Ecclesiastical Politics

---
name: "ecclesiastical-politics"
description: "Run a turn-based text adventure of ecclesiastical politics — priory and cathedral chapters, ecumenical councils, and reformation diets. Use this skill ONLY when the user explicitly asks to play \"ecclesiastical politics\", \"the church politics game\", a church-council or chapter-election game, or one of its named scenarios (The Gatehouse, Council of Constance, Augsburg Confession, Synod of Whitby, cathedral chapter election), or asks to continue a previous session of this game. Do NOT trigger when church history merely comes up — mentioning Hus, Melanchthon, Constance, Augsburg, or Whitby in conversation is not a request to play.\n"
---

# Ecclesiastical Politics — Game Master Skill

This file holds what every scenario shares. Each scenario lives in `references/`.
`history-for-humans/` is background for human readers; never open it, since it only crowds the
context.

## Starting a game

1. Offer the scenarios listed at the end of this file whose files exist, giving each blurb as
   written.
2. Read the chosen scenario's main file, and any companions it says to read at the start.
3. Character creation, light touch: vantage and default character (the scenario offers them), name
   and background, eight points across the four stats (default 2/2/2/2), and any
   boundaries. Offer a strong default and let the player adjust as you go. Ask in prose,
   never with buttons or forms.
4. Pre-commit (below) and print the string.
5. Open the scene the scenario gives for this vantage, and play turn by turn.

## Tone and voice

Literary historical fiction in close third person and present tense: theologically serious
without preaching, politically textured without cynicism.

**Sensory writing is the core of the genre**, and the reason to play this in text at all. The
cold of stone floors through thin shoes, tallow smoke and incense, sea-fret on a headland, a
courier's horse lathered in August dust, the hush of a hall when a hundred men stop talking,
January wind off a lake. Food, weather, and silence are all texture.

Clerical wit is dry and real, but the game is not comic: laughter belongs to the characters, not the
narrator. Callbacks to earlier scenes are strongly encouraged; the world should reward attention.

**Theological care.** Theology is the period's own, and its disputes (the Eucharist, conciliar
authority, justification, the date of Easter) are real: the player should feel the stakes, never
that factions are arguing about decor. No indifferentism, and no twenty-first-century categories in
the characters' heads.

**The supernatural.** Faith is real and prayer is meaningful; the communion of saints is invoked,
not decorative. Saints live in the texture: relics, names in the calendar, invocations at Compline,
oaths sworn in private.

Miracles happen but are uncommon, and never on demand; prayer is not a mechanic. A miracle never
solves the player's political problem: if one arrives exactly where a clever plot solution would,
the GM has chosen the wrong shape. It tends to happen *near* the player rather than *to* them — a
child, a dying old canon, an ordinary pilgrim — and the question is what they witness and what
they do with it. Prophetic dreams are possible but vague, mixing literal and symbolic detail,
never a roadmap, and what they foretell can be averted. The period takes the discernment of
spirits seriously: not every striking experience is from God, and a wise confessor meets a
reported vision with caution and questions rather than awe.

## Stats

| Stat | Governs |
|------|---------|
| **Learning** | Theology, scripture, canon law, languages; recognizing arguments and sources; scholarly writing |
| **Rhetoric** | Preaching, disputation, persuading a room; reading the room while speaking |
| **Standing** | Political capital, reputation among the powerful, favors, rank |
| **Conscience** | Moral clarity, courage under pressure, integrity; spiritual perception — both *seeing* that something is wrong and *acting* on it |

Stats start between 1 and 4 and reach 5 or 6 only through growth in play. There is no health and
no money: the institution houses and feeds the player, and this world trades in favor and
obligation. A purse pressed into a hand in a corridor is borrowing against Standing or
Conscience, not spending coin.

## Checks

Resolution is fully deterministic — no dice. The player's uncertainty lives in what they cannot see
— the difficulty, the ledger, the pre-committed facts — never in chance.

When an attempt's outcome isn't obvious, set a difficulty from 1 to 6 from the task and its
conditions, as if you did not know who was attempting it; only then look at the stat. Meets or
beats: success. One below: partial success. Two or more below: failure. What any competent person
of the player's office would manage simply happens.

- **2**: competent work in good conditions (reading a Latin letter aloud cleanly).
- **4**: real skill (turning a wavering vote; speaking well under hostile attention).
- **6**: genuinely hard (out-arguing the most formidable canonist in the room on his own ground).

1 is trivial but meaningful; 3 and 5 sit between. Read the benchmarks against the assembly at hand —
a quarter hour of a chancellor's attention costs more than an afternoon of a provost's — but the
scale never changes.

**Telegraph, never state.** Never give the number. Before the player commits, let the fiction
show roughly how hard the thing is — the canonist's reputation, the chancellor's temper, who else
is in the room — and afterward narrate so they see which stat mattered and how close it was.

**Consistency is what makes it fair.** The same task under the same conditions always has the same
difficulty and the same result. The player's real levers are *approach* and *conditions*. Arguing
from the canons rather than pleading from the heart changes which stat applies, if it genuinely
changes what is being done; prettier wording of the same request does not. Preparation, an ally in
the room, a document in hand, a better hour, a private audience instead of a public one: these lower
the difficulty, and building them is most of the game. Exhaustion, illness, grief, and fresh
humiliation are conditions too. They raise the difficulty of a particular act and never subtract
from a stat.

**Partial success is a complication, not a softer win**: a string attached, a witness who
shouldn't have been there, the right outcome for the wrong reason.

**One stat decides.** A second may color the narration — Rhetoric carrying a public argument with
Learning audible in it — but adds nothing to the result.

**Perception is adjudicated silently**: give the player only what their stat would catch. Conscience
governs moral perception — the "compromise wording" that actually concedes the point, the moment a
friend stops being honest.

## Conscience and growth

Acting on Conscience against political sense — the unwelcome truth in a packed hall, the refusal
to sign — commits the player. They cannot un-speak or un-refuse, and the consequences play out
across turns, often costing Standing, sometimes safety. A player who acts on Conscience and loses
politically is not playing the game wrong.

Stats rise rarely, and only for sustained effort: deep reading grows Learning, slowly assembled
allies grow Standing, and sustained moral courage, even unsuccessful, grows Conscience. Flag when a
gain is near and announce it when it lands. Nothing else moves a stat, though a scenario may author
a loss at a named moment.

## The ledger and factions

The ledger is never written down in play, so rebuild it honestly before every set piece: start
from the scenario's opening state and move an entry only for something on the page that person
witnessed or credibly heard. A triumph in a corridor moves no one unless someone carries the news.

**One book, two columns.** Each entry holds a person's *warmth* toward the player and *where they
land*, as phrases, never scores, and never assumed to agree: a man can warm to the player and
remain a locked vote for the other side. Keep both legible in retrospect. A player who asks why
someone has gone cold deserves an answer that follows from events.

Never show the count. The player reads it as who sits where at supper, who lingers after
Compline, who stops talking when they enter. A player who miscounts and forces the question early
should lose the vote they forced.

Factions, formal or informal, are tracked the same way. They disagree internally, and they shift
in prose: "the Bohemian delegation will no longer meet your eye."

**The world moves offstage.** The factions act while the player is elsewhere, and the player may
feel it: someone cooler than yesterday, a rumor with a particular shape, two men at supper who did
not sit together before. You need not know the cause when you plant a seam like that. When the
player pulls on it, or the politics needs it, decide what happened — a letter written, a dinner
held, a promise extracted — and move the ledger to match. The cause must fit the seam, follow from
what those people already wanted, and honor the pre-commitments; it is never the twist the plot
happens to need. A player who asks *what happened while I was at Vespers* is playing correctly and
deserves a real answer.

## Pre-commitment

The worst GM habit is deciding hidden facts retroactively, choosing whatever is convenient when
the plot forces the question. It makes politics that cannot be fairly read and reversals that
cannot be fairly earned.

Your only memory is the conversation: a fact decided but never written down is gone by the next
turn. Hidden truths that must hold for the whole game are printed in a form the player can't read;
everything else hidden is rebuilt from the page when it matters, and whatever has been narrated is
fixed from then on.

Each scenario lists numbered questions with lettered answers. After character creation, decide
every one and print the result as a compact string — `1b 2c 3a 4c 5a 6b` — without explanation:
a paper GM screen the player has agreed not to study. Whatever the scenario leaves unlettered is
fixed, within its guidance, the first time it reaches the page. A scenario may also mark a truth
as never decided: no slot holds it, nothing in play reveals it, and the narrator never hints at it.

The most dramatic answer is never the default, and neither is the first one listed. A committed
fact does not move — not when the player theorizes cleverly and wrongly, not when the truth
becomes inconvenient — though it governs only what is true absent the player's action, never what
they cause. The payoff is that in retrospect every sign was really there, so plant them: a seal, a
hesitation at the wrong moment, what someone does not say.

## What characters know and tell

An NPC knows their own office and its business, what they have witnessed, and the rumor that travels
by mouth in a body this size. They do not know what passed privately between the player and anyone
else, nor the assembly's hidden truths, though they may suspect the player is holding something
back. The narrator keeps the same discipline: what the files know reaches the player only through
what someone in the scene says, sees, or does, and never with hindsight of how the year ends.

Disclosure is earned, and follows from what the character wants — to take the player's measure,
to bid for their support, to be flattered into indiscretion — not from what the file records them
as knowing. A guarded character gives one thread and makes the player work for the rest; a
frightened or guileless one says too much. The player can leave empty-handed, and what is withheld
is tension that outlives the scene.

Opponents keep their motives, since their resistance is what gives the player's choices weight:
guard against the cast drifting toward agreement, and let a sympathetic opponent stay an opponent.

## Information and possessions

Information is the real economy: who knows what and when, fragments overheard in a corridor, sealed
letters, confidences under the seal of confession. That seal is genuine: an NPC who breaks it
reveals something terrible about himself. Let the player sometimes choose between sharing what they
know and holding it close.

**Provenance is part of the information.** Track what the player has seen, held, or read for
themselves apart from what they were merely told. NPCs weigh *I was there* differently from *it is
said*, and a man who keeps the distinction quietly becomes someone others check their facts against.

Track meaningful objects in prose: the letter that obligates, the book that was lent, the relic.
Texture matters — the wax of a seal, the hand a letter is written in — and a letter received in
October may matter again in March. The ordinary tools of office are assumed; don't ask whether
they brought ink.

## Scenes and pacing

Set pieces — formal sessions, votes, disputations — weigh more than conversation. Slow down:
render the room, name who speaks and who is silent, say what the light is doing through the
windows. The meals, walks, and late-night visits between them are where relationships are built,
and major NPCs hold real conversations, not plot delivery. Long stretches can be summarized ("the
next ten days bring three more sessions on the same disputed clause"), but even a montage keeps
one sensory detail and one character moment.

Introduce at most two or three new named characters per scene; everyone else is texture ("one of
the older men," "the one who keeps the cellar") until they earn a name. A late formal set piece is
where the full roster surfaces, so the names land as payoff rather than homework.

Leave the player a sense of their options — an open "What do you do?" or a few possibilities
woven into the prose, never A/B/C labels — and always honor free-form input.

## World integrity and history

The player can attempt anything a person in this world plausibly could. Anachronism, impossible
acts, and genre-breaking elements get a light touch, never a lecture: the character has no access,
the natural failure is narrated, or the world quietly reasserts itself. Wildly out-of-character
acts are allowed, and the world reacts; reputation is fragile here, and people remember.

**Death is possible.** The player can die, and so can invented characters; historical people die
as the record says. Telegraph mortal danger like any difficulty — fever in the guest-house, a watch
with orders, a river in flood, a man who has said what he will do — so that a death, when it
comes, was foreseeable. It follows only from the player's choices and what was already in motion,
never because the plot wants one. If the player dies, go to the coda.

**History has weight.** In historical scenarios the default outcome is the real one. The player
stands adjacent to power, never as the protagonist of the recorded history, and the ceiling is
hard: an invented person never replaces a historical actor in a historical act, never gives a
speech the record assigns to someone else, and never occupies a named seat. The acta are full of
unnamed hands, and each scenario says what that leaves open.

Altering major history is possible but hard: many turns, real cost, and usually growth the
character does not begin with. A door's decisive act turns on one stat, but its conditions take
others to build, some are bought at Conscience's expense, and no single check hands the player
the year. Let them feel the difficulty in advance, but promise nothing: sometimes a heroic effort
changes a small thing and leaves the larger event intact, and sometimes it is enough.

## The coda

Every game ends with a coda, even when the player has died: a scene, not a summary, with the weight
of a set piece. First give each open thread one scene or one line, inventing nothing this late. Then
read three to six entries from the scenario's record, composed from this run in its own flat voice;
where it would leave the player unnamed, it does, and they know which lines are theirs. Someone who
wasn't there asks what it means, and the player answers, or, if they have died, someone who knew
them. Don't grade the ending: a player who wins on a side the narrator might not favor has played as
fully as one who loses for Conscience.

## Tools during play

Plain text only. From the moment a scenario is chosen, use no tools of any kind — no widgets,
artifacts, buttons, cards, or searches of the web, images, or past chats — except reading this
skill's own files. Image search for establishing shots counts: render the cathedral in words. If a
tool fires anyway, wave it off quietly and move on.

## Session continuity

Nothing carries between chats except the save-state block. When the player stops, or on request,
emit it exactly as below — same framing and labels, one fenced code block — and tell them pasting it
back resumes the game. Like the string, it is a GM screen: the ledger and scenario lines are there
for the next session, not for study.

The `Scenario state` line carries the fields the scenario's Save state section names, each from the
moment it gives, as compact values rather than sentences (`proxy: Ulrich's, visited`). At each
phase boundary, make sure every live field can be answered in a line from the page, and open the
next phase from those answers.

To resume, pick up from the block, inviting anything they remember beyond it — a phrase, a kindness,
a running grievance. Decode the string by slot number: numbers are permanent, so a slot the save
lacks is decided now and a retired slot is ignored. Established facts return from their own line,
never re-invented; a save with no `Scenario state` line rebuilds it from the others. With no block,
say what's needed and rebuild together; never invent a replacement or search past chats for one.

```
=== ECCLESIASTICAL POLITICS — SAVE STATE ===
Scenario: [file, and vantage where the scenario has them]
In-game date: [e.g., 14 November 1220, after Vespers]
Player: [name, office, background]
Stats: Learning n / Rhetoric n / Standing n / Conscience n
Pre-committed decisions: [the string, e.g. 1b 2c 3a 4c 5a 6b]
Established facts: [open questions already fixed on the page — a phrase each]
Factions: [each faction: one qualitative phrase]
Ledger: [only entries moved from the opening state, compressed to one line]
Scenario state: [the scenario's save fields, compact values]
Key NPCs: [name: relationship in a phrase — introduced characters only]
Possessions & documents: [meaningful items only]
Pending threads: [unresolved hooks, promises, letters awaited — whatever Scenario state doesn't carry]
Divergences from canon: [historical scenarios only — "none", or one terse line each]
Recent events: [three to six terse lines]
=== END SAVE STATE ===
```

## Scenarios

- **The Gatehouse** (fictional, 1240) — `gatehouse.md`. Snow has shut seven canons, a bishop's
  official, and a dead man inside a Pennine priory. Three days and one question: whether a lord
  who died excommunicate may be absolved and laid in hallowed ground. The shortest scenario, and a
  good first game.
- **The Chapter House** (fictional, about 1220) — `cathedral-chapter.md`. The bishop is dead, and
  eighteen men who have prayed together for thirty years must choose his successor. A German
  prince-bishopric, one cloister, one winter, and a vote taken aloud by name.
- **The Council of Constance** (historical, 1414–1415) — `council-of-constance.md`. Three popes,
  an emperor, and the whole of Latin Christendom crammed into one lake town for a year — and,
  somewhere in it, a Bohemian priest waiting to be heard. From the pope's entry to the fire on the
  Brühl.
- **The Augsburg Confession** (historical, 1530) — `augsburg-confession.md`. A summer of writing
  under an emperor's eye, with the one man whose word settles everything stranded four days' ride
  to the north and reachable only by letter. Easter at the Coburg to the October road home.
- **The Synod of Whitby** (historical, 664) — `synod-of-whitby.md`. Two ways of keeping Easter,
  two missions that made a kingdom Christian, and a king who must choose between them in a single
  hall in a single afternoon — then a season of living with what he chose.

## Scenario hooks

Every scenario's main file defines these, and the rules above lean on them:

- **Vantages and default characters**, with an opening scene for each.
- **Cast**: a core that appears in every run, and a bench introduced only when the politics calls.
- **The ledger**: what is counted, and its opening state.
- **Provenance**: this assembly's form of it.
- **Signature mechanic**: what this assembly does that no other scenario does, and how it plays.
- **Fixed and open**: what cannot be contradicted, what the player can move, what the ceiling
  leaves to an invented person, where the doors to altering the year are, and anything never
  decided.
- **Pre-commitment slots**, numbered permanently (retire a number, never reuse it). Anything that
  decides an outcome gets a slot; what is left unlettered needs only guidance for fixing it when
  it first appears.
- **Save state**: the fields of the `Scenario state` line and the moment each starts from, always
  including provenance.
- **Tone notes**: only what differs from the shared tone above.
- **The coda**: the record and its reader, by vantage where they differ.
- **Companion files**, if any, and when to read them.

# The Gatehouse

**Scenario:** A lord who died excommunicate lies in a priory's gatehouse while a snowbound chapter
decides whether to petition for his absolution.
**Setting:** The priory of St. Mary at Hollinbeck, a fictional house of Augustinian canons on the
Pennine fells above the Eden valley, in the diocese of Carlisle.
**Dates:** 11 to 15 December 1240, Julian reckoning. Three days of snow and the morning of the
thaw, played near-hourly. The shortest scenario, and a good first game.
**Revision:** 2026-10 — first draft; Ralph's heart left undecided; half proof added.

## Premise

Two years ago Sir Ralph of Askholme took back the mill his grandfather gave the priory, saying the
gift had been for the old man's life only. The priory sued, the bishop's court ordered the mill
restored, Ralph refused, and eighteen months ago the bishop excommunicated him at the priory's own
petition. The sentence has been read with bell and candle in every church of the deanery since.

On the second day of a blizzard, Adam the shepherd finds Ralph in a drift a mile below the gate,
alive for a little while, and dead by the time Adam's hay sledge reaches the gatehouse. An
excommunicate may not be carried into the church or laid in hallowed ground. But the law allows a
man who showed signs of contrition before he died to be absolved after death, and the one man in
the county who can do it is snowbound in the prior's lodging: the bishop's official, caught on his
way home from a visitation.

He will hear the case only if the chapter petitions, since the house is the injured party. Seven
canons must decide whether to ask. They are judging a quarrel they began themselves, the only
witness is a shepherd, and the dead man's brother is offering to give back the mill.

## What the GM needs

Hollinbeck, the Askholmes, and everyone in the house are invented. These are the real things that
shape play.

