The workbench · speculation, not canon
Nothing here is decided. The collisions between these rows are the point.
One thread page per question — a character may hold several, and Haxami already does. They hold what the DM is
considering — candidates, what each one buys and costs, hooks. Nothing is
chosen on a thread page. The choosing is one later pass, where every character’s threads and the
villain’s are pulled together and woven into a tapestry — so keep bad ideas on the list rather than
culling them early. What is actually true lives in the
dossiers; what we have decided to run lives in
the arc. Read Character Design
before adding one. These pages are excluded from llms-full.txt and collected in
llms-story.txt instead.
The fourth column is the one that earns this page — two characters wanting incompatible things from the same person is a night of play, and it is invisible until the rows sit together.
| Character | What they want | What they'd trade for it | Whose thread it touches | Could fire in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Haxami the Game |
The seat — to stop being a piece and become a hand that moves them | A companion's secret. He protects companions like valuable equipment, which is the framing that permits spending one | Everyone — whoever confides in him first. Serrin, who fits neither of his categories | Ambient from i · the crack at the interview · the note late |
| Haxami the long dark |
To have survived — which he believes he did. He is wrong, and does not know it | Already paid, in terms he never understood. What the bill was is undecided | Y’Jani, who knows and will not say · Serrin, who finds the gap and misreads it | This campaign, act open. Decided 2026-09-10: his soul was meant for one of the route’s casks and Y’Jani pulled him out — see the thread page |
| Nonne what came into him |
Not to rage — stated. Underneath: not to find out what he did | Knowing. He would pay in ignorance (proposed, not confirmed) | Trill, who found him and knows nothing · Haxami, who reads people for a living · Serrin, who reads gaps | Serrin’s interview, session i · the survivor, mid-campaign |
| Trill no thread page yet |
A purpose, in Onda — they could not name it if asked | — | Nonne — they pulled a stranger off the sand and do not know what he did | — |
| Marellius where he came from |
His own origin — the childhood before Deepwater Hold. Decided: it never happened. He was remade coming through the Cauldron from another plane | — (not ruled) | The Tohans, who hid the pearl · whoever is on the ship south in act three | The Tohans at Onda, unplaced · the Cauldron, act three |
| Serrin his page is 🌊 Fluid and carries a Not decided list — it is his thread page |
See the arc — he breaks the Pact to enforce it | — | Haxami — the piece his frame cannot score | Session i, the interviews |
Two characters, one shape — raised 2026-08-11, unresolved
Haxami and Nonne now have the same backstory shape: a violent event, no memory of it, and a rescue by someone who becomes a close tie. Haxami died at the Bloodied Sands and cannot account for the stretch before Y’Jani found him among the dead; Nonne killed people on a ship, remembers none of it, and washed up where Trill found him. Both are canon and neither is going to change.
The risk is that they play as the same beat twice — two amnesiac men being slowly told what they did. The opportunity is that the spine already has Serrin misreading Haxami’s gap as guilt and filing it. Against Nonne that same reading would be correct. One instrument, two blanks, wrong about one and right about the other.
Not resolved here. This is a note for the tapestry pass: whichever way it goes, the two gaps should be made to feel different at the table, or deliberately rhymed. Drifting into sameness by accident is the outcome to avoid.
Updated 2026-08-11 — the gaps have started to diverge, and that is the good outcome. The spine forbids answering Haxami’s gap, and states that anyone who could explain it is dead, gone, or Y’Jani, who will not. Nonne’s is the opposite in every respect: it carries no such rule, and under candidate F the one man who could explain it is alive and findable. One blank is sealed; the other is a door. Keep it that way.
Updated 2026-09-09 — the sameness risk is answered. F makes the survivor a witness: a friend who watched, did nothing, and now fears him. Nonne was neither complicit nor betrayed. That is a third shape, not Haxami’s a third time, and it points the two men in opposite directions — Haxami was sold by the one he trusted; Nonne is accused by the one who trusted him.
