fail, ___.” Concrete and personal — Loss, Escalation, or Exposure. Often grows out of the Friction.
• Stage — “At [place], [when], while [active constraint].” It must be able to notice you, interrupt you, or make the Aim harder. If nothing presses, roll the Stage-constraint d12 (R11).
• Opening Beat — Position + First Action + First Question, written as one present-tense paragraph at eye level, ending on the unanswered question. This is where play begins.
• Name the clock — the character’s want, phrased as a question; default size 4. This is the one output you cannot skip (R5).

R10 · The Table Index

Twenty-five tables in five families. Pick by judgement — the table that matches the pressured moment. The statement under each is the sentence you set before you roll: an objective fact a camera could show.

Reading the Situation

Taking in, before action is decided. Ask: testing a held suspicion (L1), arriving somewhere (L2), reading a situation (L3), or reading a person (L4)?

Engaging People

The room is reacting to you. Ask: a weighted move into someone (L5), a bargaining state (L6), social ground (L7), scrutiny as the subject (L8), or performing as the act (L9)?

Finding Things Out

What the character notices that they didn’t already know. Ask: material for its content (L10), whether something is rigged (L11), or a space for what it conceals (L12)? Roll once per scene of the domain; the No-Dead-Ends rule (R4) applies.

Executing

Plans in motion under resistance. Ask: running a plan (L13), a fight (L14), a chase (L15), an offer (L16), a sustained lie (L17), or a wait (L18)? Roll at the opening, at turning points, and at the end — not every action.

Forces and Consequences

Forces larger than you, and the aftermath. Ask: the environment is the threat (L19), using power (L20), the supernatural pressing in (L21), consequences landing (L22), travelling (L23), resting (L24), or a bond deepening (L25)? L21 is uncanny throughout and needs the d12; L20 turns uncanny only in its upper range.

R11 · Mini-tables

Turn Spark (d6) — shapes a Commit when the change isn’t obvious.

No Dead Ends — Lead (d6) — when an investigation clock commits without the answer, give a Lead and a Consequence (apply the Dominant Tag as a cost).

Stage constraint (d12) — when a Stage doesn’t actively push back, roll for one. (How many: roll d6, halve, round up; then roll that many d12.)

Yes/No Dice — for an objective binary the fiction doesn’t already settle. Frame the question so yes is the leaning answer; set a likelihood 1–6; roll d6; roll ≤ likelihood = yes.

Quick-Detail A — Sensory Hook (3d12). One roll each; combine into a single concrete image: “A/an [Aspect] thing [Verb]s, [Descriptor].”

Quick-Detail B — Stakes Prompt (d12). Read across: “To [Need], you must risk [Cost], because this world runs on [Truth], and right now you are a [Perspective].”

First Sign (d6). Each Lens table carries its own six-channel First Sign list. Roll it only when the main result needs something concrete to catch on; take one sign and stop. It narrows the image — it never explains the scene.

R12 · Starting from your source

The flow is always the same (R2); only the prep changes. The richer the source, the lighter your work.

Lens proposes; the world disposes. Across every source-type, a roll can surface a candidate fact, not only read one already on the page — but it is true only when a confirmer agrees: the source, an oracle, a Yes/No, or a Commit. You never confirm your own read. With only your three sentences and no other oracle, Lens’s own Yes/No is the minimum confirmer — set the likelihood from the fiction, not the answer you want. Hold every candidate felt, not fixed until confirmed.

R13 · Worked example — the planted lure

The single scene where player-knowledge, character-belief, the firewall, the priced choice, and the host hand-off are all visible at once.

The module says the checkpoint inspector has been tipped off — she is waiting for a courier with a red seal. The player knows this. Mara, the courier, does not. Clock: Can I clear the checkpoint? 0/4.

Roll — L8 Under Watch, d10 → INTEREST SHARPENS, First Sign: Timing. Through Mara’s eyes: the inspector glances up a second time, a half-beat too soon. Impulse: give them something else to look at. Tag [Exposure +1].

The player is tempted to make Mara hide the seal — because the player knows. That would be taking the pen: a Resist. It is allowed, and it costs a Beat. But watch the firewall: whatever Mara does, the Belief must come only from what she felt — “the second glance came early; this one’s paying attention” — never “she’s been tipped off about a red seal.” The Beat prices the steer; the Belief keeps Mara honest. (Here the player Follows instead: Mara, who felt only a second glance, slides her papers across as if bored. Clock → 1/4.)