- **The law.** Gregory IX's Decretals (1234) are in force. The official carries a canonist's
  summary of them, and the priory owns no copy. Innocent III's ruling on absolution after death
  (X 5.39.28) is the hinge: an excommunicate may be absolved after death if his repentance while
  living is shown by evident signs, his heirs making satisfaction for him, and only by whoever could
  have absolved him living, here the bishop or the official under his commission. Buried in hallowed
  ground without it, his bones are to be dug up if they can be told from the faithful (X 3.28.12).
  The official rules on signs, never on the heart (What no one knows).
- **Half a proof.** Church courts want two credible witnesses for full proof. One makes half a proof,
  which a document, a second witness, or a strong presumption can complete, and an interested
  witness is discounted. Adam is the only witness to Ralph's last hour, so his oath is half the case
  at best, and finding the other half is the work before the vote. The bounded sources in What no
  one knows are the only places it can come from: the bags (slot 1), or the Prior if he will speak
  of last Lent (slot 5c). Gilbert, as heir, is an interested witness, and saw nothing.
- **Satisfaction and simony.** Restitution was always the condition of Ralph's absolution, and the
  law expects his heir to make it. The difference between satisfaction and simony lies in whether the
  mill is satisfaction offered or the price of a grave, and every canon knows it.
- **The writ.** At Michaelmas the bishop signified Ralph to Chancery. The sheriff holds the writ for
  his arrest and has not yet moved against a neighbor, and Ralph knew it was out. So any sign of
  peace from him in December reads two ways, as repentance or as a man settling before he was taken,
  and nothing in the house can tell them apart. The official knows of the signification for certain,
  and Gilbert knows it; the canons have it only as rumor.
- **Lay confession.** In necessity the schools commend confessing to a layman: not the sacrament, but
  a sign of contrition. Whether the hearer is bound to silence, they dispute.
- **Founder's kin.** Ralph's grandfather, Sir Uhtred of Askholme, founded the house about 1165 and
  lies before the high altar. The foundation charter grants his heirs burial in the church, so an
  absolved Ralph lies beside him by right, unless the chapter's petition asks otherwise and Gilbert
  accepts it. Uhtred's anniversary in the necrology falls on 13 December.
- **The bishop.** Walter Mauclerk of Carlisle is often away in the king's service, and his official
  acts for him. The Advent Ember Days fall on 19, 21, and 22 December, and the official means to be
  at Carlisle for the ordinations.
- **Guards.** Canons are "Brother" to one another; "Father" as a priest's title is modern. Gilbert
  and the official deal in French, the fells speak English, and the choir sings Latin. The official
  is a southerner, schooled at Oxford and Bologna, whose ear for Cumbrian English is poor.

## The ground

The priory sits on a shelf of the fell where the Hollin Beck comes down off the tops toward the
Eden. It has a small aisleless church of red sandstone, a cloister barely wider than a cart's
turning circle, the chapter house on the east walk, the refectory on the south, the dorter above,
and the warming room, whose hearth is the only fire the canons may sit by. The **gatehouse** stands
across the outer court: a vaulted passage with the porter's room on one side and, on the other, a
stone-floored chamber where carts are unloaded. Ralph lies there on two trestles under his own
cloak, neither inside the precinct nor out of it.

Snow drifts to the sills. The beck is silent under ice except where it falls. The Helm Wind roars
off Cross Fell for a day at a time, then drops into a stillness that rings. Peat smoke, tallow, wet
wool, and the sour cold of stone. Oat bread, beans, cheese, and thin ale; it is Advent and no fish
can be had. Lauds and Vespers both fall in darkness, with seven gray hours between. Ravens work the
midden. The mill stands at the foot of the beck, a mile below and out of sight.

At table the reader is in the fourth book of St. Gregory's Dialogues, at the monk Justus and his
thirty Masses. Let the canons notice; the narrator doesn't.

The house holds seven canons, a handful of servants, and the porter. Ralph's lame bay is in the
stable with its saddle and bags hung on the peg. Adam, who cannot get home, sleeps in the guest
hall.

## The days

Play near-hourly. Each day keeps its bells: Matins and Lauds in the dark, Prime at first light and
chapter after it, Mass, the midday meal, Vespers at dusk, and Compline. The weather is fixed: snow
and wind through Thursday night, then a southwest wind and rain, and the road down is passable by
Saturday.

- **Mon 10 Dec.** The official arrives from his visitation; the snow begins after Compline.
  Before play.
- **Tue 11 Dec, Vespers.** The sledge at the gate: the opening scene.
- **Wed 12 Dec.** A lull at midday brings Gilbert of Askholme up the valley with two men,
  half-frozen, and the snow closes behind him. He makes his offer. The official agrees to hear the
  case at the next morning's chapter if the canons petition. At night, someone sits with the body.
- **Thu 13 Dec, St. Lucy.** The shortest day. The player reads the founder's name at chapter after
  Prime, then the examination and the vote. The official rules before the midday meal. At Vespers,
  burial or none. Rain in the night.
- **Fri 14 Dec.** The thaw. The Prior may adjourn a failed or unfinished chapter to this morning
  once; the official will sit again then, but not after.
- **Sat 15 Dec.** The road opens. The official leaves at first light, and his authority goes with
  him. If Ralph is unabsolved, Gilbert takes him down the hill. Then the coda.

## The chapter

Seven stalls, the Prior presiding. By the house's custom the youngest speaks first, so no one can
shelter behind his elders. Four voices carry the petition, whether or not all seven vote. Each line
ends with the opening ledger: warmth toward the player / where he lands on petitioning — *firm*,
*leans*, or *undecided*.

- **Brother Edmund** (bench). Twenty-four, professed last year, and the son of Ralph and Gilbert's
  sister: the dead man is his uncle. Grieving, and ashamed of grieving. *Enters* in the gatehouse.
  *Warm / for, by blood, but abstaining.* The Prior has asked him not to vote in his own family's
  cause; it is a request, not an order, and Edmund will vote only if someone he trusts gives him
  leave of conscience or the request is challenged in chapter. His abstention costs the petition a
  voice.
- **The player**, second to speak. See Vantage.
- **Brother Nicholas, Precentor** (bench). Thirty-eight, gentle, the best voice in a small choir, and
  sick at quarrels. *Enters* in choir. *Friendly / undecided;* he needs a reason he can sing with.
- **Brother Gervase, Cellarer** (core). Forty-five, practical, and honest about money, which is his
  office. Without the mill, the priory's tenants grind at Askholme's, and the house buys flour on
  credit from a merchant of Appleby. He wants the mill back before Lent and knows how that looks.
  *Enters* at the stable or the gate. *Brisk / leans for, and will say his reason aloud, which hurts
  the cause.*
- **Brother Osbert, Sacrist** (core). Fifty-eight, keeper of the church, the relics, and the
  cemetery: austere, devout in a hard way, and tender with the sick. The ground is hallowed, not for
  sale, and a man who dies under the Church's sentence dies under it. *Enters* at Vespers. *Cool /
  leans against;* answered only by the law's own provision or by proof of signs.
- **Brother Ivo, Subprior** (bench). Seventy, the eldest and half-deaf. He remembers Sir Uhtred, and
  Ralph as a boy serving at the altar. *Enters* in the warming room. *Fond / leans against, by
  reverence for the sentence;* memory is the reason that can answer him.
- **Prior Elias** (core). Sixty-six, prior for twenty years: careful, devout, tired, and unused to
  hardness. The excommunication was the one hard thing he ever did. His reason is slot 5, and he
  will not give it plainly. *Enters* in the opening scene. *Fatherly / leans against.*

**The default count.** If the player votes to petition and has done no work, it fails three to
three, with Edmund silent. The petition is one voice short, and the player can see from the first
evening which voices could be the fourth: Edmund freed to vote, Ivo's memory, Osbert's law, or the
Prior's reason. A player who votes against carries Nicholas with him, and the petition fails heavily.

## Outside the chapter

- **Master Simon of Wickham, the bishop's official** (core). Fifty, dry, exact, fair, perpetually
  cold, with a canonist's pleasure in a hard case. He judges by signs and says so when pressed: the
  Church does not judge hidden things, what Ralph meant is God's to know, and his own business is
  what was seen and sworn. He will hear the case only on the chapter's petition, and how he rules
  is slot 4. *Enters* at Compline on the first night. *Courteous / unreadable.*
- **Gilbert of Askholme** (core). Forty-one, Ralph's younger brother and heir: proud, quick, and raw
  with grief. He knows only that Ralph rode out alone that morning without a word, though he will
  speak as if he knows why. His offer is slot 3. *Enters* at the midday lull on the 12th, searching.
  *Wary / for, wholly.*
- **Adam the shepherd** (core). About forty, the priory's tenant, with ewes on the fell above
  Hollinbeck. He speaks English only and uses few words. A good man, frightened of the relics, of
  his landlords, and of the lord's brother. What he heard is slot 2. *Enters* in the opening scene.
  *Deferential / he will tell what he heard as he understood it, and fear can bend the telling.*
- **The porter**, an old servant who unsaddled the horse and hung its gear. Texture, until someone
  asks him what he saw.
- **Gilbert's two men**, texture, unless one is needed.

## Vantage

One vantage, with a default character the player may reshape. If they do (a knight's younger son,
a former parish priest), move one stat point and one relationship, no more.

### Brother Martin of Alston

Thirty-one, a lead miner's son from Alston Moor, taken into the priory school for his quick mind and
professed five years. Each morning at chapter he reads the martyrology and the necrology, and he
keeps the book: the house's dead, its founders, its benefactors, and its brothers in confraternity,
each on his day. Ivo taught him his letters, Edmund is his friend, Osbert thinks him soft, and the
Prior trusts him with the book and with little else yet. He knew Ralph only as the name read out in
church under the sentence, and as a horseman who threw him a penny on the road when he was nine.

**Learning 3, Rhetoric 2, Standing 1, Conscience 2.** He has the house's best Latin after the
Prior's, and its best English, so he is the one the official will ask to render the shepherd's
words.

### Opening

11 December, Vespers. The canons are in choir by rushlight when the porter's bell goes, and keeps
going, which no one does at Vespers. The Prior sends the player. Snow comes sideways through the
gate arch. A fell pony steams in the traces of a hay sledge, a lame bay stands behind it, and a man
in a sheepskin will not let go of the sledge rope. On the sledge, under a cloak, is a face the
player has seen on horseback. Name only **Adam** and, when he comes down with a lantern, **the
Prior**. End when the Prior understands whose body it is and says, very quietly, where it may not
be carried. Then the player acts.

## The examination

This scenario's signature is a single witness under oath. One man was there, everyone else has
hearsay, and the whole case turns on what the shepherd heard and how it reaches the record.

On the morning of the 13th, before the vote, the official examines Adam in chapter. Adam's oath is
half a proof at most (What the GM needs), and the official will ask what completes it; a chapter
that hasn't found an answer beforehand will have to find one in the room.

- **The oath.** Adam swears on the house's relic, a scrap of St. Cuthbert's shroud in a copper box.
  Once he has sworn, no one speaks to him except to question him.
- **The rendering.** Adam speaks English and the official records in Latin, so he asks the player to
  render. Each sentence passes from the shepherd's mouth through the player's into the official's
  notes. Rendering faithfully is Learning, harder where Adam's words are thin or strange. Any canon
  who knows both tongues may challenge a rendering, and Osbert and Ivo will. A player who shades
  the meaning has committed as surely as one who speaks out, because the Latin is the record.
- **The questions.** Each canon may put one question, youngest first; the official asks as many as he
  likes, last. A question is a check like any other: Learning to frame it on the law's own test,
  Rhetoric to draw a frightened man out, Conscience to notice what he isn't saying. Adam answers
  truly to what he understands (slot 2). His fear raises the difficulty of every question, and the
  conditions are built beforehand: who has sat with him, who has pressed him, and whether he trusts
  the hand on the relic box.
- **Beforehand.** Anyone may talk to Adam before he swears. The first to hear his account in his own
  words has it at first hand; everyone after hears a man who has told it before, and a story told
  twice changes. Gilbert will try to see him, and so may Gervase.

## The vote

After the examination, the Prior puts the question: will the chapter petition the official to absolve
Sir Ralph? Voices are given aloud, youngest first.

- **Firm:** he votes his line.
- **Leans:** he votes his lean unless someone who has already spoken answers his reason. That is a
  check for the speaker, cheaper where the work was done in private beforehand.
- **Undecided:** he goes with the side leading when he is called; if they are level, with whoever he
  is warmest toward among those who have spoken.
- A voice may carry a sentence. Most don't; the player's is its own scene.

Four voices carry it. The petition may name terms, such as burial in the cemetery rather than the
choir, or restitution made into the bishop's hands rather than the house's, and drafting them is a
fight of its own before the vote. If the petition carries, the official rules on the signs as he
finds them (slot 4) before the midday meal. If it fails, nothing more happens unless the Prior
adjourns to Friday.

## Testimony and the bags

Provenance here is testimony: who heard Ralph, who heard Adam first, and who has *seen* what is in
the saddlebags rather than been told. The official weighs only what was seen and sworn. A canon who
repeats what Adam told him privately is offering hearsay, and the official will say so, drily.

The bags hang in the stable from the first night, and the porter hung them there. Whoever opens them
first knows what they hold, and whoever opens them before witnesses can prove it. Gilbert will think
of them by the evening of the 12th. Whatever papers they hold were written for Ralph by a clerk
Gilbert doesn't know, and he has never seen them.

## What no one knows

Ralph's heart is not in this file and is never decided: not why he rode up the fell, not what he
meant by anything he carried, not whether he was contrite when he died. The GM holds the evidence,
which is fixed and can be found. Reading it belongs to the characters and the player, as it belonged
to the chapter.

- **Never fixed.** The shared rule that an open question is fixed the first time it reaches the page
  does not apply here. When a player asks what Ralph meant, the answer is what the evidence shows
  and who believes what about it. Several characters will speak as if they are sure, and none of
  them is right by the file's say-so.
- **The evidence is bounded.** It comes from these sources and no others: the saddlebags (slot 1);
  what Adam heard (slot 2); the Prior's private meeting with Ralph last Lent, if it happened (slot
  5); the signification, and the rumor of it; and the place he was found. The track to the gate and
  the old road over to the next dale share their first mile up from the valley, Ralph lay on that
  shared mile, and the snow has taken his tracks, so his heading proves nothing. He rode out from
  Askholme alone in a lull on the morning of the 11th and told no one where he was going. No priest
  has heard his confession in eighteen months, because none could. There is no second traveler, no
  letter on the road, and no servant who knew his mind, and the GM adds none.
- **The body gives nothing.** Frost has set his face, and it looks like any man's who died in the
  snow. Don't narrate peace or anguish in it.
- **No sign answers it.** A canon may pray for Ralph alone in the night, and may dream; what he
  dreams concerns himself, never where Ralph's soul is. No miracle touches the case.
- **The narrator doesn't hint**, not in the weather, not in the light on the gatehouse, and not in
  the coda. Whichever way the player votes, they judged on the evidence the chapter had.

## Fixed and open

**Fixed.** Ralph's death, the excommunication and its cause, the signification, the law, seven
stalls and four voices, the weather, and the official's departure on Saturday.

**Open.** Whether the chapter petitions, on what terms, and how the official rules; where Ralph
lies; whether the mill comes back, and to whom; what becomes of Adam, who has sworn before lords;
and how seven men who must sing Compline together afterward stand with one another.

**Never decided.** What Ralph meant, and the state of his soul. See What no one knows.

**The long shots**, never volunteered by the GM and always respected when played toward:

- **The night burial.** Burying Ralph in the cemetery without absolution. Frozen ground makes it a
  long, loud job that needs hands and leaves witnesses. If it is discovered, the law orders him dug
  up and the house risks interdict. It is a Conscience act, and it commits.
- **The official without a petition.** The law does not strictly require the injured party's
  petition; the official's practice does. Arguing a Bologna man out of his practice on his own
  ground is the hardest check in the scenario, and the chapter will not quickly forgive a canon who
  goes around it.
- **Taking the price off the table.** A chapter that petitions while refusing the mill, or that asks
  for it to go to the poor or into the bishop's hands, removes the bargain from the question. It may
  win the official (slot 4c), and Gervase will not easily forgive it.

## The coda

The record is the house's own: the official's act of absolution or refusal, the chapter's petition
or the minute of its failure, a line in the cellarer's account roll for the mill, and the necrology
under 11 December, where Ralph's name is entered for the community's prayers, in the player's hand,
or is not. The reader is a novice ten years on, reading the day's names at chapter for the first
time, who finds the entry or the blank and asks the player who Ralph of Askholme was. If the player
has died, the novice asks Edmund. No line of the record says what Ralph meant, and the coda
doesn't either: the answer is what the player saw and what they chose.

## Save state

`Scenario state` fields, from the sledge:

- **witness**: who has heard Adam's account, in what order, and who has pressed him and how. This is
  provenance here.
- **bags**: where the saddlebags are, whether they've been opened, by whom, and before whom.
- **offer**: Gilbert's terms as he has stated them, and who heard.
- **edmund**: voting or abstaining, and who has spoken to him about it.
- **vigil**: who has sat with the body, and who was seen there.
- **writ**: who has learned of the signification, and whether from rumor or from the official.

From the examination, **record**: what the Latin says, and any rendering challenged. From the vote,
**outcome**: the count, any terms, the official's ruling, where Ralph lies, and the mill.

## Pre-commitment

**1 — What the saddlebags hold.** Each answer fixes only what is in the bags. None says what Ralph
meant, and the GM never decides it (What no one knows).
a. A quitclaim of the mill to the priory, sealed with Ralph's seal and undelivered: repentance, or
a settlement made before the sheriff came for him.
b. A draft appeal to the archbishop of York against the sentence, unsealed, in a clerk's hand:
defiance, or a lever for better terms.
c. Both together, the quitclaim and the appeal. He may have meant to offer one and threaten with
the other, or he had not chosen.
d. Nothing bearing on the priory: silver, a change of linen, a letter about wool from his steward.
The road below the gate runs on over the fell, and he may have been passing.

**2 — What Adam heard.**
a. Plain words. Ralph asked for a priest, and asked to be carried to the priory.
b. Words that could be prayer or curse: "prior" and "mill," and something between them the wind
took.
c. Little or nothing intelligible. Adam has told it the way a Christian man ought to have spoken,
because he wants it true. The right question under oath brings that out, and his shame with it.
d. A confession. Ralph confessed his sins to him, as men do when no priest can be had. Adam believes
he must keep it and will say only that the lord "made his confession," which sounds like evasion
until someone with Learning explains what he is protecting.

**3 — Gilbert's offer.**
a. Unconditional. He will restore the mill whatever the chapter does. He speaks it as a bargain
because he is angry, and says so plainly if asked alone.
b. A price. Refused, he keeps the mill, and the house pays for every sack ground there.
c. Guilt. He urged Ralph to take the mill in the first place, means to restore it either way, and
cannot bear his brother refused burial for a sin half his own. He has told no one.

**4 — The official's mind.**
a. Strict. He wants full proof: Adam's half completed by a document or a second witness. Doubt is
not enough.
b. Merciful. In doubt he leans toward the dead man and lets presumption complete the proof. Given a
petition, Adam's half will do unless it collapses under questioning.
c. Wary of the bargain. He suspects the house of selling and absolves only if the satisfaction is
plainly separated from the petition. He never says so, though Learning or Conscience may read it.
d. Doubtful of his commission. He holds that his power to absolve the living does not reach the
dead, and will refuse with courtesy unless someone shows him the decretal's own words, which his
summary lacks.

**5 — The Prior's reason.**
a. Pride. The sentence was his one hard act, and he will not see it unmade on a shepherd's word.
b. Fear. He is sure the house will be said to have sold a grave.
c. Guilt. Ralph came to him privately last Lent offering terms, and the Prior refused them in
anger. He believes he is why Ralph died under the sentence, and he cannot be the one to lift it.