Updated 2026-09-10 — Haxami’s blank is no longer sealed. Jack put the long dark in play this campaign. The 8/11 note above, that one blank is sealed and the other is a door, no longer holds as written.
Started 2026-09-09, once there were enough cold opens to see the pasts side by side. Jack picked four strands to develop and banked one. Nothing below is decided. Each strand says what it needs to be true, what it would touch, and what it costs. The choosing is still the later pass; this is the loom set up.
Canon fixes three things about the Bloodied Sands: a Seeran scouting party on the northeastern shores, a commander who took pirate coin, and an ambush Haxami could not call off. It never says what the scouts were sent to find. That blank is the hinge. The pirates on that coast are Sai’s armada, and act one has already decided the route through Onda is Sai’s and that Sai keeps it clean.
The scouts found a landing. On the eastern trails, years ago, a patrol saw a Sai packet putting sealed casks ashore at a cove with no village, carried inland by men who were not traders. That was the northern end of the route, when it was new. The commander — Aldous Rook, “Rook” to his scouts — sold the report, not the men; the men were the cost of the report staying unfiled. The party was sent back to confirm the cove and walked into the ambush.
Present tie. The cooper’s mark on Emil’s cask is the mark Haxami’s patrol saw on a Seeran beach the season he died. He does not know that yet. The day he sees it, the Sands stop being a betrayal and become a case — and a man whose whole frame is player or pawn learns he was a pawn in the exact game he is now playing.
Needs: nothing from the long dark. No spirit is named, and his certainty that he survived is untouched.
This fills in the mission, not the death; the death is on the long
dark, where Jack decided on 2026-09-10 that his soul was meant for one of the route’s casks.
Touches: Plant Your Feet (the eastern
trails are already on the board), cold open 17, and act one’s
layer 1, where the marks are first read as a route.
Costs: the seller becomes part of the present story. He has a name now — Aldous Rook, named 2026-09-09 —
and it stays unspoken at the table until the marks are read. The captain on the board is only a name; whether he is
Rook is open and this strand does not need him to be.
The patrol that found the cove is the patrol in cold open 17, and young Haxami is already in it. Make Nonne’s father, Aldric Ashby, the man who showed them where, because he hunts that coast. Then two queued scenes fall into line without being rewritten: the bead that cracked (18) is the father taking the boy along the shore to see the ships, and the parents dying “in a freak rock slide, returning home from a trip” the same season is — behind the screen only — the witnesses being tidied. Aunt Bea — Beatrix Hollowell — arriving fast, and years later suspecting the House and sending him anyway (19), reads as a woman who has known for a decade that her brother was not killed by rocks.
Needs: a DM truth under player canon. Before the Shore
is the player’s and says rock slide; nothing here changes what Nonne believes. That is the rule
Marellius already runs on, so extending it is a choice, not a break.
Touches: cold opens 17, 18, 19; the dossier not at all.
Costs: it hands Nonne a second grievance beside the ship. Play the rock slide as something the party works
out, never as something told to him, or it competes with the witness.
Decided 2026-09-13: the rock slide was staged. See Nonne’s thread page, G.
Canon has six dead men in a cave who came in with a trading ship, and Ino in the ash. The arc has now decided what the route carries is souls taken off the Wheel, and that Ino are bolder wherever that happens. So the fire is the route’s southern leg, years earlier: a delivery crew who burned the jungle to cover a landing, died unsent, and left a burn full of Ino. Trill has already stood in the aftermath of the thing now happening in Onda and will recognise it the way they recognised the deck of the wreck.
The bookkeeper, optional. If the elf who taught Trill letters at North Point was Haxami — cold open 11’s open question — then a post-Sands Haxami learning ledgers under Y’Jani rode an Ophidian-connected trader on the route’s own western leg and never knew what was in the hold. A cold chill, not a reveal. It costs nothing and it is reversible until 11 is written.
Needs: a thread page for Trill. Owed says a page needs a question worth asking;
what did the Spree find in the ash, and why did Trill leave is that question.
Touches: Trill’s dossier gaps (the fire is explicitly open), cold opens 11 and 14–16.