The host resolves the discrete thing. Mara’s game runs a Composure/Deception check as the inspector studies her. That roll — not Lens — decides whether the bluff holds.

A later beat — Targeting. Two rolls on, Exposure is climbing and about to dominate; the Commit would land as identified. Mara doesn’t want that shape. The player names the rising Exposure concretely — the duty-log the inspector keeps glancing at — and Mara “accidentally” knocks the inkwell across it (a host Sleight check, success). The Exposure tag is struck from the record; its Beats stay as untagged fill, so the clock still fills on schedule — but now it will commit as something other than they have your name. The spilled ink is real, though: the gasp draws a guard, and the next Lens roll may earn a fresh tag.

Commit (clock fills). Dominant Tag now Pressure (Exposure gone). Commit: the inspector waves Mara through but holds her papers a beat too long — she’s clearing the courier she expected, not the one she got; the tip said red seal, and Mara’s is black. Belief: “Close. She bought it. I’m through.” The gap between what the world did (a tipped-off inspector, briefly wrong-footed, who will realise) and what Mara believes (a clean pass) is the scene the player can already feel coming — and Mara cannot.

R14 · Glossary (run-mode terms)

• Aim — what the character is trying to get done right now; set at Ignition.
• Beat — one unit of Resistance on a clock. Tagged Beats feed the Dominant Tag; untagged Beats only fill.
• Belief — what the character takes to be true, written from their experience alone. The firewall against player-knowledge. May be right, partial, or wrong.
• Commit — the world-state change when a clock fills. A fact, on screen or off. Shaped by the Dominant Tag (and Turn Spark).
• Conflict Tag — the kind of pressure a roll applies: Threat, Exposure, Cost, Pressure, Control, Clue, Reputation, Uncanny.
• Diegetic authority, not authorial authority — what the player holds: free to act as the character; not free to decide what the world means. Resisting borrows a sliver of authorial control and pays a Beat for it.
• d10 / d12 toggle — a per-roll choice: the d10 is the grounded read, the d12 opens the uncanny range (11–12) for that roll. Situational, not a session setting; no ratchet.
• Dominant Tag — the tag with the most Beats in the record when a clock fills (ties → most recent). It shapes the Commit.
• First Sign — the per-table d6 that gives a result something concrete to catch on. Optional.
• Follow / Resist — accept the Impulse (free, the default) or overrule it (take the pen; +1 untagged Beat).
• Golden Question — Whose eyes am I behind — and what is objectively true? Asked before every roll.
• Hook — Ignition’s opening: Anchor (“if I have X, the world has Y”) + Trigger (“right now…”). Skipped for modules.
• Ignition — the start-of-play procedure: Hook, Problem Setup (Aim, Friction, Stake, Stage), Opening Beat, and naming the first clock.
• Impulse — the character’s gut response the table hands you: the GM’s “as you turn to leave…” made mechanical.
• Lens roll — Tell, Impression, Impulse, and a Conflict Tag with its Resistance value.
• Pressure Card — the running record: Commits and Beliefs as they happen. The canonical session log.
• Pressure Clock — the named, sized tracker of mounting consequence. The same object at every scale (see World Pressure).
• Resistance — a roll’s mechanical output: a Tag + a number, added as Beats.
• Stage / Stake — where this happens and what it can do to you / what the character loses if the Aim fails. Set at Ignition.
• Targeting — naming a rising tag concretely and acting against it; a hit strikes the tag (not its Beats) from the record.
• Tell — the capitalised result-name of a roll (e.g. SOMETHING TUNED).
• Turn Spark — the d6 that shapes a Commit when it isn’t obvious; also shapes a Commit whose tag record is empty.
• Uncanny — both a Tag and the 11–12 results range (d12 only; throughout on L21).
• Untagged fill — Beats that fill a clock but never enter its tag record: from a Resist, from Targeting, or from a tag-less child clock.
• World Pressure — the clock one level up: each local Commit feeds it +1, carrying that clock’s Dominant Tag. Nestable. No clock at any level may move an authored timeline.
• Yes/No Dice — the binary oracle for facts the fiction leaves open; likelihood 1–6, roll ≤ = yes, optional Twist die for and / but.