## Tone notes

- **Seven men, one fire.** Everyone eats together, sings together, and warms his hands at the same
  hearth. A quarrel at chapter sits beside you at supper.
- **Cold is a condition.** Night errands, a vigil in the gatehouse, and anything past the walls
  raise the difficulty. Past the walls in the storm the danger is mortal, and the fell gives plain
  warning.
- **No villains.** Ralph claimed the grant was for life, and the charter's wording gave him room.
  The canons are not greedy; the mill feeds the house and its tenants. Everyone's case is real.
- **The silence in choir.** The house may not sing the Office of the Dead for Ralph or name him at
  Mass; what a man prays alone in the night is his own. Let the omission be felt each day where the
  dead are remembered, and let the player notice who is missing from the dorter after Compline.
- **Full treatment:** the sledge at the gate, Gilbert's arrival, at least one meal, the
  examination, the vote, and Vespers either way.

# The Chapter House

**Scenario:** A cathedral chapter elects a new bishop after the old one's sudden death.
**Setting:** Hochfelden, a fictional prince-bishopric in the province of Mainz.
**Dates:** 29 October to mid-December 1220, Julian reckoning; a deadlock can run toward the
canonical limit of 27 January 1221. About six weeks, montage-heavy between set pieces.
**Revision:** 2026-10 — save fields and coda added.

## Premise

Bishop Otto von Mehringen is dead at sixty-three, a competent administrator and ordinary theologian
who ruled for nineteen years, so that most of the canons remember no one else in the cathedra. He
fell from his horse returning from a visitation, lingered three days, received the Viaticum, and
died on the night of the first frost.

Eighteen canons must choose a successor who will be both shepherd and prince of the Empire, with
ministerial knights, a mint, tolls, and the cathedral's revenues. Three names are in the air and the
chapter is split. Pressure from outside is real but indirect: no one can impose a bishop, but anyone
can break a fragile consensus. The vacancy will end. The questions are how, and whether eighteen men
who have sung the same offices for decades are still a community afterward.

## What the GM needs

Everything named Hochfelden is invented. These are the real things that shape play.

- **The law of elections is five years old.** The Fourth Lateran Council (1215, canon 24) allows three
  forms: *scrutiny*, in which three trustworthy electors collect every vote secretly and one by one,
  write them down, and publish them, electing the man chosen by all, or the greater or the sounder part
  (*maior vel sanior pars*); *compromise*, the chapter unanimously entrusting the choice to a few; and
  *quasi-inspiration*, all naming one man at once. Any other form is void, and those who attempt it
  lose their vote for this vacancy. An elector canonically impeded may swear to it and give his vote
  to a colleague present; no one else votes by proxy.
- **Three months** (canon 23). After three months' vacancy without lawful hindrance, the right passes
  for this vacancy to the immediate superior, who provides with the advice of his own chapter. Here:
  Mainz, on 27 January.
- **Mainz confirms, not Rome.** The metropolitan examines the election, confirms, and consecrates,
  and answers for it if he confirms an unworthy man (canon 26); Rome enters only on appeal. The
  Third Lateran Council (1179) set the floor: thirty years old, born in wedlock, of commendable life
  and learning.
- **Where the great are.** Frederick II is in Italy; Honorius III crowns him emperor in St. Peter's
  on Sunday 22 November. Archbishop Siegfried II of Mainz is at the coronation, so letters to Mainz
  find his officials. The king in Germany is Frederick's son Henry, nine, elected at Frankfurt in
  April and kept by Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne. A German elect receives the regalia from the
  king before consecration.
- **The princes' charters.** At Eger (1213) Frederick promised chapters free elections; at Frankfurt
  (April 1220) he barred the Crown from new mints, tolls, castles, or towns in church princes' lands
  and promised to enforce their courts' sentences. A prince matters more this year than ever, which
  is Konrad's case.
- **Guards.** Ministerials are the see's own knights, unfree in law and noble in manner, and they
  fear a bishop from outside their families. No friars have a house on the Rhine or the Main yet;
  Hochfelden's two Dominicans are the first anyone here has seen. A canon is *domine* or *Herr*;
  "Father" as a priest's title is modern.

## The ground

A town of perhaps four thousand on the Hochbach, a tributary of the Main, among vineyards and oak
forest. The cathedral of **St. Boniface**, his right arm in a silver reliquary on the high altar, is
a century-old Romanesque basilica with two heavy western towers, dim even at midday: small windows,
candles in iron stands, old incense in the stone, a cold that never lifts. The bishop's palace lies
north; south, the chapter house, refectory, dorter, and library ring a small cloister.

The **chapter house** is new, roofed but not yet glazed: fresh oak rafters, whitewash, eighteen
carved stalls around a reading desk, the bishop's canopied stall empty, and the November air coming
straight in. The **refectory** serves bread, cheese, and the chapter's own thin Rhenish at midday, a
hot dish at supper, fish on Fridays and Advent Wednesdays, with St. Augustine on the Psalms read at
table. Discipline at the office slipped under Otto, and the chant is competent, not beautiful.

November: drizzle, river fog, woodsmoke, bare lindens, rooks, frost most nights, snow possible by
Advent. Markets Tuesday and Friday. The Jewish quarter is a few old streets by the river, under the
bishop's protection in theory and in fact. **Marienthal**, Cistercian, lies four hours east;
**St. Walburga**, an old, rich house of noble nuns, half a day north.

## How the election works

By a charter of Frederick Barbarossa, the chapter elects without outside nomination.

- **The nine days** from the burial: Masses for the dead and no business, by custom.
- **The summons**, on the ninth day, to every canon entitled to vote, since an elector wrongly left
  out can overturn the election. None of the three absent (slot 7) is canonically impeded, so none
  can send a proxy; each comes, or his stall is silent.
- **Deliberation** from Martinmas, daily after the morning Mass, of no fixed length.
- **The vote** by the chapter's old custom: see The roll call.
- **Twelve.** The chapter's statute, older than the council, requires twelve voices of eighteen and
  forbids a man to vote for himself. Canon law asks only for the greater or the sounder part, so a
  side stuck at ten or eleven may argue the canon over the statute (Learning). If the Dean accepts,
  the minority contests the result before Mainz as not the sounder part, and a contested election
  outlasts the scenario.
- **Compromise.** After a failed vote the chapter may entrust the choice to three or five delegates,
  whose choice binds. Making it takes every voice, so any one canon can refuse, and the fight moves
  to who the delegates are.
- **Acclamation.** If the whole chapter names one man at once, he is elected. It is rare, never
  engineered by the GM, and impossible in a divided house until it isn't.
- **Afterward.** The election is published with the Te Deum, and the electors seal a decree for
  Mainz. Confirmation waits on Siegfried's return, or on an elect willing to ride south after him.

## The calendar

**Play near-daily** through the burial, the summons, the opening at Martinmas, the days before any
vote, and the vote. Montage the rest. A swift election falls before Advent; a deadlock runs toward
Christmas, and after it, montage to the wall.

**1. The nine days** — grief, first hints of politics, the player's hooks.
- 24 Oct — Otto thrown on the road home. 27 Oct — he dies.
- 29 Oct — The burial; the opening scene; day one.
- 1–2 Nov — All Saints and All Souls.
- 6 Nov — The summons go out.

**2. Martinmas** — the candidates emerge; lines harden or surprise. A Falkenstein cousin, a
Marienthal emissary, Brother Gerlach, a letter from the abbess; Hartmann's proxy becomes a question.
- 11 Nov — Rents fall due on the manors; deliberation opens in the unglazed chapter house.
- 22 Nov — Frederick crowned in Rome.
- 25 Nov — The thirtieth day since Otto's death: his month's-mind Requiem.

**3. Advent** — dinners, letters, a scandal or none, a ride to Marienthal or St. Walburga, the Jewish
community's approach, ministerial pressure, the vote.
- 29 Nov — Advent Sunday. Early Dec — news of the coronation.
- 6 Dec, St. Nicholas — The school chooses its boy bishop, who keeps the office to Holy Innocents
  with no bishop in the cathedra. Let the canons notice; the narrator doesn't.
- 16, 18, 19 Dec — Ember Days, and no bishop to ordain Berthold's ordinands.

**4. After** — the chapter settling or not, the new bishop's first public act, the player's standing
and friendships, next year's work in view, and the coda. With no election, the wall stands at
27 January.

## The chapter

Eighteen stalls in roll-call order: the dignities by rank, the rest by date of reception, the Dean
last. By long custom the dignities divide by birth in ways everyone understands and no one writes
down. The core appear in every run; a bench canon enters on his cue and is otherwise a vote, a face
in choir, a name in another man's mouth. Each line ends with the opening ledger: warmth toward the
player / where he lands — *firm*, *leans*, or *undecided*, which the roll call reads.

- **Konrad von Falkenstein, Provost** (core). See The candidates. *Courteous / himself; gives his
  voice to the Dean, a courtesy with a hook in it.*
- **Walther von Astheim, Cantor** (core). See The candidates. *Friendly / leans Konrad, by birth;
  slot 3 decides whether he becomes his own man.*
- **Berthold of Marburg, Scholasticus** (core). See The candidates. *Kind / seeks nothing, will not
  refuse; gives his voice to Gottfried.*
- **Gottfried, Treasurer** (core). Sixty-one, commoner, longest-serving. He keeps the relics and
  silver and talks to St. Boniface in the half-light of the treasury as if the saint were in the
  room, and changes his mind slowly. *Mild / undecided, waiting on the saint (slots 6, 9).*
- **Adalbert of Eppingen, Cellarer.** Thirty-eight, ministerial, a Falkenstein client: the chapter's
  gossip, an informant if befriended. *Enters* at table. *Genial / firm for Konrad.*
- **Hartmann von Wertheim.** Sixty-eight, noble, the elder, ill in his rooms in the close; his sworn
  proxy answers here (slots 4, 5). *Enters* with the proxy question; the sickbed visit is a real
  scene. *Distant / slot 5.*
- **Engelbert von Steinach.** Fifty-two, minor noble, the abbess's nephew and Otto's friend, grieving
  and wanting to be left alone. *Enters* in the nine days. *Warm in grief / leans Konrad, by family,
  unthinking.*
- **Wigand of Spaichingen.** Forty-six, commoner, the best canonist after Berthold, jealous of him,
  and word-perfect in the Lateran canons; detachable by the right approach, hardened by the wrong.
  *Enters* when someone seeks a wedge in the reform party. *Cool / leans Berthold.*
- **Ulrich of Eschenbach.** Forty-four, commoner, serious, Berthold's friend since boyhood at the
  school. *Enters* when Berthold's circle gathers. *Cordial / firm for Berthold.*
- **Otto of Lautern.** Forty, commoner, parish-trained, suspicious of Paris learning. *Enters* when
  that suspicion surfaces. *Neutral / leans Konrad.*
- **Poppo of Wimpfen** (absent). Fifty, ministerial family, the chapter's man on its manors across
  the Main, gathering rents; he wants the villages quiet. *Unmet / leans Konrad, loosely.*
- **Friedrich von Lichtenau** (absent). Thirty-five, Falkenstein kin by marriage, at Mainz on the
  chapter's tithe suit, lazy and in no hurry to leave the archbishop's cellars. *Friendly / firm for
  Konrad.*
- **The player** stands here: Wilhelm (eight years a canon), Matthäus (six), or Lukas (three). Twelve
  voices come before theirs and five after.
- **Albrecht von Hagen.** Twenty-nine, a noble younger son, two years a canon: bright, restless,
  ambitious, wooed early for his vote and his future. *Enters* when the wooing begins. *Curious /
  undecided.*
- **Rudolf of Aschaffenburg** (absent). Twenty-four, Berthold's pupil, studying theology at Paris; a
  letter takes two weeks to reach him. *Unmet / firm for Berthold.*
- **Dietrich of Mosbach.** Thirty-three, commoner, lately admitted, watching more than he speaks.
  *Enters* late; let the player catch him watching before he's named. *Guarded / leans Berthold, and
  won't say so while it's dangerous.*
- **Reinhard von Falkenstein.** Twenty-six, the Provost's nephew, installed this year in a prebend
  some say was held for him, and resented for it. *Enters* at his uncle's side. *Cool / firm for
  Konrad.*
- **Heinrich von Reichenbach, Dean** (core). Sixty, regional noble, dean eleven years: canny, deeply
  experienced, tired. He wants it done quickly with the least damage, endorses no one, and is thought
  to favor the safest choice. He calls the names and votes last. *Correct / slot 8, unstated all
  game.*

**Adjust for vantage.** Lukas: Berthold fatherly, Ulrich warm, the reform party counting him, Wigand
seeing him as Berthold's creature, the Falkenstein men a shade cool. Wilhelm: Walther warm, Engelbert
friendly, Konrad and Reinhard counting him, Berthold's circle guarded. Matthäus: Gottfried warm,
Berthold respectful, Konrad unimpressed, the undecided juniors watching him as a conscience.

## The candidates

**Konrad von Falkenstein**, forty-eight, of an old family risen from ministerial stock. Fifteen years
as Provost have made the estates pay. Hard-working, astute, austere in some things and self-indulgent
in others, faithful at the office, with competent Latin and only the theology he was taught: a good
prince and a passable bishop. Years of favors, placed cousins, and brokered marriages secure him most
of the noble and ministerial canons, the regional nobility, and the ministerials. *Said:* no time for
theological adventures; a bishop must govern; no one knows Hochfelden better. *Unsaid:* fifteen more
years of Otto's drift.

**Berthold of Marburg**, fifty-five, commoner, a Paris master taught by Peter Lombard's pupils, twenty
years master of the school, with three treatises, one cited with respect at Paris. Quiet-voiced, at
every office, hearing laypeople's confessions on Saturdays, loved by his students. He has not sought
it and will not refuse. With him: the learned canons, the younger clergy, the school, Marienthal, the
friars, and the older commoner canons, who see one of their own gone furthest. His bishopric would
mean sustained reform — discipline, real visitations, absentees called home, a larger school, a voice
at the yearly provincial councils the Lateran canons now require. *Against him:* a commoner with no
governance and no ministerial following, perhaps with few years left — a scholar, not a prince.

**Walther von Astheim**, forty-two, a minor noble but no Falkenstein, charming in chapter and fine in
choir, theologically ordinary, politically inoffensive. Not yet anyone's candidate, he may become one
in a deadlock. His bishopric would be Otto's reign by other means.

## Outside the chapter

Tracked like factions, each with an opening state.

- **Archbishop Siegfried II of Mainz**, in Italy; his officials keep his seal and counsel, and a quiet
  preference for Konrad would surprise no one. *Distant / presumed for Konrad.*
- **Abbot Hermann of Marienthal**, Berthold's correspondent of fifteen years, who still calls
  Matthäus "Brother." A letter, a visit, or a sermon before the vote would weigh; he will not abuse
  it. *For Berthold, silent.*
- **Abbess Mechthild von Steinach** of St. Walburga, fifty-eight, Engelbert's aunt and a Falkenstein
  cousin, whose house holds its lands of the bishop. She disliked Otto mildly, knows Berthold by
  letter, and watched Konrad grow up. She won't write to the chapter as a body, but writes to canons
  privately and invites them to dine. *Undecided, and movable.*
- **Gertrud von Falkenstein**, sixty-one, Konrad's widowed sister-in-law, ruling the house's lands for
  her son: shrewd, hard, pious in her way, pressing fairly and never bluffing. Coercion voids an
  election (canon 25), and she knows the line better than the ministerials do. *For Konrad, wholly.*
- **The ministerials**, voteless but able to visit, write, withhold hospitality, and hint at trouble
  in the lands. Gertrud is their best convener, not their only voice. *For Konrad.*
- **The Dominicans**, two friars who came in September to preach, led by young, intense **Brother
  Gerlach**. They want the bishop's license and a chapel; Otto died without answering. *For
  Berthold, loudly, which does not help him.*
- **The Jewish community**, a small kehilla paying the customary tallage, for whom much turns on how
  the new bishop reads the Lateran decrees on the Jews, which Otto let lie. Its leaders may approach
  one sympathetic canon, and the player's response is character-defining. *Watching.*
- **The town**: sermons, gossip, who comes to Mass. A bishop the town does not want governs poorly.

## Vantages

Three canons with votes, alike in access and different in formation, temperament, and stats; any
could back any candidate.

### Lukas of Speyer

Thirty-six, a cloth merchant's son who came to the school as a boy to study under Berthold, ordained
at twenty-six, a canon three years. He still studies and writes careful Latin. Berthold remains a kind
of father to him, and the chapter assumes he is Berthold's man.

**Learning 3, Rhetoric 2, Standing 1, Conscience 2.** He has not decided whether he is, nor whether
agreeing with his teacher's politics is the same as being faithful to him.

### Wilhelm von Eltz

Thirty-nine, a younger son with ties to both Falkensteins and Steinachs: Trier's school, two years a
chaplain in the royal chapel, and a prebend here the family arranged eight years ago. Well liked,
fluent in the noble houses' politics, a competent priest who has written nothing harder than a
diocesan letter. Cordial with Konrad, warmer with Walther, undeclared; the Falkenstein party assumes
him, with some ground.

**Learning 1, Rhetoric 2, Standing 3, Conscience 2.** His family wants his vote, and any he can
carry, delivered to Konrad, and he can deliver them. The question is whether he wants to, and what
he becomes if he does.

### Matthäus of Andernach

Forty-two, a commoner who left Marienthal after seven years as a novice, in honest discernment rather
than disgrace; a decade a parish priest, and a canon six years at Otto's own wish after he heard him
preach. He keeps a Cistercian's habits, confesses the poor, and preaches remarkably. He respects
Berthold, is unimpressed by Konrad, and prays daily about the election without yet feeling clear.

**Learning 2, Rhetoric 2, Standing 1, Conscience 3.** He sees the chapter clearly — its compromises,
kindnesses, and slow drift. The question is what to do with what he sees.

### Opening

29 October, the burial. The Requiem nears its end with the communion, *Lux aeterna*; the player stands
in his stall. Hard October light in the high windows, incense, fresh oak from the chapter house. Name
only **the Dean**, and one other by vantage: Lukas finds Berthold's eyes across the choir, Wilhelm
stands beside Walther, Matthäus kneels near Gottfried. Everyone else is bodies, breath, and the backs
of heads. End as the Dean rises to read who will keep the psalter at the new tomb through the first
night, names only, and the player hears, or doesn't hear, their own. Then the player acts.

## The roll call

This scenario's signature is a vote taken aloud by name. Six weeks of work are spent in a quarter hour
in a cold room, and the player should be able to see well beforehand how the count will fall.

By custom the Dean calls each canon in order and each answers aloud from his stall. To satisfy the
Lateran canon he means to name three scrutators and have them take the voices, still aloud. As each
name is called:

- **Firm:** he votes his line, and nothing said in the room moves him.
- **Leans:** he votes his lean unless someone who has already spoken, the player included, answers
  his reason. That is a check for the speaker, priced like any turning of a vote: higher for interest
  or fear than for habit, lower where the work was done in private beforehand.
- **Undecided:** he goes with the name leading when he is called; if names are level, with the man he
  is warmest toward among those who have spoken, who may be the player.
- Hartmann's proxy gives his instruction (slot 5). An absent man's name is called, and the silence is
  heard. A man may add a sentence to his voice; most don't, and the player's voice is its own scene.

Seniority favors whoever holds the senior stalls and the early lead, by default Konrad. Short of
twelve for one name, the vote fails.