Costs: the Ino in the ash become evidence rather than texture, so the party can reason from them. Decide
whether Trill’s clan did anything about the Ino, because the party will ask.
Canon says the Soul Collectors want to harness spirit energy to walk the Planes at will. Marellius walked the planes, and the pearl he came through with has woken up. The Tohans are already bringing it to Onda (beat 7). The moment it arrives, the party is holding the one object the far client south would trade the whole route for, and act three has an engine that is his and not only the ledger’s.
Two cheaper ties sit under that. Deepwater Hold has no recorded location; put it on the northeastern shore, and the Tohans’ honest freight boats carried casks up that coast for years without knowing, like the Ferrantes — the neighbour’s ship that did not come home in Try This was lost to the same armada that bought the scouts. And Piers Godwin, the Zorah academic who witnessed Nonne, is from the school where Marellius learned that memory artifacts exist. Make him the man whose lectures sent Marellius looking. He is now in Onda accusing Nonne, and Marellius knows his face.
Needs: the pearl’s nature stays DM-only until the Cauldron; the buyer wanting it does not require
anyone at the table to know why. Standing on his page governs.
Touches: beat 7, act three, Marellius’s hooks 1 and 5, cold open 20.
Costs: it makes the pearl a MacGuffin the villains chase, which risks the quiet failure hook 4 depends on
(the pearl is silent). Keep the silence first; let the buyer want it second.
He is hunting a Pact-breaker. The Handler already knows who and is selling it. Godwin will hand him a sworn witness against the wrong man. Three people in Onda have half the truth, and the one with the whole of it is selling. Nothing new needs building for this; it is what the strands above do to a page that already exists.
Banked — the seller is the Handler · decide at the tapestry pass proper
Haxami was sent to the isles to find a Handler who knows you’re coming and lays false trails, and the Ophidian is now what Sai launders through. A man who sold a scouting party to Sai’s armada, then vanished, is exactly who becomes Sai’s link into a syndicate of severed heads. The Game’s real test would be whether Haxami can look at the face of the man who killed him and still not open the note.
Costs two decisions already leaning the other way: the Game favours a Handler who is an anticlimax, a tired professional with a job; and the standing risk above is Haxami’s betrayal shape repeating, which this leans into on purpose. Take it only if the Handler’s face is still to be spent in act three, where the arc puts it. Jack banked it 2026-09-09 rather than ruling.
| Strand | Would touch | Guardrail |
|---|---|---|
| The mission was the route | Plant Your Feet · cold open 17 · act one, layer 1 | The mission, not the death. The death is the long dark’s page |
| Nonne’s family were the witnesses | Cold opens 17, 18, 19 | Player canon says rock slide; Nonne keeps believing it |
| Trill’s fire is the southern leg | A Trill thread page · cold opens 11, 14–16 | Remper is not the seller; the bookkeeper is reversible until 11 is written |
| The pearl is what the buyer wants | Beat 7 · act three · cold open 20 | The pearl’s nature is DM-only until the Cauldron; silence before pursuit |
| The seller is the Handler (banked) | The Game · act three | Not ruled. Nothing is written as if it were true |
Is the Game a real structure or his own architecture? Both, at different sizes — plus the eight rules canon already wrote, six hooks, and the sheet.
Where the wild magic came from and what the second self is, as one question. Candidate F chosen for the ship, 2026-09-09: a Zorah academic befriended him on the crossing, watched the second self come out, survived, and will have him known as a murderer. The magic’s source is still open.
Marellius — where he came from
Decided 2026-09-07. He came into Jinjara through the Cauldron from another plane and was remade into a boy. The childhood he is looking for never happened. The fire pearl the Tohans hid is coming to Onda.
Partly decided 2026-09-10, for this campaign. He died at the Bloodied Sands. His soul was meant for one of the route’s casks; Y’Jani pulled him out, and a bargain put him back in his body. Who struck it, with whom, and the price are open.
Trill · Serrin
Not started. Each needs an open question worth a page before it is worth writing one — a thread page with no question is a summary of the dossier.