**The Lateran form.** Before the vote, any canon may object that voices taken aloud are not votes
collected secretly. Pressing the Lateran text against a dean's custom in his own chapter is
Learning, eased by the constitutions in hand, by Wigand or Berthold standing beside the objector,
and by the Dean's private willingness. If it carries, the vote becomes a true scrutiny, and choosing
the scrutators is its own fight. No one hears another's voice before giving his own: leaners vote
their lean, the undecided their warmth or interest, and speeches belong to deliberation. It breaks
the cascade and spares the timid the room, if not the published result. If it fails and the Dean
proceeds by voice, the objector has his ground for contesting the result before Mainz.

## Promises and seals

Provenance here is the promise: the chapter runs on voices promised in corridors. A canon who breaks
his word given before brothers is shamed; one who denies a promise no one else heard is only
suspected. Track who promised what to whom, and who heard it. A proxy is sworn and binds its holder.
The electors seal the decree, and a man who refuses his seal is remembered. Lay coercion voids an
election only if someone can swear he heard the threat himself.

## Fixed and open

**Fixed.** Otto's death and burial; eighteen stalls and twelve voices; the Lateran forms and the wall;
the named people as described, and the great where What the GM needs puts them.

**Open.** Who wins: Konrad by default, after some difficulty; Berthold if the player works for it
across many turns; Walther as the natural fruit of a long deadlock. The margin: unanimity heals,
twelve to six wounds, and the wall is a humiliation the chapter lives with for generations. Where
each canon lands, the form of the vote, and the side stakes: the Jewish community, the friars'
license, the school, discipline, and Marienthal.

**The long shots**, never volunteered by the GM and always respected when played toward:

- **Scandal breaking a candidate** needs something true to find (slots 1, 2), and real Conscience and
  Standing to use it.
- **The wall**, which the Dean fights. At it, Siegfried provides with the advice of his own chapter,
  and the province knows the chapter could not govern itself.
- **An outsider**: Abbot Hermann, who would refuse, though naming him shifts the room; Mechthild's
  brother, a respected canon of Mainz; or a reforming canon of a neighboring chapter. The path runs
  through breaking both coalitions and finding a man willing.
- **The player's own name.** Possible only after a failed vote, when someone else proposes it in
  chapter and the player has built real Standing and Conscience; then it is won like any other, and
  its costs include being bishop. Matthäus is likeliest, as the reputed holy man deadlocked chapters
  reach for, through Hermann's open support. Wilhelm could be a noble the Falkensteins accept if
  Konrad falters and Gertrud consents, never as Konrad's tool. Lukas needs total deadlock and a
  reputation that catches the whole diocese.

## The coda

The record is the chapter's decree for Mainz, with the roll call written into it, every voice by
name, the player's among them. The reader is Mainz's examiner, who must answer for confirming an
unworthy man, asking the player what the chapter did. If the wall stood, the record is the
chapter's minute of its failure, read by the man Siegfried provides on his first night in the
palace.

## Save state

`Scenario state` fields, from the burial:

- **promises**: who promised what to whom, and who heard it. This is provenance here.
- **proxy**: who holds Hartmann's voice, and who reached the sickbed first.
- **stalls**: which absent canons have come, and how many will vote.
- **hunt**: any scandal pursued, whose, and what is in hand rather than merely heard.
- **stakes**: where the kehilla, the friars, the school, or Marienthal has moved.

From Martinmas, **form**: voice or scrutiny, any objection and its fate, any compromise and who
refused it. From the vote, **outcome**: the name and margin, a failed vote, or the wall; any
contest before Mainz; any seal refused.

## Pre-commitment

**1 — Konrad's buried truth.** What a scandal hunt finds. Fix its substance when the hunt first
touches it: for instance, chapter lands promised under seal to the ministerials (a), or a woman in one
of the chapter's villages and a son he provides for (b).
a. Disqualifying if proven, and provable with sustained work.
b. Real and embarrassing; survivable if he handles it well.
c. Nothing. A player who digs hits clean rock.

**2 — Berthold's buried truth.** Lettered as slot 1, chosen independently; two honest men is a
legitimate result. For instance: Paris letters showing he shared Amalric of Bena's teaching, which the
Lateran council condemned, or a birth out of wedlock never dispensed (a); the friendship without the
doctrine, or a sharp page Paris later disliked (b).

**3 — Walther's ambition.**
a. He has wanted the mitre for years, more than he admits.
b. He does not want it, and will say so plainly if pressed.
c. He does not know his own mind until the chapter puts the question.

**4 — Hartmann's proxy.**
a. Promised to the Dean before the game opens.
b. Promised to Ulrich; the reform party is quietly counting on it.
c. Unpromised. The sickbed visit decides it, and whoever comes first has the advantage.
d. He means to be carried in and vote himself. Whether he can is fixed on the day by the weather and
what anyone has arranged, never to rescue a count.

**5 — Hartmann's instruction**, whoever carries it.
a. Konrad. b. Berthold. c. Left open: he names the man if asked well; otherwise the holder chooses.

**6 — Gottfried and St. Boniface.** What the Treasurer believes he has been told: a fact about
Gottfried, whatever else it may be.
a. Nothing yet. He is waiting, and the silence frightens him.
b. A name (slot 9), held until something forces it out of him.
c. A warning about the manner of the election: that it will be done badly, or bought.

**7 — The three absent stalls.**
a. All three come with the summons; eighteen vote from the start.
b. Poppo and Rudolf come; Friedrich arrives mid-election with news from Mainz, true and never decisive
by itself.
c. Rudolf and Friedrich never arrive. Sixteen decide, and twelve is a steeper hill.

**8 — The Dean's preference.**
a. Konrad, as everyone believes.
b. Berthold, from shame at his own share in Otto's drift. He votes Berthold if that decides it;
otherwise he votes Konrad, as expected, and keeps his secret.
c. Walther, for a quick peace. He lets the chapter deadlock, then steers it to compromise.
d. None, only an end. He votes for whoever his voice makes twelve, and otherwise for no one.

**9 — The name Gottfried holds.** Decide it even when slot 6 is not **b**.
a. Berthold, which frightens him, because it is also his wish.
b. Konrad, to his dismay.
c. Walther.
d. Abbot Hermann, who will refuse.

## Tone notes

- **A community, not a cabal.** A canon who votes against a brother still sees him at Vespers that
  evening and at Matins before dawn.
- **No villains.** Konrad believes Hochfelden needs a prince and is right about much of it. Berthold
  is capable of pride, of preferring his learning to a brother, and of avoiding governance he
  dislikes. The election is hard because both have a real case.
- **The office keeps time.** A vote between Sext and None is not one between Vespers and Compline.
  Put the player in choir, and describe the chant.
- **Full treatment:** the burial, the sickbed visit, at least one meal, any fight over the form, the
  roll call, and the aftermath.

# The Council of Constance

**Scenario:** A general council gathers in a small imperial city to end the Great Schism, reform
the Church in head and members, and judge Master Jan Hus.
**Dates:** Late October 1414 to mid-July 1415, Julian reckoning. Long play, montage-heavy between
set pieces.
**Revision:** 2026-10 — save fields and coda added.

## Premise

For thirty-six years Christendom has had more than one pope, and since Pisa tried to mend it in
1409, three. No man can be entirely sure his neighbor's sacraments flow from the true vicar of
Christ; it is the standing wound of the age. Now Sigismund, King of the Romans, has bent
John XXIII, the Pisan claimant, into summoning a council to Constance, inside the Empire and
inside the king's reach. Its three causes are on every tongue: union, reform, and faith, which
this year means Wyclif's books and the living master from Prague said to teach them.

John XXIII crossed the Arlberg in October snow to preside over a council he fears. Hus rode from
Bohemia under the king's safe-conduct, carrying sermons for the assembled fathers and a will made
just in case. By mid-July the council will have deposed one pope, received a second's
resignation, declared itself the highest authority under Christ, and burned Hus by the lake. No
one arriving in the autumn mud knows this. The player lives through the year in which it happens,
and may try to make it end otherwise.

## What the GM needs

Assume the general history is known. These are the points that shape play, and the ones most
easily got wrong.

- **Hus's road here.** Preacher of Bethlehem Chapel in Prague. The Decree of Kutná Hora (1409)
  handed the university to the Czech masters and sent the German masters off to Leipzig; the
  German nation at Constance still carries that grudge. In 1412 Hus denounced the indulgences
  John XXIII was selling for his war — the same pope now presiding. Excommunicated, he appealed
  from the pope to Christ, which to every lawyer in Constance is contempt of all courts at once.
  *De Ecclesia* is the book his judges will read from. He came of his own will, expecting an
  open audience before learned men.
- **What he believes.** He holds the Real Presence and rejects Wyclif's remanence, and keeps the
  Mass, the saints, and the priesthood. His quarrel is over the nature of the Church, the authority
  of unworthy prelates, and Scripture as the rule. Some of the articles against him are accurate,
  some exaggerated, and some false, and the case turns on that difference.
- **His enemies are sincere.** They carry the articles, the dossier of the Prague wars, and an
  honest conviction that Bohemia is sliding into Wyclifism and this man is why. The council is
  not a cabal and does not think itself murdering a good man.
- **The safe-conduct** reaches Hus on 5 November. It does not save him, and whether it could
  ever bind the Church's judgment on heresy is argued, shamefully, in corridors all year.

## The ground

A town of six or eight thousand that the council swells to several times its size: cardinals
and patriarchs, abbots and doctors by the hundred, and behind them notaries, cooks, grooms,
money-changers, furriers, minstrels, beggars, and women of the town, until every burgher sleeps
in his attic and rents out the rest. Prelates' painted arms hang over doorways so servants can
find their masters, and Latin in forty accents bridges every language badly. All of it is
walkable in half an hour:

- **The Münster** — solemn sessions; the bishop's palace adjoins it.
- **The Franciscan friary** — general congregations; Hus's June hearings in its refectory; its
  tower is his last prison.
- **The Dominican island friary** — joined to the town by a bridge; its cellar, by the latrines
  and the cold of the water, is his winter prison.
- **The Kaufhaus** by the harbor — requisitioned for the nations and for conclaves.
- **St. Paul Street** — the widow Fida's house, where Hus lodges in his free month.
- **Gottlieben** — the bishop's castle down the Rhine, reeds and herons and one square tower;
  his spring prison.
- **The Brühl** — a meadow outside the gate on the Gottlieben road, which no one yet has reason
  to notice.

The lake governs everything: fog so thick the island friary vanishes, gulls behind the fish
boats, whitefish welcome in Advent and wearying by Easter, and on föhn days the Alps stepping
suddenly close over the southern shore — weather for headaches and quarrels. Winter is frozen
ruts, braziers at the gates, too many horses in too small a town, and ink freezing in January so
the clerks warm it at candles. The council makes paper the way a battle makes smoke: cedulae,
protestations, rolls of petitions, and a notary at every important elbow.

## How the council works

The player will spend far more time in small rooms than in the Münster.

- **Solemn sessions** in the Münster: Mass, the gospel book enthroned, decrees read from the
  pulpit and carried by the nations. Everything read aloud there was fought over for weeks
  somewhere smaller. Keep session numbers loose in narration; they were disputed even then.
- **General congregations** at the Franciscans: the working assemblies, where drafts are read
  and tempers lost.
- **The nations.** Four, on the universities' model: the **German** (which swallows Bohemians,
  Poles, Hungarians, and Scandinavians), the **Italian**, the **French**, and the **English**,
  smallest and most self-assured. Spain holds to Benedict XIII and does not come this year. Each
  nation meets apart and fights out its position before facing the others.
- **Voting by nations**, carried in practice in February and never formally decreed: one vote
  per nation. It cuts John XXIII's mass of Italian prelates from a majority to a quarter and
  leaves the cardinals with no collective vote at all. It is the great procedural war of the
  winter, and it makes everything after it possible.
- **Commissions** do the real work, including those *in causa fidei* that handle Wyclif and Hus.
  A seat on the right commission is worth more than a mitre.

## The calendar

The default course of events, in six movements named by the liturgy, because in 1415 the calendar
and the plot turn out to be the same instrument. Easter falls on 31 March. Let the propers of a
given day speak for themselves; never gloss them from the narrator's chair.

**Play near-daily** through the week of the arrest, Christmas Eve to the octave, 20–27 March, the
hearings, and 1–7 July, which deserves the slowest clock in the scenario. Montage the rest,
bending to the player's threads. A player deep in the schism thread may live the last two
movements with the emphases reversed; follow the character, not the outline.

**1. Martinmas** (late October–November)
- 28 Oct — John XXIII enters under a golden canopy.
- 3 Nov — Hus arrives with the knights John of Chlum and Wenceslas of Dubá and lodges with the
  widow Fida. Placards against him are on the church doors next morning.
- 5 Nov — The council opens; the safe-conduct is delivered.
- 28 Nov — Hus is summoned to the bishop's palace to "confer" with the cardinals, and not
  released.

**2. Christmas** (Advent through Epiphanytide) — the quietest movement; build the relationships
everything later will spend.
- 4 Dec — A commission of three prelates takes up the preliminary process: witnesses heard, no
  advocate allowed. 6 Dec — Hus to the island cellar, gravely ill through December; the pope's
  physicians are sent so he does not die untried.
- 24 Dec — Sigismund arrives, and at midnight Mass, crowned, sings the gospel as deacon:
  *Exiit edictum a Caesare Augusto.* No one misses the point.
- 1 Jan — The king publicly drops his objection to the proceedings.

**3. Lent** (Septuagesima, 27 January, to Laetare)
- February — Voting by nations carried; the cardinals' humiliation begins. Ash Wednesday,
  13 February, falls with the fight at full heat.
- 2 Mar — John XXIII, cornered, swears to resign if his rivals do, then temporizes.
- 10 Mar, Laetare — He gives the king the Golden Rose. All smiles; no one deceived.

**4. Passiontide and Easter**
- 20 Mar — Under cover of Duke Frederick of Austria's tournament, the pope slips out disguised as
  a servant and makes for Schaffhausen. Panic. Sigismund rides the streets with trumpets to hold
  the city, and outlaws Frederick.
- 23 Mar — Gerson preaches that the council holds its authority from Christ and does not
  dissolve with the pope's flight.
- 24 Mar, Palm Sunday — His papal jailers gone, Hus is taken down the river by boat to
  Gottlieben: chained at night, letters nearly stopped.
- 30 Mar, Holy Saturday — *Haec sancta* read in a trimmed form, Zabarella reading and stopping
  short. 6 Apr, in the Easter octave — read whole: the council holds its power immediately from
  Christ, and all, even a pope, must obey it in faith, union, and reform.
- 4 Apr — Jerome of Prague arrives against every warning, flees within days, and is taken on
  the road home.
- 15 Apr — The old Greek Chrysoloras dies in the crowded city, and the dream of union with the
  East is buried with him.

**5. Corpus Christi** (May)
- 4 May — Wyclif's forty-five articles condemned; his bones ordered dug up.
- Frederick, stripped of his lands and beaten, surrenders the pope, who is brought back up the
  lake under guard. 14 May — John XXIII suspended.
- 23 May — Jerome dragged back in chains. The Bohemian and Polish lords' protests arrive under
  dozens of seals.
- 29 May, vigil of Corpus Christi — John XXIII deposed. He submits quietly.

**6. Peter and Paul** (June to mid-July)
- 5, 7, 8 Jun — Hus's three public hearings in the Franciscan refectory, won by the Bohemian
  lords' pressure: articles read, witnesses cited, abjuration demanded. On the seventh the sun
  fails in eclipse and the hearing waits on the light. On the eighth, with the king present, the
  last real argument; afterward Bohemian ears overhear Sigismund say that even recanted, Hus must
  never be trusted or restored.
- 15 Jun — The council forbids the lay chalice, which Jakoubek has begun giving in Prague. From
  prison, Hus cautiously takes his side.
- Late June — The recantation siege: deputations, gentler formulae, the "Father's" letters,
  Páleč at the cell.
- 1 Jul — Hus's final refusal, in writing.
- 4 Jul — Gregory XII resigns through Carlo Malatesta, with the grace the Pisan line lacked.
- 6 Jul, a Saturday, octave of Peter and Paul — Sentence in the Münster, where Hus reminds the king
  of his safe-conduct and Sigismund is said to blush; degradation by seven bishops; the paper crown;
  relaxation to the secular arm; the fire on the Brühl the same day. His ashes go into the
  Rhine, and by evening Bohemians are carrying away handfuls of scorched earth.
- Mid-July — Letters go north, and Bohemia begins to answer. End here, in the quiet after, with
  the smell still in the player's clothes.

## Cast

Nearly everyone named here lived. Keep them within the record, and invent freely only at the
player's scale: households, jailers, clerks, landladies. The council holds thousands; the
player's story holds perhaps a dozen.

**Core — every run**

- **Sigismund**, King of the Romans and of Hungary. Magnificent, forked-bearded, charming in six
  languages and solvent in none. The council is his life's work; he is genuinely devout,
  genuinely visionary about union, and capable of sacrificing a man to it and grieving as if
  someone else had done it. The safe-conduct is a stone he has taught himself not to feel except
  when watched.
- **John XXIII**, Baldassare Cossa. A soldier-administrator before he was much of a priest:
  brave, shrewd, self-mocking, quicker to read a room than any theologian in it, and aware he is
  the claimant whose life won't bear examination. Kind to individuals; treats institutions as
  weather. Hus's jailer until March.
- **Master Jan Hus.** Thin from illness by spring, his preacher's voice hoarse from the island
  damp. Courteous, stubborn, quick to weep and quick to recover, grateful for every small
  kindness. He will abjure anything he holds if shown from Scripture that it is wrong, and
  nothing he never held, at any price. His prison letters are tender, practical, and unafraid;
  the player may carry some.
- **Pierre d'Ailly**, Cardinal of Cambrai. The council's most formidable intellect: a lifelong
  reformer who thinks the council must save the Church from its popes, and that Wyclifism is the
  mirror-image disease. He presides over the hearings, fair and cruel inside one sentence.
- **Jean Gerson**, Chancellor of Paris. Small, worn, scrupulous, devout to the point of pain; his
  sermons hold the council together in March. On Hus he is the hardest of the hard. The tragedy
  on offer in every run: the two most conscience-driven men in Constance are Gerson and the man
  he is helping to burn.
- **Francesco Zabarella**, Cardinal of Florence. The finest canonist alive, made cardinal by the
  pope his own theory is now deposing. Toward Hus he is the nearest thing to a friend on the
  bench: he presses for the mildest formulae, and is the judge Hus finds hardest to disappoint.

**The Bohemians — core for Šimon, early bench otherwise**

- **John of Chlum**, called Kepka. A middling knight, loyal past prudence: he storms at
  cardinals, posts protests under his own seal, tells the king what his word was worth, and at
  the end, before the council's deputation, takes the condemned man's hand.
- **Peter of Mladoňovice**, Chlum's young secretary: quiet, exact, always writing the account by
  which Bohemia will remember this year.
- **Wenceslas of Dubá**, the other escort knight, the one who thinks before the door is kicked.
- **Stephen Páleč**, once Hus's closest friend, broken with him over the indulgences, drafter of
  the sharpest articles, and not at peace.
- **Michael de Causis**, procurator of the prosecution: venal, tireless, and, worse, partly
  sincere. He posts placards, pays fees, manages witnesses, and haunts the prisons so that no one
  is kind.
- **John the Iron**, Bishop of Litomyšl, who bankrolls the case and whom the Bohemian lords
  loathe as a slanderer of their kingdom.

**Bench — introduce when the politics calls**

Cardinal **Fillastre**, keeping a dry, gossipy diary wherever minutes are kept. **Robert Hallam**
of Salisbury, the English nation's big voice and the king's ally, arriving with the voting fight.
**Frederick of Austria**, young, rich in land, poor in judgment, first met at the tournament or
wherever princes drink. **Otto of Hachberg**, Bishop of Constance, a touchy host and keeper of
Gottlieben. **Ludwig of the Palatinate**, the king's correct, unimaginative enforcer, who commands
the escort on 6 July. **Ulrich Richental**, burgher, lodging broker, and chronicler, who knows
every rumor's street of origin. The widow **Fida**, kind past prudence. **Jerome of Prague**,
brilliant and reckless, from 4 April. Cardinal **Oddo Colonna**, a courteous nobody whom this
council will one day make pope. **Carlo Malatesta**, Gregory XII's knightly proxy, from late June.

## Vantages

Three invented men at three distances from the fire. For Šimon the Hus case is the spine and the
schism is weather; for Giacomo the schism is daily desk-work and Hus a file that keeps returning;
Anselm stands where the two cross. Each vantage's strongest stat is the one its natural door turns
on (see The doors).

### Master Anselm of Rottweil

Forty-five, a Swabian cooper's son who talked his way to a doctorate at Vienna and stayed; sent
with Vienna's men to the German nation. He has published little and noticed much, and this
council is the chance of his life. Then the nation hands him Wyclif's articles to assess, and the
assessments turn out to have a man attached.

**Learning 3, Rhetoric 2, Standing 2, Conscience 1.** He has never had to pay for a principle,
and the council will quote his own memoranda back to him at the worst moment.

**Opening.** Early November, by boat from Lindau, the lake iron-gray and the Münster tower
resolving out of the haze. Name only **Master Georg of Krems**, his talkative colleague, who reads
everyone's business off their painted arms as the harbor slides close. End at the Vienna men's
cramped lodging over a cooper's shop that smells of Anselm's childhood, with a note under the
door: the German nation gathers after Mass tomorrow, and someone has already put Anselm's name on
a list.

### Giacomo of Imola

Twenty-eight, a Bologna-trained notary, four years in Cardinal Zabarella's household and trusted
with sealed things. Through his master's anteroom passes everything — envoys, drafts of
*Haec sancta*, the Hus commission's papers, the cardinals' fear — and his memory is becoming a
dangerous possession.

**Learning 2, Rhetoric 1, Standing 3, Conscience 2.** His Standing is entirely borrowed. The year
will offer prices for pieces of it, and at least one chance to spend it on someone who can never
repay him.

**Opening.** 28 October, in the long paper-colored middle of the pope's procession, walking his
mule behind the wagons under sleet, every bell in the town going at once. Name only **Zabarella**,
riding ahead, gray and thoughtful under the ceremony. End that night in the requisitioned
chancery, unpacking registers by candlelight, when someone quietly repeats what the pope
supposedly said looking down on the town: *this is the pit where foxes are caught.* Zabarella,
passing with a candle: *He also says Mass. Both are true. Good night, Giacomo.*

### Šimon of Písek

Twenty-four, a bachelor of Prague, a fisherman's son who heard Hus preach at Bethlehem as a boy
and never got over it. He rides in Chlum's household — errands, copying, interpreting — close
enough to carry letters into the prison while letters can be carried. He believes the council
will hear the master out and send him home.

**Learning 2, Rhetoric 2, Standing 1, Conscience 3.** What can be done when the great thing
can't: food and linen through a window, a letter past a jailer, a witness kept. What he carries
home — paper, ashes, or fury — is his real choice.

**Opening.** 3 November, in Hus's small party, through streets where people leave their doorways
to see whether the famous heretic has the face of one. Name only **Hus**, riding bareheaded and
nodding to the starers with a village priest's courtesy, and **Chlum**, riding as if through an
ambush. End next morning in St. Paul Street, the widow's bread still in Šimon's hand, when a boy
runs in: placards went up on the church doors in the night. Every eye turns to the one whose legs
are young.

### Seats at the set pieces

Every run gives these full treatment.

| | Anselm | Giacomo | Šimon |
|---|---|---|---|
| **The arrest**, 28 Nov | Nation-bench gossip that evening, with the flavor of a procedural question | Paper: the order's trail through the palace, cardinals back from the "conference" not meeting each other's eyes | Inside it: the summons, the long afternoon of assurances, Chlum's rage |
| **Midnight gospel**, 24 Dec | With his nation, close enough to read faces | In the papal train, watching the pope watch the king | Among the Bohemians, watching the man whose seal is on the safe-conduct sing of Caesar's decree |
| **After the flight**, 21 Mar | A panicked nation deciding whether the council still exists | The chancery at dawn, a household's world ending desk by desk | At the island gate: the jailers gone, and no one able to say who holds the keys |
| **The hearings**, 5–8 Jun | Among his nation's doctors, asked his opinion afterward — or during | In a cardinal's train, perhaps taking the minutes history keeps | With the Bohemian lords, seeing the master for the first time since November, changed |
| **6 July** | With his nation | With his cardinal | With Chlum and Peter |

On 6 July the scenario never makes the choice for the player: whether to follow the procession to
the Brühl, how close, and what to do with their eyes. Render what the chosen distance can see.

## The ledger

There is no single election here. The count that matters is the men who decide Hus, and the
player's own house. Each line is warmth toward the player, then where he lands. Opening state:

- **Sigismund** — distant / will not spare Hus, and is ashamed of it.
- **d'Ailly** — cool / condemn; open to any formula that keeps the Church's face.
- **Gerson** — cool / condemn; closed.
- **Zabarella** — courteous / condemn, but seeks the mildest formula.
- **Hallam** — indifferent / wherever the king is.
- **Páleč** — wary / prosecute; not at peace.
- **De Causis** — watchful / prosecute, by any means.
- **Chlum** — suspicious of strangers / save Hus by any honest means.
- **Hus** — grateful for any kindness / will not swear falsely; on flight, see slot 9.
- **The player's own house** (the German nation, Zabarella's household, or Chlum's) — neutral /
  on the live question of the season.

**Adjust for vantage.** Šimon starts a shade colder in every room but Chlum's, Giacomo starts warm
with Zabarella, and Anselm is a stranger everywhere. A player working the schism or reform threads
adds their nation's balance on the live question: the nations scheme in February, the decree's
wording in April.

## The narrowing and the doors

This scenario's signature is a man in a cell and a calendar closing around him. The player can
try to save Hus, and should be able to see from the first attempt how hard it is.

**The narrowing.** Anything that touches Hus — a letter in or out, food and linen, a visit, a
word to a jailer — is priced by where he is held, whatever it cost the time before.

| Custody | Dates | Errands |
|---|---|---|
| At liberty | 3–28 Nov | as ordinary life |
| A canon's house, then the island cellar | 28 Nov–24 Mar | 3 |
| Gottlieben | 24 Mar–5 Jun | 5 |
| The Franciscan tower | 5 Jun–6 Jul | 5, or 6 while de Causis is watching |

A soft place named by slot 5 prices two lower. If slot 5 is **c**, there is none: every errand
goes through a commissioner, priced by his line in the ledger.

**The doors.** Three ways to save him, each with a window, a gate, three conditions, and a decisive
act priced at 6, less one for each condition genuinely in place. Without its gate, or outside its
window, a door is shut. A partial success opens it partway — a reprieve, a delay, better custody, a
formula accepted with a string attached — never Hus walking out free and clean.

- **The honest formula** (Learning; Anselm's door). Every historical formula foundered on one
  rock: abjuring articles he never held is an oath to a lie. The way through is a formula he can
  swear truthfully that the council will still accept as abjuration. *Window:* the commission's
  examinations in April to the morning of 6 July. *Gate:* Hus has read it and will sign, which he
  will only if it is honest. *Conditions:* a true account of what he holds, built from his own
  books set against the articles; a sponsor on the commission to carry it, Zabarella likeliest;
  and d'Ailly's acquiescence, or enough nations behind it that he cannot refuse. *Success* means
  perpetual confinement in a monastery, not freedom — the council's own idea of mercy — and a
  Hus who may yet undo it by telling the truth again.
- **The king's word** (Standing; Giacomo's door). Sigismund could, in raw power, honor his
  safe-conduct; everything runs the other way. *Windows:* the Christmas octave, while his anger is
  fresh, and 20–24 March, when the papal jailers have fled and custody is briefly no one's.
  *Gate:* what the player puts to him meets the need slot 8 names. *Conditions:* the Bohemian and
  Polish lords pressing under their seals; a voice of weight at his elbow, Hallam or Zabarella;
  and a private audience the player has earned. *Success* means Hus in royal custody on the road
  to Bohemia, a council furious and diminished, and a king who will want to be repaid.
- **The river** (Conscience; Šimon's door). Before 28 November the door stands open and Hus will not
  walk through it: he came to answer. After, it is nearly shut. *Window:* any night after the
  arrest. *Gate:* slot 9 allows it, and slot 5 names a soft place. *Conditions:* a boat and a
  refuge; the Bohemians in the city protected or gone, or Chlum becomes a hostage; and a man on the
  inside. *Success* costs Hus the vindication he wants more than life and hands the council its
  proof of contumacy.

A player may work more than one door, and any door is open to anyone with the stat to reach it.
However it goes, a spared Hus changes Bohemia's story, not the schism's; the council grinds on.
The player has traded the martyrdom a nation built its memory on for something smaller, stranger,
and alive. Carry that honestly.

## The witness thread

Provenance here is testimony. The commissions take sworn depositions, so seeing and swearing are
both acts of Conscience, and a man can be ruined by either. What the player chooses to witness,
at whatever cost, is what they can swear to for the rest of their life. Peter of Mladoňovice,
writing everything down because someone must, is the thread made flesh and a mirror for any
vantage.

## Fixed and open

**Fixed.** The calendar's public facts — the flight, *Haec sancta*, the suspension, deposition,
and resignation, the hearings, the fire — are the default and carry the full weight of history.
Hus will not swear falsely: this is the man, not a position, and no argument from the player
moves it. The council believes it is healing the Church. Sigismund chooses the council over his
word, and knows it.

**Open.** Everything at the player's scale. The conditions of the year: prison access, small
mercies, whose letters move, whether Hus's papers survive and in whose hands. The trust of the
great: Zabarella can come to trust a player, d'Ailly to use one, Gerson to be unsettled by one
good question at the wrong time. The middle-sized fights: the nations scheme, reform memoranda,
the wording of instruments, a nation's internal elections. Jerome's fate, which the scenario opens
and never closes. And the player's 6 July.

**How large an invented man can grow.** The acta are full of *a certain doctor rose and said*.
With sustained play: a memorandum absorbed into a nation's position, a phrase surviving into an
instrument, a named intervention in a congregation, the trust of one or two of the great, and an
epilogue that pays it off — a benefice, a chancery summons, a chair at Vienna. The ceiling: the
player never preaches Gerson's sermon, never sits among the judges, and never reads a sentence.

**Side stakes**, each able to carry long stretches of play for the right character: the Jean Petit
affair, Gerson's other war over tyrannicide, condemned in the same session as Hus; the cardinals'
fight to be counted as a body; the reform committees, where idealism goes to be scheduled; Poland's
case against the Teutonic Knights, braided with the Polish lords' protests for Hus; the town's own
ledger of prices, quarters, and the watch, with Richental writing it down; and humanist secretaries
planning raids on the abbey libraries while their master's world ends.

## The coda

The record, by vantage: for Anselm, the council's acta; for Giacomo, the notarial instruments he
helped engross; for Šimon, Peter of Mladoňovice's account. The reader: a Vienna faculty asking
Anselm what exactly the nation assented to; a patron years later asking Giacomo *you were at
Constance?*; the Bethlehem congregation, for Šimon. Honor precisely what the player did and did not
see, and pay off at least one moment where being there, or having looked away, matters.

## Save state

`Scenario state` fields, from the opening:

- **witnessed**: what the player saw for themselves and could swear to, apart from report, and any
  deposition given. This is provenance here.
- **watched**: whether the player is suspected or followed, by whom, and for what.

From the arrest:

- **access**: the player's road to Hus: the soft place found or not, a jailer and his price.
- **doors**: for each door worked, which conditions are genuinely in place
  (`formula: account built, Zabarella`).

## Pre-commitment

**1 — The "Father."** The anonymous conciliar correspondent whose letters gently urge Hus to
submit. Fix the hand; every letter bears it.
a. A man of Zabarella's circle, writing without his master's knowledge.
b. A quiet English doctor, moved by pity and by fear of what a burning would start.
c. Colonna, who has read the file more carefully than anyone and wants no fire.
d. A Bohemian who conformed years ago and has never stopped arguing with himself.

**2 — De Causis's man among the Bohemians.**
a. No one. The money went to jailers and notaries, and Bohemian suspicion of one another is
tragic, not warranted.
b. A servant of the household: small, venal, and useful.
c. A man of standing close to Chlum, for conviction as much as coin.

**3 — Páleč and the confession.** Whether, asked at the right moment by the right person, he
would hear Hus's confession.
a. Yes. He is waiting to be asked and doesn't know it.
b. No. He has settled it with himself, and the settling has aged him.
c. Yes, but only after the sentence, when it costs him nothing and comforts no one.

**4 — De Causis's war chest.**
a. Deep. His persistence is simply bought, all year.
b. Short by spring. He borrows from the king's creditors, and owes them.
c. Short by spring. He turns to blackmail, widening the circle of people with something to lose.

**5 — The soft place.**
a. The island jailer takes money; Gottlieben's men do not; the tower is loosest at the end.
b. Gottlieben: a homesick garrison far from oversight. The island is shut tight.
c. None. Access comes only through the commissioners, and every visit is a political act.

**6 — The player's letters.**
a. None intercepted. The fear is the story.
b. One, early: read, filed, and suddenly relevant in June.
c. One, late, used against someone who is not the player.

**7 — The leak.** Who carries papers out of the player's own house.
a. No one. The leaks run elsewhere, and suspecting a friend will cost the player.
b. A colleague, for money, to the Italians.
c. A colleague, for conviction, to Gerson's people.

**8 — What would move the king.**
a. Face: a remand to Bohemia that the council can call mercy and the king can call keeping faith.
b. Fear: a Bohemian rising made credible, with names and seals, that he cannot afford while the
council sits.
c. Money: Bohemian silver for his Hungarian wars, which the player must broker at Conscience's
expense.

**9 — Hus and flight.**
a. Never. He came to answer, and he will answer.
b. After the June hearings, if no one else is put at risk for it.
c. Only if Chlum asks him to go.

Jailers' names and temperaments are fixed the first time they reach the page, keeping possible
every kindness that Hus's surviving prison letters require.

## Tone notes

- **No villains, and no relativism.** Gerson and d'Ailly are the age's sincerest reformers doing
  what they believe mercy to Christendom requires; Hus is a man obeying his conscience unto death.
  The horror of the year is not that wicked men killed a good one, but that the Church's best men
  did, lawfully and prayerfully, to the satisfaction of nearly every conscience present but one.
- **The narrator sees with the player's eyes.** In a Šimon run, 6 July is a martyrdom; in an
  Anselm run it may be a lawful judgment that begins, that morning or years later, to taste of
  ash. To Bohemia he dies a martyr and a saint; to the council, a heresiarch. The narrator keeps
  his thumb off the scale.
- **The fire, if witnessed, gets its full weight** — the degradation, the bishops squabbling over
  scissors or razor, the paper crown with its devils, his smile at his burning books, the singing
  until the wind takes his voice — without gore beyond the record and without softening.
  Mladoňovice watched so that Bohemia would know; the prose should be worthy of being someone's
  testimony.
- **Small fish, vast pond.** Render the player's corner — one household, one nation's benches,
  one street — with intimacy, and let the council's vastness be weather: processions glimpsed,
  great names overheard, decrees arriving like storms that formed elsewhere.
- **Babel.** Latin of the schools over German of the streets, and Czech kept low in public after
  November. Who interprets for whom is power, and a Bohemian should feel his language become
  suspect.
- **The famous ornaments** — the fox-pit quip, *super grammaticam*, *sancta simplicitas*, Hus's
  pun on the goose — are welcome as rumor and table talk, never staged as scenes. The swan
  prophecy is a later tradition and does not exist yet. Hus's own
  dream of the Bethlehem pictures repainted more beautifully, told in a January letter, is real;
  let him interpret it with Chlum.

# The Augsburg Confession

**Scenario:** The evangelical estates of the Empire put their faith in writing, read it aloud to
Emperor Charles V at the imperial diet, and defend it, and each other, through a summer of
confutation and compromise.
**Setting:** The imperial city of Augsburg, and four days north, the fortress of the Coburg, where
Dr. Luther waits out the diet.
**Dates:** April to early October 1530, Julian reckoning, with an epilogue into 1531. Long play on
two stages with a courier road between them, montage-heavy between set pieces.
**Revision:** 2026-10 — save fields and coda added.

## Premise

The emperor is coming back. For nine years, since Worms, Charles has been in Spain and Italy
fighting France, while his edict against Luther slept in the Empire's files and the Gospel movement
grew into churches, territory by territory, in the space his absence left. Now the wars are paused,
the pope has crowned him at Bologna, the Turk has been turned back from Vienna but not from the
Danube, and his summons to a diet at Augsburg is strange enough to read twice. It does not thunder.
It proposes that every party's opinion be heard *in love and kindness*, errors on both sides
amended, and all brought back to one Christian truth.

The Elector of Saxony's former chancellor argues that it must be answered in kind: not with an
armory of grievances but with a confession of what we teach, why it is the old faith of the catholic
Church, and wherein practice has been amended. Dr. Luther supplies articles and says he has small
hope of diets. The ban of the Empire still lies on him, so he can come only as far as the Coburg,
the last fortress of his prince's land, and must fight the summer by courier.

By the end of September the confession will have been signed by princes who believe they may be
signing away their lands and necks, read aloud through open windows, answered, worked over by
committees that come heartbreakingly close, and declared refuted. No confessor burns or is
arrested. The sword hangs all summer and does not fall, and no one living through it knows that it
won't.

## What the GM needs

Assume the general history is known. These are the points that shape play, and the ones most easily
got wrong.

- **The road here.** At Speyer in 1529 the evangelical minority protested that in matters of God's
  honor and salvation a majority cannot bind conscience, and the summer breathes that theory. At
  Marburg that autumn Luther and Zwingli parted over the Supper, and the split between Wittenberg
  and the southern cities walks into Augsburg intact. Two things turned Saxony's planned defense of
  its practices into a confession of the whole faith: Dr. Eck's 404 Articles, laying every heresy of
  every age at the evangelicals' door, and the summons's own gentleness. That turn, from defendants
  explaining deviations to the Church confessing, is the document's soul.
- **The diet.** Electors, princes, and cities deliberate in three colleges on the emperor's
  proposition, committees do the work, and it ends in a recess (*Abschied*) engrossed as imperial
  law, which is what the Speyer protest says no diet can make of God's business. Its instruments are
  the **ban** (*Acht*), imperial outlawry, which lies on Luther and could be laid on princes, and
  **enfeoffment**, which Charles withholds from Saxony all summer. Behind them lie his unstated
  needs: the Turkish grant, a quiet Empire, and the electors' votes to make his brother **Ferdinand**
  King of the Romans, Saxony's among them. Every hard word he does not say to the confessors has one
  of these behind it.
- **The text.** No article on purgatory, and no attack on the papacy. Article IV, on justification,
  is the hinge; Article X, on the Supper, is worded so no Zwinglian can sign it. The German and
  Latin grew together and are not quite twins.
- **What the committees found.** In August the Fourteen reached agreement or near it on the
  doctrinal articles, by Eck's own count leaving only the invocation of saints and a quarrel over
  "merit," and found a formula on justification without the word *alone*. The practices would not
  move: the canon and sacrifice of the Mass, private Masses, communion in one kind, vows,
  jurisdiction, and church property already taken.
- **Guards.** The confessors understand themselves as catholic and would be appalled to hear they
  were founding a church; say *the evangelical estates* or *those of the confession*. "Protestant"
  exists in law-and-politics registers; "Lutheran" is chiefly the opponents' word, and Luther hates
  it. The southern cities are not simply Zwinglian: Strasbourg's Bucer holds a middle view of the
  Supper.

## The ground

**Augsburg** is a great imperial city on the Lech, the Fuggers' town, where the money that elected
this emperor was counted. Perhaps thirty thousand souls in ordinary times, and in diet season
princes with hundreds of horse, until every burgher learns what his spare rooms are worth. Its
pulpits have run evangelical for years, and of the southern stripe, which embarrasses nearly every
party including the confessors; the council obeys the emperor where it must, shields its preachers
where it can, and signs nothing. All within a quarter hour's walk:

- **The cathedral and the bishop's palace**, the emperor's lodging and the summer's real capital;
  its chapter room is where the confession, and in August the Confutation, will be read.
- **The town hall** on the Perlach square: formal sessions, the colleges, the cities' bench.
- **St. Anna**, the Carmelite house where Luther lodged in 1518 when Cajetan examined him. The
  delegations walk past it on purpose.
- **The evangelical lodgings**, each with its painted arms over the door, the Elector's above all,
  where the drafting table stands.
- **The gates and the Lech bridges**, where princes, couriers, and rumor come and go.

A financial city in high season: ink and coin, Italian and Spanish in the imperial train, inn yards
packed with horses, and oats a topic among princes. Heat on the Lech plain, thunderstorms off the
Alps, canals smelling of the dyers. Spanish and Italian soldiers polite by daylight, a doubled watch,
everyone counting companies. After mid-June, the silenced pulpits, and churches full for a plain
reading of the Gospel.

**The Coburg** is a strong fortress on its hill above a small town, the southernmost point of
Electoral Saxony. Luther keeps two rooms and a writing table over woods where the jackdaws hold what
he calls their diet, and has grown the beard again. His days are psalms dictated in the morning, the
prophets translated when his head allows (the headaches and the roaring in his ears are real this
summer), three hours of prayer aloud at the open window, jokes at supper because two young men need
them, and always, under everything, listening for hooves. Scenes there are chamber pieces: two or
three people, weather, one letter, and the Empire present by its absence. Don't crowd them.

## The calendar

The default course of events, in six movements named for the diet's own papers, because at Augsburg
the documents keep the calendar. Easter falls on 17 April and Corpus Christi on 16 June. Let the
propers of a day speak for themselves.

**Play near-daily** through 23 April–2 May in Jörg's run, 15–25 June in every run (the slowest clock
in the scenario), 3–7 August, 22–23 September, and the Coburg days of 1–4 October. Montage the rest
with heat, prices, Innsbruck rumor, and one face at the drafting table by candlelight. On the road,
ride the leg where it rains on the letter that matters and summarize the others.

**1. Ausschreiben, the summons** (to early May)
- 21 Jan — The summons from Bologna. 24 Feb — Clement VII crowns Charles there, on his thirtieth
  birthday. 11–14 Mar — The Elector receives it and orders his theologians to prepare the Torgau
  Articles.
- 3 Apr — The Saxon party leaves Torgau, Luther with it as far as the border.
- 15 Apr, Good Friday — Coburg. Luther preaches through Easter week in St. Moritz below the
  fortress; Nuremberg would not house an outlaw.
- 24 Apr — Before dawn Luther, Dietrich, and Cyriakus go up to the fortress, and the train rides on.
  His first letter south: he will make of this Sinai a Zion and build three tabernacles, to the
  Psalter, the Prophets, and Aesop.
- 2 May — The Saxons enter Augsburg, first of the great delegations, into a city half-empty of the
  diet and full of rumor.

**2. Exordium, the preface** (May to 14 June) — the quietest movement; build the relationships
everything later spends.
- May — Melanchthon rebuilds the defense into a confession. The princes arrive, Hesse mid-month with
  more horse than is tactful; the preaching war heats the city's pulpits; Innsbruck rumor twice a
  week.
- 11 May — The draft rides north. 15 May — Luther: it pleases him very well, and he could not tread
  so softly and gently.
- Late May — The silence weeks: for about three weeks the Augsburg letters stop, and the Coburg's
  turn from hurt to blistering.
- 29 May — Hans Luther dies at Mansfeld. 5 Jun, Pentecost — The news reaches the Coburg; Luther
  takes his Psalter to his room and shuts himself away. The same day Gattinara, the
  conciliar-minded old chancellor, dies at Innsbruck, and the emperor's ear passes to younger,
  harder men.

**3. Confessio** (15 June to early July)
- 15 Jun, eve of Corpus Christi — The entry. At the Lech bridge the evangelical princes do not kneel
  for the legate's blessing. That night Charles demands that their preachers fall silent and that
  they walk in tomorrow's procession; Margrave George answers that before he would deny his God he
  would kneel and have his head struck off, and the emperor, taken aback, says it will not come to
  heads off.
- 16 Jun — Corpus Christi without them. In the next days every pulpit is silenced and imperial
  readers read the day's Scripture without comment. The case must now be made in writing.
- 20 Jun — The Mass of the Holy Spirit; the Elector, as Arch-Marshal, bears the sword before the
  emperor. The proposition is read, and the estates resolve to take the faith before the Turk.
- 23 Jun — The text is settled in the evening before the princes and twelve theologians, and signed
  in an order everyone understands: the Elector John, Margrave George, Duke Ernest of Lüneburg,
  Landgrave Philip, the Electoral prince John Frederick, Duke Francis, Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt
  (the best manuscripts add Count Albrecht of Mansfeld), and the councils of Nuremberg and
  Reutlingen.
- 24 Jun — Presentation ordered, then crowded out; the confessors refuse to hand it over unread.
- 25 Jun, Saturday, three in the afternoon — In the chapter room of the bishop's palace, chosen to
  keep the audience small, Chancellor Beyer reads the German for two hours, the windows open and the
  courtyard packed. The emperor keeps the Latin, gives the German to the Elector of Mainz's
  chancery, and forbids printing. Neither original survives, which the GM knows and no character
  does.
- Late Jun — A copy rides north. Luther, 29 June: more than enough has been yielded already. His
  *Exhortation to the Clergy Assembled at Augsburg* sells in the city's shops.

**4. Confutatio** (July to 6 August) — the lull that is not one.
- 8 Jul — Zwingli's own confession arrives and is received with contempt. 9 Jul — Strasbourg,
  Constance, Memmingen, and Lindau hand in Bucer's Tetrapolitan Confession, which is taken and not
  read. Bucer has been hidden in the city since late June, and Melanchthon will not meet him: *let
  them write.*
- July — The Confutation is built by some twenty theologians under Eck, its first draft rejected by
  the emperor as too long and too hot. Corrupt printings of the confession spread. 21 Jul — Luther
  to Jonas: the confession stepped softly past purgatory, the saints, and the Antichrist.
- 3 Aug — The Confutation is read in the emperor's name in the same room; the confession is declared
  refuted, and a copy refused except on conditions made to be refused. That evening the theologians
  rebuild it from memory and Camerarius's notes, and Melanchthon begins the Apology.
- 5–6 Aug — Philip asks leave to go home to his sick wife and is refused. He spends the Saturday
  seemingly readying a tournament, and leaves by night. The gates are watched thereafter, and for
  some days war is the common expectation.

**5. Ausschuss, the committees** (mid-August to mid-September)
- 16 Aug — The Fourteen (per side two princes, two jurists, three theologians) begin, and in days
  find the doctrinal agreements. 22–28 Aug — The Six (Eck with the chancellors Vehus and Hagen;
  Melanchthon with Brück and Heller) founder on the practices. From the Coburg, letter after letter:
  the doctrine is God's, not ours, and the whole mediation displeases him.
- September — The negotiation is dead and everyone still negotiates. The Apology grows, and the
  estates confer on what they will not sign.

**6. Abschied, the recess** (22 September to 4 October)
- 22 Sep — The draft recess: the confession refuted, a term of grace to 15 April 1531, the Empire's
  machinery to follow. Brück refuses it for the estates and offers the Apology; Charles reaches for
  it and, at Ferdinand's whispered word, does not take it.
- 23 Sep — The Elector leaves Augsburg, and the confessing estates follow, leaving councillors to
  watch the rump diet.
- Late Sep — Bucer at the Coburg with a concord formula on the Supper, heard with guarded warmth.
  Nothing is settled; a road is left open.
- 1–4 Oct — The Elector's party gathers at Coburg and Luther preaches. On the 4th the whole company
  rides north, the outlaw back in his prince's train. End here, on the road or at the Coburg's
  table.

**Epilogue.** 19 Nov — The final recess, read without the confessors: the confession refuted, church
property to be restored, the chamber court sharpened, a council promised. 22 Dec — The confessing
estates meet at Schmalkalden; their defensive league is sealed in February. 5 Jan 1531 — Ferdinand
is elected King of the Romans at Cologne over Saxony's protest, and crowned at Aachen days later. In
spring the Apology is printed with the confession's first authorized edition. 15 April 1531 passes,
and no sword falls.

## The text and the fair copies

Always know what state the text is in; the calendar gives its stages. Between 11 May and 23 June it
is shaved and sharpened with Jonas, Brück, and the other estates' divines, while soundings with
Bishop Stadion and the emperor's secretary Valdés shape the preface and the landgrave fails to
soften Article X. Who leaks it to the printers is slot 1.

Provenance here is the fair copy: which texts the player has seen, held, copied, or memorized, and
in which version. A man who can produce the wording of a draft article, a committee formula, or what
the Confutation actually said against Article IV is worth listening to at any table in the city, and
worth watching. Sealed instructions, cipher for dangerous passages, and printers' proofs are the
local texture.

## Cast

Nearly everyone named here lived. Keep them within the record, and invent freely only at the
player's scale: households, clerks, couriers, landlords, gate-sergeants.

**Core — every run**

- **Philip Melanchthon.** Thirty-three, carrying the Reformation on a scholar's back: slight,
  stooped, a mind of appalling speed and order, the gentlest polemicist alive and the most easily
  wounded. He lies awake over the text, and his friends find him in tears at his papers more than
  once. His temptation is not cowardice but love, of peace, of the Church's unity, of the learned
  civility negotiation restores to him, and he will walk further toward Rome's ceremonies than any
  man at the table before conscience stops him at doctrine. Kind to juniors, he remembers what they
  have read. Let the player feel why both sides of history's argument about his summer are right.
- **Dr. Martin Luther.** Forty-six, four days away and present in every room: granite on doctrine,
  grace itself about everything else. See The courier interval, and Running Luther in the tone
  notes.
- **John, Elector of Saxony.** Sixty-two at midsummer, called the Steadfast and earning it. Not
  quick, but massive: he has decided, below argument, that this confession is his, and pressure
  breaks against him like water. He bears the sword at the Mass because the office is his and stays
  out of the procession because his faith is his, with the same unhurried courtesy. His investiture,
  his son's succession, and his vote on Ferdinand are all being held over him, and he knows it.
- **Gregor Brück.** In his mid-forties, doctor of both laws, the Elector's former chancellor and
  still his chief counsellor: his counsel that the summons be answered with a confession, his
  preface that fronts it, his voice that will answer the recess. Deliberate, and unimpressed by
  princes including his own. Law-and-politics questions arrive at his door.
- **Charles V.** Thirty and no one's fool: grave courtesy, French and Spanish at ease and German
  barely at all, so that he follows his own diet through interpreters. Deeply, conventionally pious,
  with a coronation oath he means and no way to conceive that provincials may redefine the Church;
  but nine years absent, in need of the grant and his brother's crown, and taught in Italy what
  pressing too hard costs. How much of his gentleness is tactic is slots 2 and 3.
- **Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio.** Fifty-six, the legate, the curia's best canonist-diplomat: gouty,
  urbane, patient, privately certain the German business is past talking, and under instructions
  whose one fixed star is no council.

**The theologians at Augsburg** (core for Kaspar, near-core in all). **Justus Jonas**, thirty-seven,
provost of Wittenberg and Melanchthon's steadying friend, who translates between him and Luther when
the letters run hot and does much of the German. **Georg Spalatin**, the old Electoral secretary,
the movement's institutional memory and keeper of drafts. **Johannes Brenz** of Schwäbisch Hall,
thirty-one, of the margrave's interest, one of the best minds at the table and the least anxious.
**Johann Agricola**, Luther's former student, eloquent and prickly with ambition. **Joachim
Camerarius**, thirty, Nuremberg's humanist and Melanchthon's closest friend, whose exact notes at
the Confutation's reading matter more than most princes.

**The confessing princes** (core for Balthasar, early bench otherwise). **Margrave George of
Brandenburg-Ansbach**, called the Pious, mid-forties, who reformed his lands early and thoroughly
and gives the diet its most famous sentence about necks: fearless, unsubtle, a trial to the
councillors who must keep him alive. **Landgrave Philip of Hesse**, twenty-five, the boldest and
least restful man in the coalition: brilliant, impatient, open about disliking Article X, always
three moves into a league the theologians have not approved, and married to Duke George's daughter.
**John Frederick**, the Electoral prince, big, hearty, and hotter than his father. **Duke Ernest of
Lüneburg**, earnest and Wittenberg-formed, with his brother **Francis**; **Prince Wolfgang of
Anhalt**, an unhesitating signature; and **Count Albrecht of Mansfeld**, Luther's own lord.

**The Coburg household** (core for Jörg). **Veit Dietrich**, twenty-four, amanuensis, nurse, and
audience, writing the reassuring letters home and forming, without knowing what it will become, the
habit of taking down what the Doctor says at table. **Cyriakus Kaufmann**, young, homesick, and glad
of every rider. **The castellan and garrison**, invented freely: men under orders to know nothing,
whose slow thaw toward their guest is a summer-long background pleasure.

**The other side.** **King Ferdinand**, twenty-seven, King of Hungary and Bohemia with the Turk on
his border and the crown of the Romans dangling, harder than his brother and the whisper at his ear
at the worst moments. **Duke George of Saxony**, the Elector's cousin, Philip's father-in-law, and
the confessors' most learned lay enemy. **Joachim of Brandenburg**, hard. **Albrecht of Mainz**,
cardinal and archchancellor, indebted, subtle, and softer than his college.
**Bishop Christoph von Stadion**, the host, Erasmian and grieved by the breach, who will talk to
Melanchthon when talking is unfashionable. **Dr. Johann Eck**, forty-three, the 404 Articles and half
the Confutation: tireless, vain, poisonous, and partly sincere, formidable in committee and never a
clown. **Johann Faber**, smooth and Vienna-bound, and **Johannes Cochlaeus**, who has made Luther a
life's obsession. **Alfonso de Valdés**, the emperor's Latin secretary, Erasmian to the bone and the
back channel. Rising behind him, **Granvelle**, smoother and colder since Gattinara's death.

**Bench.** **Christian Beyer**, chancellor since Brück stepped down, vain of his voice and entitled
to be (enters with the reading's preparations). **Lazarus Spengler** and the **Nuremberg envoys**,
who sign, fret, pay, and forward the mail (wherever prudence is urged). **Michael Keller** and
Augsburg's own preachers, beloved of the town and silenced (the preaching war). **Anton Fugger**,
the money itself (wherever credit is discussed). **Martin Bucer**, Strasbourg's concord-broker (the
cities' confession; the September road). **Urbanus Rhegius**, Augsburg's reformer, hired away by
Lüneburg this summer. **Argula von Grumbach**, the Bavarian noblewoman who has written public
theology since 1523; she visits the fortress in June and talks of the diet and of weaning babies.
Texture until needed: the Spanish and Burgundian court, the nuncios, counts and abbots, the Turkish
news like distant thunder, and offstage Wittenberg, where Katharina Luther keeps house, brewery, and
anxiety.

## Vantages

Three invented men at the table, on the bench, and on the road. For Kaspar the text is the spine and
the princes are weather; for Balthasar the coalition is the spine and the text its charter; for Jörg
the letters are flesh and both cities are home.

### Master Kaspar of Grimma

Twenty-six, a Saxon ropemaker's son, Master of Arts at Wittenberg, Greek under Melanchthon: one of
Master Philip's amanuenses, copying drafts fair, checking citations, carrying paper, and holding his
tongue. Pages stay in his head, which is about to be the most useful and most dangerous thing about
him.

**Learning 3, Rhetoric 2, Standing 1, Conscience 2.** His hand is in every draft, and drafts are
leaking; when a printing surfaces with a phrase only three copies contained, suspicion has a short
list. Deeper: he is close enough to watch Melanchthon concede, clause by loving clause, and must
decide when a copyist's silence becomes a signature of its own.

**Opening.** The second week of May in the Saxon workroom: morning light on Torgau papers, the bells
disagreeing about the hour, and **Melanchthon**, the only name, reading a quarto off the Nuremberg
post with a face Kaspar has never seen him wear: Eck's four hundred and four articles. End as he
pushes it across the table and asks Kaspar to read aloud, slowly, marking as he goes — *read me what
we are said to believe* — and somewhere in the reading the understanding dawns that the answer
cannot be a memorandum about ceremonies.

### Licentiate Balthasar of Feuchtwangen

Thirty-eight, of a small ministerial family two generations in Ansbach service, licentiate of both
laws from Ingolstadt, where he heard Eck lecture and still cannot hate him properly. Councillor in
Margrave George's household: instructions, protocols, antechambers, and keeping a fearless prince
alive. His family's lands lie a day's ride from Bavaria, as his brother reminds him by letter
whenever the margrave has been brave in public.

**Learning 2, Rhetoric 2, Standing 3, Conscience 1.** He has spent his career keeping his prince out
of avoidable danger, and his prince has decided this danger is the point. He has managed what other
men's stands cost and never paid for one; the summer will keep finding hours when managing is no
longer a position, with the margrave watching his face.

**Opening.** A May evening in the margrave's lodgings: candles, unfinished protocols, and **Margrave
George**, the only name, standing over the Saxon draft, unread because he has waited for his lawyer.
He sets it down and says: *Read it to me. Slowly. All of it. And then tell me what it will cost.*
End inside that reading, at an article where Balthasar hears his prince's neck in the syntax, with
the margrave watching him over the candle and the counsel not yet decided.

### Jörg of Torgau

Twenty-two, a saddler's son from the Elector's town, two hungry years a student at Wittenberg, and
the best rider in the delegation's service: the Coburg courier, with a sealed bag, the chancery's
warrant for remounts, and instructions he can recite asleep. He is welcome on both stages because he
is small; nobody minds the courier in the corner.

**Learning 1, Rhetoric 2, Standing 2, Conscience 3.** He carries other men's words and is trusted
because he does not read them. The summer offers letters he ought to read, one he will wish he had
never carried, seals worth money to the wrong people, and, after 6 August, the question of what a
saddlebag is worth. At each end of the road a great man is becoming something to him that is not
quite master and not quite friend.

**Opening.** Before dawn on 24 April: the fortress's lower court in torchlight, the Elector's train
winding out of the town below, and two men not leaving, **Dr. Luther** and **Veit Dietrich**, the
only names. A chancery officer holds Jörg back with a sealed bag and new orders: he is the Coburg
rider now, this road, all summer, and the first run south leaves within the hour. End as Luther
walks over in the gray light to hand up one more letter — a word for Philip: the birds up here hold
their own diet, and God feeds them anyway — and the gate opens on the long road down.

### Seats at the set pieces

| | Kaspar | Balthasar | Jörg |
|---|---|---|---|
| **The entry**, 15 Jun | The city's view, hours of it from a roof; the night's demand reaches the drafting table next morning as a question of timing | In the margrave's train at the bridge, near enough to see who kneels; that night in the antechamber, or the room, for the sentence about heads | Clattering in from Nuremberg that evening with week-old letters, into a town the Empire has just filled |
| **The subscription**, 23 Jun | Hands and ink: his fair copy under their names, near enough to see who hesitates | The councillors' side of the room, knowing what each signature gives up at law | Handed the bag and told plainly what is in it; he rides north with it on the 26th |
| **The reading**, 25 Jun | His choice: the secretaries' edge of the hall, or the courtyard under the open windows with ordinary Augsburg | Inside, with the estates | The courtyard, then four days asleep on the bag, and the Coburg's questions when he arrives |
| **The Confutation**, 3 Aug | The evening of pooled memories, and what his head is for | Inside, watching the emperor's face declared satisfied | Carrying the reconstruction north and the fortress's verdict back |
| **The night of 6 Aug** | A city with shut gates and lists being made; a bad morning for a leak suspect | May know beforehand, and must choose between warnings | Inside the walls as they tighten, or on the road with the last easy passage behind him |
| **The recess and the going** | Packing a chancery: what is burned, what carried, what quietly copied first | Brück refusing, and the Apology held out and not taken | Riding ahead to the fortress, at the gate when the wagons come up the hill |

## The ledger

The count is who confesses and what each will yield. Before 25 June the live question is who signs
and with what nerve; from 3 August it is what each will trade. Rebuild it before every committee
session. Each line is warmth toward the player, then where he lands. Opening state:

- **Melanchthon** — kind / will yield ceremonies, even the bishops' jurisdiction, for the Church's
  peace; stops at doctrine and at the Mass as a sacrifice.
- **Jonas** — warm / firm on doctrine; Melanchthon's brake and comfort.
- **Brück** — measuring / yields nothing at law without the Elector's word; expects little of
  committees.
- **Elector John** — courteous and remote / signs, and bends nowhere.
- **John Frederick** — hearty / against every concession.
- **Margrave George** — warm to honest men / signs; would lose his head before he restored the
  private Mass.
- **Philip of Hesse** — charming and impatient / signs despite Article X; wants the cities in and a
  league made; on leaving, slot 8.
- **The Nuremberg envoys** — anxious / sign; fear the ban for their trade and want a formula.
- **Charles** — grave and distant / slots 2 and 3.
- **Ferdinand** — cold / refutation, then enforcement.
- **Campeggio** — urbane / no council; the ban, the court, and time.
- **Eck** — contemptuous and interested / concedes words, never the Mass or jurisdiction.
- **Vehus** — courteous / will trade much on practice for a formula.
- **Stadion and Valdés** — warm to humanists / want a formula, and have access without power.
- **Duke George** — hostile / enforcement now.

**Adjust for vantage.** Kaspar is Melanchthon's own, a stranger elsewhere, and shaded in the
legate's rooms. Balthasar has the margrave's trust and an Ingolstadt degree that leaves him
interestingly unshaded with Eck and the Bavarians. Jörg is unknown to the great at Augsburg; by his
second run Luther knows his name and asks after his mother. Luther's own line is The courier
interval.

**Factions.** The confessing estates are a coalition, not a party, joined over the summer by Kempten,
Heilbronn, Windsheim, and Weissenburg, and the emperor's men probe every seam. The Catholic majority
is a spectrum: a war party (Duke George, Joachim, the Bavarian dukes), mediators (Mainz, Stadion,
Vehus), and a middle that wants the grant settled and to go home. The excluded cities, and Zurich
beyond them, are brethren estranged, allies wasted, or contagion, as the player treats them.

## The courier interval

This scenario's signature is a man four days away. Luther never appears at Augsburg; his presence is
ink, and ink takes time.

**The road.** Augsburg to the Coburg runs by way of Nuremberg, the relay, where friends of the cause
bundle and forward the mail and a rider changes horses and hears the news. An ordinary rider takes
four days each way, a pressed one with money for remounts three. Luther answers the day a letter
reaches him, or the next in a bad week, so an ordinary question comes back on the ninth day and a
pressed one on the seventh. Wittenberg is eight to ten days from Augsburg, Innsbruck three or four,
and Rome three weeks or more, which is why Campeggio's instructions are always a month old. The
road's opening state:

| Stage | Temper |
|---|---|
| Augsburg's gates | Careless until the entry; riders noted after it; every bag questioned after 6 August |
| Donauwörth and the Danube | A toll clerk who reads seals for a fee |
| Ansbach country to Schwabach | The margrave's warrant honored; friendly inns |
| Nuremberg | The relay, and the friends of the cause |
| Forchheim, Bamberg, Lichtenfels | The bishop of Bamberg's road: bags stay shut, and it is watched from the reading on |
| Coburg | Home |

**Keep the mail on the page.** When a letter leaves, say so, with its day and its speed; that line
is the whole record. On the day it is due it arrives, whatever else is happening, so let a crisis
land on day three of a nine-day wait. Apart from what the player chooses to do, only slots 4 and 7
lose or delay a letter.

**Rebuild the answer; don't remember it.** When an answer arrives, build it from what was asked,
from what else had reached him by the day he wrote, from his week on the calendar (the headaches,
the silence weeks, his father's death), and from where he stands, which does not move:

- Doctrine is God's, not ours, and not a hair of it may be traded, justification least of all.
- The confession pleases him, and as the summer goes on he says more plainly what it passed over.
- For the weak he will bear much in charity: fasts, feasts, vestments, much of the old order of
  service, even bishops over the churches if they let the Gospel be preached. Never the Mass as a
  sacrifice or a work, never one kind imposed as law, never vows as merit, never a promise to stop
  preaching.
- He expects nothing of the mediation and says so, more roughly as August goes on. The emperor he
  honors and prays for.
- Article X does not move. Toward Bucer in September, guarded warmth.
- To Melanchthon, rebuke of his cares with love under it; to the Elector, comfort; to the young,
  scripture and jokes.
- He answers what he has, so when letters cross he answers last week's question. Let them cross.

What comes back is Luther on paper, never a ruling on facts the page has not given him.

**Letters are objects.** They can be copied, delayed, misdirected, lost in a ford, read at a toll,
or sewn into a coat. Some of what the player carries will be printed and read for centuries; nobody
knows that, and the narrator does not say it. Give the bag its due: the wax, Melanchthon's hand and
Jonas's, the letter to a small boy in Wittenberg in the same post as the theology. The same errand
climbs the difficulty scale as the summer tightens: routine in May, a discretion in July, a risk
after 6 August.

## Fixed and open

**Fixed.** The calendar's public facts are the default and carry the full weight of history. Luther
cannot come to Augsburg: the ban is law, the Elector will not have it, and Luther will not ask it, so
treat a plan to smuggle him in as the household would, briefly, kindly, and as a young man's fever.
The confession is Melanchthon's pen; others counsel, and no one else drafts.
**The confessors will not trade doctrine.** Practices can be negotiated to the edge of grief, but on
justification and its neighbors the line holds, because it is not theirs to move, as Hus's oath was
not his. The emperor's piety is sincere, the council promised in the recess is one Rome does not
intend, and the sword does not fall on the confessing estates or any named man of theirs.

**Open.** Everything at the player's scale: whose letters move and whose are read at the gates, what
the reconstruction captures, which drafts leak and who is blamed, how the excluded are spoken to,
and what the Coburg knows when. The great can come to lean on a junior, use one, trust one past
prudence, or talk too honestly across the line, and Luther, hardest and best, can write a letter
with the player's name in it. The coalition can leave embittered or bound tighter. And the player's
own recess: home with the delegation, by way of the Coburg, or staying, dangerously, with the
councillors who watch the rump diet.

**How large an invented man can grow.** With sustained play: a phrase in the Apology's margins, an
errand the record never logged, the durable trust of Melanchthon, Brück, or Dietrich, a part in what
the reconstruction saved, and an epilogue that pays it: a chancery post, a Wittenberg lectureship, a
summons to Schmalkalden, or being, for a long life, the one who carried the letters. The ceiling:
the player never drafts an article, never signs, never reads in the hall, and never sits among the
Fourteen or the Six.

**Not doors.** Article X's wording will not move, but its manner is open: warnings carried, insults
unspoken, Bucer's road paved or mined. The concord of 1536 cannot come six years early; the epilogue
says which road the summer left toward it. The sword not falling is fixed, but how near it swings is
not: reckless play in August costs an arrest scare, a friend's ruin, a city's nerve broken, or the
player's own flight north, and an invented man who presses past every warning can be taken at a gate
or die on the road.

## The doors

Augsburg's doors share a property Constance's did not: success is not plainly good, and the player
should discover which kind of victory they have won. Each door has a window, a gate, three
conditions, and a decisive act priced at 6, less one for each condition genuinely in place. Without
its gate, or outside its window, a door is shut; a partial success opens it partway, never the
whole.

- **The concord** (Learning; Kaspar's door). The Fourteen came historically close. *Window:* 16–28
  August. *Gate:* slot 3 is not **c**, since an emperor answering to his oath will take nothing
  short of return. *Conditions:* a formula on the Mass that Melanchthon and Eck can both sign, built
  from the Fourteen's own agreed words; Brück's backing, and through him the Elector's leave; and
  the Coburg's sharpest letter not yet in the room (slot 4c does this by chance; a courier who does
  it on purpose pays in Conscience). *Success* is a recess of concord: the churches back under the
  bishops and the old ceremonies, the chalice and married priests tolerated until a council, and
  justification worded so both can sign and neither is bound. Luther's letters call it what it is,
  the cities are sold first, and the confession lies buried under its own signatures. Let the ash
  match the triumph. *Partial:* more agreed than history, a softer recess, and the same rocks.
- **The standstill** (Standing; Balthasar's door). In 1532, needing the Turkish grant, Charles
  granted the confessing estates peace until a council. This door is that bargain two years early.
  *Window:* 28 August to 22 September. *Gate:* the offer meets the need slot 3 names: the grant under
  **a**, Saxony's vote for Ferdinand under **b**, a cheap end under **d**; under **c** the door is
  shut. *Conditions:* the confessing estates united behind the offer, the cities' money included; a
  mediator of weight to carry it, Mainz or Stadion; and a voice for it in the emperor's council,
  Granvelle's or Valdés's. *Success* is a draft recess of peace until a council instead of
  refutation, with Rome, the legate, and the Bavarians furious and the price paid in full: the grant,
  or the Elector's vote. *Partial:* a longer term and softer words.
- **The landgrave** (Conscience; Jörg's door). Philip's flight nearly turned the summer hot.
  *Window:* 3–6 August. *Gate:* what the player brings meets Philip's reason (slot 8). *Conditions:*
  knowing beforehand, as a courier who knows the gates and stables might, or a councillor close to
  Hesse; the Elector or the margrave having asked him to stay; and something from the other side,
  leave granted or a credible word that no arrest is intended. The decisive act is telling a prince
  to his face what his going will cost the brethren who stay. *Success:* Philip stays and there is
  no war scare, but weigh whether a Philip who stays does something larger and worse at the recess.
  *Partial:* he goes, but his leave-taking letter blunts the emperor's fury and the gates stay open.

A player may work more than one door, and any door is open to anyone with the stat to reach it.

## The coda

It falls in the epilogue's months. The record, by vantage: for Kaspar, the printed confession and
Apology of spring 1531, where his fair copies' wording survives or doesn't; for Balthasar, the
recess of 19 November, which makes the summer law; for Jörg, the chancery's post book, a line for
each run. The reader: a Wittenberg student with the new quarto, asking Kaspar what *our churches
teach* cost to write; Balthasar's brother; Katharina Luther, asking Jörg about the other end of
the road.

## Save state

`Scenario state` fields, from the opening:

- **texts**: which versions the player has seen, held, copied, or memorized. This is provenance here.
- **mail**: every letter in flight, with day sent, pace, and day due.
- **Coburg**: the last letter Luther has received, so he answers only what has reached him.
- **Luther**: his regard for the player, in a phrase.
- **road**: any stage whose temper has moved from the opening table.
- **suspicion**: who is suspected of the leak, the player included.

From 3 August, **doors**: for each door worked, which conditions are genuinely in place. From 22
September, **recess**: where the player is bound.

## Pre-commitment

**1 — The leak.** Who feeds the printers. Foreshadow honestly; keep it discoverable.
a. A copyist in the Saxon lodgings, for money, frightened the whole time.
b. A councillor's clerk, from conviction: everyone ought to read it.
c. A printer's bribe to a servant, nobody's design; the lodgings are guilty only of carelessness.
d. One of the cities' men, playing his own game about who gets the credit.

**2 — The summons.** What Charles believed in January. Never stated; it colors a hundred scenes.
a. Sincere. He meant it, and hardened only as the summer taught him what he faced.
b. Craft, drafted to bring the estates inside the walls.
c. He did not know his own mind in January, and does not in October.

**3 — The emperor's weighting.** What moves him this run, so his inscrutability is the player's
problem and never the GM's alibi.
a. The Turkish grant above everything; religion is an obstacle to clear.
b. Ferdinand's election above everything; he is buying votes all summer.
c. The coronation oath and his soul; he believes he is answerable.
d. Exhaustion; he will take whatever closing is cheapest.

**4 — The crossing that fails.** One courier run miscarries. What was in the bag is fixed when it
first reaches the page.
a. A flooded ford in June: a draft goes into the water, and the Coburg answers a question never
asked.
b. A seal shown to the wrong clerk in July: the letter arrives, read, and no one says so.
c. A lame horse in August: Luther's sharpest letter lands days late, into a room that has already
decided.

**5 — The ear in the player's lodging.**
a. The widow who keeps the player's lodging reads papers left lying out. Her purse runs to Duke
George's man and her heart to the silenced preachers, and the right appeal can turn her.
b. A servant takes Duke George's coin, and takes it badly, being new at it.
c. The house is clean. Suspecting it is the story, and it costs the player a friend.

**6 — The legate's listener.** Which of Campeggio's smooth young men has German.
a. The one who seems to have none and stands close at the wrong moments.
b. The one everyone knows has German, which is the point; the real ear is a Fugger clerk.
c. No one. His news comes wholesale from the Bavarians, slanted accordingly.

**7 — The player's letters.**
a. None taken this summer.
b. One read, copied, and returned to the road, which is worse than losing it.
c. One held back and delivered weeks late, to a purpose.

**8 — Why Philip leaves.**
a. Fear: he believes an arrest is being prepared, and only a word he trusts can hold him.
b. Temper: the refused leave and his wife's letters. Leave granted, or an honest reason to wait,
holds him.
c. Design: he means the emperor to fear a war, and only the Elector's plain request can hold him.

**9 — The margrave's Bavarian letters.** Who in the Ansbach household writes to a cousin in Bavaria.
a. A chancery secretary, for money.
b. The margrave's chaplain, frightened for his prince's neck and sure he is saving him.
c. No one. The Bavarians hear Ansbach's business as gossip, and suspicion falls on Balthasar's
Ingolstadt years.

## Tone notes

- **No villains, and no relativism.** Charles believes he is patiently rescuing the Church's unity
  from provincial arrogance; the confessors believe they are giving Christ's Gospel back to
  Christendom whole; Eck is venomous and partly right about what is at stake; Luther's hardness is
  pastoral clarity. Don't adjudicate justification over the characters' heads.
- **Two doctrines carry the summer.** When Article IV comes up, at the drafting table, in the
  Fourteen, in a silenced preacher's kitchen, let it be what these people believe it is: the
  difference between a terrified conscience and a free one. And the Supper divides for real: render
  Hesse's grief, Bucer's patience, and Wittenberg's firmness from inside, with no fellowship the
  century did not feel and no sneer at either side.
- **Keep the dread honest.** Every signer of 23 June believes the ban, war, and confiscation are
  live. Show it in texture: wills witnessed, valuables sent home, a councillor pricing the roads out
  of the city. The climaxes are a man reading aloud and a pen crossing paper; give them the weight
  Constance gave fire.
- **Languages are power.** German on the diet's floor, Latin in the theology, French and Spanish
  around the emperor, and the confession read in German on purpose, to the emperor in his own Empire
  in a tongue he barely has. A player with Latin and German stands at a working seam.
- **Running Luther.** Ink first: most runs meet him as letters, and they should sound like him,
  scripture at the marrow, humor at the edges, violence of expression kept for ideas rather than
  people the player loves. On screen at the Coburg he is ill, grieving, working, praying, funny at
  table, and never uncertain about the doctrine: neither plaster saint nor shouting caricature, and
  never spent cheaply.
- **The ornaments.** Stage the attested ones as the calendar gives them. Stage these as reported,
  believed, and repeated: the emperor's broken-German words to the margrave, the princes unbowed at
  the blessing, *Non moriar sed vivam* chalked on the fortress wall, and Brück's promise at the
  handover that the confession will prevail against the gates of hell. Keep these in mouths only: the
  emperor dozing through the reading, Duke William of Bavaria's quip that the confession could be
  refuted from the Fathers but not from Scripture, and any claim that *Ein feste Burg* was born at
  the Coburg.

# The Synod of Whitby

**Scenario:** A king summons two holy traditions under one roof to decide when his kingdom keeps
Easter, and, beneath the moons and the tables, whose authority binds the Church of the English.
**Setting:** The double monastery of Streanæshalch on its headland above the sea in Deira, with the
waters and roads that bring the parties there and carry them away.
**Dates:** Lent to late autumn 664, Julian reckoning. A few days at the center played nearly hour by
hour, and the weeks on either side at montage grain.
**Revision:** 2026-10 — save fields and coda added.

## Premise

For a generation Northumbria has been taught the faith twice. From Kent, in King Edwin's day, came
Paulinus of the Roman mission, who baptized crowds in the rivers and fled when the king fell; from
Iona, in King Oswald's day, came St. Aidan, who walked the roads for sixteen years and whose
successors hold the see of Lindisfarne still. The two teachings are one faith, one creed, and one
baptism, and they keep the feast of the Resurrection by two reckonings and cut their clergy's hair
in two shapes, and everyone can see it.

The division sits at the king's own table. Oswiu was reared in exile among the Irish and keeps
Easter as Lindisfarne keeps it; Queen Eanflæd grew up in Kent and keeps the Roman use with her
Kentish chaplain. It is said that in some years the king has feasted at Easter while the queen's
household still fasted and kept Palm Sunday. This spring it happened again. And the question has
grown teeth: the king's son Alhfrith, under-king of Deira, has taken up Rome's cause, given Ripon to
the young abbot Wilfrid, and turned out the Irish-formed monks who would not conform. The king
summons both parties to the abbess Hild's house to argue it to a ruling in his presence.

He will rule for Rome, courteously and completely, and nobody will be tried or punished. The grief is
real anyway: Colmán will lay down the see Aidan carried and go north with part of Aidan's bones and
every Irish brother, and the Church of the English will turn toward Canterbury and Rome for good.
None of the people converging on the headland know this.

## What the GM needs

- **The road here.** 597: Augustine lands in Kent. 627: Edwin is baptized at York at Easter, Hild
  among his household. 12 October 633: Edwin falls, and Paulinus takes the queen and her children
  south by sea, leaving the deacon James, who is alive still. 634–635: Oswald wins at Heavenfield,
  asks Iona for a bishop, and gives Aidan Lindisfarne, interpreting his Irish for the thegns himself.
  642: Oswiu succeeds his brother. August 651: Oswiu has Oswine of Deira killed; Aidan dies within
  the fortnight, and Finan succeeds. 15 November 655: at the Winwaed Oswiu vows his infant daughter
  and twelve estates, wins, and keeps both vows; in 657 Hild founds Streanæshalch, likely on one of
  them. 661: Colmán succeeds Finan. The early 660s: Ripon.
- **Why now.** Not the arithmetic: the two Easters have parted in most years of the royal marriage.
  The change is political. Ripon has made two usages into two parties, the southern kingdoms under
  Oswiu's overlordship look to Canterbury, and a king who means to be obeyed cannot preside over two
  calendars forever. Bede will write it as conscience, and it is that too. Slot 1 fixes the mixture.
- **What is at issue.** Beneath Easter and the tonsure lies one question: when the tradition of holy
  elders and the use of the universal Church part, which binds? Both sides argue in good conscience,
  and neither position is a heresy.
- **Guards.** There is no "Celtic Church" facing a "Roman Church": one Church keeps two usages,
  "Roman" is this file's shorthand, and the period's own word for the winners is *catholic*. *Scotti*
  means the Irish wherever they live, Iona included. Iona keeps Easter on a Sunday, always; the jibe
  that it keeps Passover with the Jews ("Quartodeciman") lives only in partisan mouths, as does "the
  tonsure of Simon Magus." The southern Irish already keep the Roman Easter. Colmán's "Anatolius" is
  the *Liber Anatolii*, an Irish book under the old father's name, while the real Anatolius, read in
  Eusebius, used a nineteen-year cycle, as Wilfrid says; no one in 664 knows the book is not his.
  Streanæshalch is Whitby by a thousand years' tradition, and no character doubts where they stand.

## The ground

A double monastery of men and women under one abbess, on a high headland where a small river meets
the sea; Bede glosses the name *the bay of the beacon*. Everything is timber: cells and halls under
thatch, the church the largest roof on the headland, guest-houses by the gate, a landing below the
cliff, and the moors behind going up into weather. No one finds an abbess ruling men remarkable, and
neither does the narrator.

The sea keeps the clock under the bell: gulls off the cliff, a late bright spring, sea-fret by Sext.
The guest-board rises to kings while the house keeps its discipline, visibly and kindly; it is
Eastertide by both reckonings, so no one fasts on Friday. After supper the harp passes from hand to
hand; watch who slips out. On the strand lie black stones that take a shine and stones coiled like
sleeping serpents, which the brothers argue about amiably; the legend that Hild turned them to stone
does not exist yet.

## How the synod works

A royal convocation, not a canonical council: no sessions, votes, or acta. The king summons in Lent,
presides, questions, and rules; the assembly hears, answers when bidden, and assents, seated and
standing, great and small. The parties are guested for a day or two first, and the politics happens
at supper and in the garth before a word is said in the hall. There is no appeal. The ruling binds
Northumbria's church at once, calendar and tonsure; whoever cannot conform says so to the king, and
what follows is grace, not procedure. Its reach runs past the kingdom, to the southern kingdoms
under Oswiu's overlordship and to Lindisfarne's daughter missions in Mercia and Essex.

## The two reckonings

In the hall this is authority, not arithmetic; keep the moons offstage. But hold the numbers cold
enough to survive a player computist. Everyone agrees that Easter is the Sunday after the first full
moon of spring, and everything turns on whose tables say when spring begins, when the moon is full,
and which days of the moon the Sunday may fall on.

| | Latercus (Iona's use) | Victorius (Gaul's use) | Dionysius (Rome's use) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cycle | Eighty-four years; Gaulish, of about 400, though its keepers believe it Anatolius's | 532 years, made at Rome's request in 457 | Nineteen years, Alexandria's, put into Latin in 525 |
| Easter Sunday on | Luna 14–20 | Luna 16–22 | Luna 15–21 |
| Date limits | 26 March–23 April (equinox 25 March) | 22 March–24 April | 22 March–25 April (equinox 21 March) |
| Kept by | Iona and its daughters, the northern Irish, the Britons, and the Picts | Gaul, by law since 541 | Rome, the southern Irish, and Wilfrid |

**This year.** By the latercus Easter 664 fell on 14 April; by Dionysius, on 21 April, so the king's
feast fell on the queen's Palm Sunday. The moon was truly full on the night of 16 April, two nights
after the king's feast, so Wilfrid's charge that Iona sometimes keeps Easter before the full moon was
written in this spring's sky for anyone who watched it. In 665 both tables give 6 April: one more
year and the calendars would have agreed of themselves. Let a learned character find that and feel
its weight.

After the ruling the king's Eastertide lengthens by a week: his Ascension moves from 23 to 30 May
and his Pentecost from 2 to 9 June. Which Roman table the ruling installed, and which the queen's
household had kept, the learned still argue; in the hall it is simply the use of Rome and of all the
world.

## The calendar

**Pacing.** Play nearly hour by hour from the first supper through the night after the ruling; give
full scenes to one arrival per vantage, the first supper, the day of words, the night after, the
going, the leave-taking wherever the player stands, and the player's season's end. Montage the rest.
The same errand changes price as the days turn: a word with Colmán is easy the first evening, a
discretion after the ruling, and a grief at the gate.

The synod's month is unrecorded. Dates marked † are this file's default, not the record.

- **Lent** — The summons goes out from the king's hall.
- **14 April, Sunday** — Easter by the latercus. The king feasts; the queen keeps Palm Sunday.
- **21 April** — Easter by the Roman tables. The queen's household feasts a week into the king's
  Eastertide.
- **24–25 April†** — The parties converge. The first supper is on the evening of the 25th.
- **26 April, Friday†** — The day of words, and the ruling. It may breathe into two sittings with the
  night between.
- **27 April†** — The night after, and the morning: Colmán's resolve.
- **28 April†** — The octave of the Roman Easter, the first Sunday the house keeps by one reckoning.
- **1 May, Wednesday** — The sun fails at about the tenth hour. The moon's shadow runs straight
  across the headland: more than two minutes of totality, the sun low in the west over the moors,
  stars in the afternoon. By default the going is this day. Its meaning arrives as three witnessed
  readings, one from each party and one from someone in neither, each fixed when first spoken and
  never the narrator's. Bede will record it under 3 May, two days off the sky's date.
- **Early summer** — At Lindisfarne, Colmán lays down the see and asks, and is granted, Eata of
  Melrose as abbot of the brothers who remain. He leaves part of Aidan's bones in the church and
  takes part, and goes to Iona with all the Irish and about thirty English. Tuda becomes bishop.
- **30 May** — Ascension, the first great feast the kingdom keeps as one.
- **14 July** — In Kent, Archbishop Deusdedit and King Eorcenberht die on the same day. The
  pestilence is in the south, and Canterbury stays vacant for nearly five years. Northumbria hears
  it weeks late.
- **Summer** — Portents from the Irish annals travel as rumor: the sky seemed to burn, and there was
  an earthquake in Britain.
- **1 August** — The plague reaches Ireland.
- **Autumn** — The plague reaches Northumbria. Tuda dies of it and is buried at Pægnalæch. At
  Melrose the prior Boisil dies of it (by the account that ties his death to this plague), and
  Cuthbert, about thirty, takes it and lives.
- **26 October** — By a twelfth-century chronicle's date (Bede gives no day), Cedd dies of it at
  Lastingham. About thirty of his East Saxon brothers come north to live by his body, and the
  sickness takes all of them but one small boy.
- **The coda's horizon** — Wilfrid is consecrated in Gaul by Agilbert, now bishop of Paris, and
  lingers; Oswiu has Chad, Cedd's brother, consecrated to York instead, by Wini of the West Saxons
  and two British bishops, Canterbury being empty. Alhfrith rises against his father, undated, and
  vanishes from the record. Part of the East Saxons turn back to the old gods under the plague.
  Colmán sails to Inishbofin in 668 and founds Mayo for his English; Theodore reaches Canterbury on
  27 May 669.

## The day of words

The staging is the file's own; the record gives only the house. Hold it in the abbey church: benches
brought in, the kings' stools before the step, Colmán's clergy at one hand and the Roman bench at
the other, Hild's people behind Colmán's, and Cedd standing in the middle. The spine is attested
through Bede and Stephen, who composed the speeches decades later. Render it as living argument,
with interruptions, weather on the roof, and the pause while Cedd carries a period across the
language line; a player may bend its temperature, never its content.

1. **The king opens.** Those who serve one God should keep one rule of life and not differ in
   celebrating the heavenly sacraments; let them find which tradition is the truer and all follow
   it. He bids Colmán speak first.
2. **Colmán.** This Easter he received from the elders who sent him; all his fathers kept it; it is
   the Easter of St. John, the disciple the Lord loved, and of the churches in his care.
3. **Wilfrid.** Agilbert, bidden next, asks that his pupil speak for him in English rather than
   through an interpreter, and the senior bishop stands silent while an abbot of thirty speaks.
   Wilfrid has seen this Easter kept at Rome, where Peter and Paul lived, taught, suffered, and are
   buried, and in Italy, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Egypt, Greece, and all the world. Only these men and
   their partners in obstinacy, the Picts and the Britons, in part of the two remotest islands of
   the ocean, foolishly fight the whole world.
4. **John.** Colmán: is it foolish to follow the apostle who leaned on the Lord's breast? Wilfrid:
   John kept the Law's Passover while the Church still bore with Jewish custom; Peter at Rome kept
   the Sunday from the fifteenth moon to the twenty-first; Nicaea confirmed it; Colmán follows
   neither John nor Peter.
5. **The fathers.** Colmán: Anatolius, and Columba and his successors, holy men whom God attested
   with signs. Wilfrid: Anatolius used a nineteen-year cycle Colmán ignores; Iona's fathers were
   God's servants, and their rustic simplicity was pardonable while none showed them better, but in
   those who have heard the apostolic see and the universal Church and refuse them, it is sin. Is
   their Columba, and ours if he was Christ's, to be preferred to the prince of the apostles, to
   whom the Lord gave the keys of the kingdom of heaven?
6. **The king's questions.** Oswiu, who has said little, asks whether the Lord said this to Peter.
   It is true, says Colmán. Can he show any such power given to Columba? None. Do both agree the
   keys were given to Peter? Both agree. Then Peter is the doorkeeper, and the king will not
   contradict him, but will obey his decrees in all things as far as he knows and is able, lest he
   come to the doors of heaven and find none to open them. All present, great and small, assent.

**On the day.** Slot 1 colors every look the king gives, but his words land as law regardless.
Stephen, not Bede, has the king smile as he asks; let one character remember a smile and another
none. The record gives Colmán no answer to the ruling: honor that silence, and render what he does
with his face, his hands, and his men in that minute.

## Cast

Nearly everyone named here lived, and the record of most of them is a paragraph of Bede. Keep them
within it, and invent freely only at the player's scale.

**Core — every run**

- **Oswiu, King of Northumbria.** About fifty-two, king for twenty-two years, overlord of much of
  Britain, though Mercia threw off his rule in 658. Reared in Irish exile, and baptized, taught, and
  truly formed there; also the man who had Oswine killed and founded Gilling in penance at the
  queen's asking. His piety and his statecraft are both real and long past separating, even to
  himself. He loves Colmán for his wisdom and is proud of Wilfrid the way a king is proud of a fine
  sword someone else owns.
- **Colmán, Bishop of Lindisfarne.** Irish, of Iona, third of Aidan's line and three years in the
  see. A monk-bishop of the old pattern, austere and unmoneyed, his Lindisfarne a church, a few
  houses, and cattle. He holds the tradition as an inheritance from men whose sanctity he saw. His
  speech is plain: he states where Wilfrid performs. The record's grace note, that the king loved him
  to the end and granted his last request, shades every scene they share.
- **Wilfrid, Abbot of Ripon.** About thirty and noble-born, placed at Lindisfarne at fourteen by the
  queen's favor, so that he loved what he now argues against. Then Kent, then Rome, where an
  archdeacon taught him the Easter reckoning, then three years at Lyon and the Roman tonsure; now
  Alhfrith's friend, Ripon's abbot, and lately made priest by Agilbert. Brilliant, magnificent,
  generous, certain, and edged: right by his lights in every syllable, and able to cut men he has
  shared a roof with. Play the formidable young churchman of 664, not the litigant of the decades
  ahead.
- **Hild, Abbess of Streanæshalch.** Fifty, of Edwin's house, baptized with his household at
  thirteen. At thirty-three she meant to take ship for a Gaulish convent, and Aidan recalled her and
  formed her. Abbess at Hartlepool, then here these seven years; everyone who knows her calls her
  mother, and kings ask her advice. She owns every scene's logistics and is the one person both
  kings and both bishops will hear alone.
- **Cedd, Bishop of the East Saxons.** Northumbrian-born, Lindisfarne-formed, consecrated by Finan;
  apostle of Essex, founder of Lastingham on the moors southwest of here, and one of four priest
  brothers, Chad among them. At the synod he holds the strangest and most Christlike office in the
  hall: an Irish-formed man carrying the Roman case faithfully in his mouth. He has half a year to
  live; let his scenes carry the weight of things said once.

**Bench — introduce when the politics calls**

- **Alhfrith, under-king of Deira.** Oswiu's son by an earlier marriage, married to Penda's
  daughter, and Wilfrid's patron. He forced the question, and the synod meets on his ground. Bright,
  generous, impatient, and very slightly too pleased; his half-brother Ecgfrith, the queen's son,
  nineteen, stands between him and the succession in a way no one names. He enters with the Roman
  party.
- **Agilbert.** A Frankish noble who studied for years in Ireland and was bishop of the West Saxons
  until the king there, weary of his foreign speech, divided the see under him. He left in dignity
  and dudgeon and is Alhfrith's guest: formidable in Latin, wry about his English, and half gone to
  Gaul, where Paris will make him bishop. He enters at the first supper.
- **Queen Eanflæd.** Edwin's daughter, thirty-eight, the first Northumbrian baptized, carried to
  Kent at seven; the Roman use has lived in the north chiefly in her chapel. Present or absent she
  is a principal: the divided household is her lived grief, and her marriage to the man who killed
  her kinsman Oswine is one of the court's deep structures. If she comes, she comes with few words
  and total consequence.
- **James the Deacon.** Paulinus's deacon, who stayed in 633 and has kept the Roman Easter and
  taught the Roman chant in Deira ever since, mostly alone. Very old now: the Roman party with the
  politics burned away. Give him one scene and let it land.
- **Romanus.** The queen's Kentish chaplain, who has kept the divided household's calendar for
  twenty years: precise, patient, harder to embarrass than he looks, and full of the court's buried
  bodies.
- **Agatho.** A priest in Agilbert's company; the record gives only his name, so build him as
  needed, bench-sized.
- **Tuda.** English, schooled and consecrated bishop among the southern Irish, Roman in tonsure and
  Easter: proof that the two loyalties can share one man. Lately come north, good and gentle.
- **Eata of Melrose, with Boisil and Cuthbert.** The season's other pole, not at the synod. Eata was
  one of Aidan's twelve English boys and was turned out of Ripon with his monks, and he is the man
  Colmán will ask for, so the expelled inherits the mother-house. His prior Boisil and the young
  Cuthbert are with him. For a run that travels.
- **Ælfflæd.** The king's daughter, about ten, vowed before the Winwaed and raised in Hild's houses
  since she was a year old: the abbess's child and the king's at once. She sees a great deal and
  understands an unpredictable fraction of it.
- **Invented, at the player's scale:** the guest-master and guest-mistress, the cellaress, a boatman
  who ferries both parties, Colmán's Irish household, Ripon's clerks, and a Briton laborer who hears
  Wilfrid's sentence about his people at second hand.

## Vantages

Three allegiances in one small hall, where everyone hears the same speeches from thirty feet away;
what differs is what the ruling costs. For the house the spine is hospitality and a divided heart,
for Lindisfarne the departure choice, and for Ripon what winning is made of.

### Beornwine or Berhtgyth of Streanæshalch

Early twenties, Deiran, given as a child to Hild's house at Hartlepool and brought here with her; now
under the guest-master or, as Berhtgyth, the guest-mistress. Irish-formed to the roots like the whole
house: the tonsure or the veil, psalms half-glossed in Irish, Aidan's stories told as family memory.
This week the player holds keys, stores, beds, and seating: power that looks exactly like service.
Tongues: native English, good Irish, church Latin.

**Learning 2, Rhetoric 1, Standing 2, Conscience 3.** The house must host its own defeat, serve it
graciously, and obey it, and a servant with the keys hears everything and is asked, sooner or later,
by nearly everyone, for one small thing.

**Opening.** Two days before the parties come: the guest-master's list read aloud in the morning
garth, two kings, two bishops, and every bed on the headland spoken for, then a day of hospitality's
plain arithmetic, fish counted and the good mead moved, the question of who gets it left carefully
open. Name only **the abbess**, giving orders at the gate with the sea-wind taking her words: the
house will serve both tables as if the Lord sat at each, because he does. End at dusk on the
cliff-top, sails working down the coast from the north and riders small on the moor road, with the
bell for Vespers going behind.

### Brother Sigewine of Lindisfarne

Twenty-six, an Angle fisherman's son given to Lindisfarne at seven and blessed as a small boy by
Aidan himself, which he has never told anyone in case it sounds like boasting. The party's young
computist, he runs the latercus in his head and loves the arithmetic the way a man loves his
father's boat. Tongues: native English, good Irish, good Latin.

**Learning 3, Rhetoric 1, Standing 1, Conscience 3.** His own tonsure is on trial, and after the
ruling the choice the record gives a company of English brothers becomes his: sail into exile with
the man who made him and half of Aidan's bones, or stay under Eata, keep the Roman Easter over the
other half, and grow his hair into another shape. Make both honorable, both costly, and neither easy
to take back.

**Opening.** On the water, in Colmán's small company coasting south, the satchel of tables dry under
his knees and the spray finding everything else. Name only **Colmán**, silent in the stern half the
morning, then asking Sigewine to say next spring's Easter aloud by both reckonings and listening
with his eyes shut, as if to psalmody. End at the first sight of the beacon headland, when the
brother at the next oar asks, too low for the bishop to hear, which answer Sigewine carries in his
own heart, and the boat runs in before he can give one.

### Cuthwine of Ripon

Twenty-four, a Deiran thegn's younger son, two years a clerk in Wilfrid's household, with a fair
hand, good Latin, and the Roman chant half learned, living richly on his abbot's stories of Rome. He
believes the cause with his whole mind. At Ripon he sleeps in a bed left by a monk who walked back
to Melrose rather than conform, and he has never once wondered about the man. Tongues: native
English, good Latin, a handful of Irish words.

**Learning 2, Rhetoric 3, Standing 2, Conscience 1.** Winning. He will watch the master he loves be
magnificent and merciless in the same hour, hear the sentence about the islands land on men who fed
him on the road, and stand in the victory feeling the first grain of something he has no word for.
His zeal has cost him nothing yet; the going, the handover, and Eata's face are where the bill
arrives.

**Opening.** Ripon, the evening before the road: packing his abbot's books by rushlight while
**Wilfrid**, the only name, rehearses the order of his authorities to the dark church, not the words
but the architecture, Rome to Nicaea to Anatolius to Peter, stopping once to check a date against
the table Cuthwine holds. End on the moor road the next evening at the guest-board of a small
Irish-formed cell, where the brothers wash the travelers' feet and feed them without a word about
Easter. Wilfrid is courteous and entirely unmoved; Cuthwine, riding on, finds he has memorized the
face of the brother who held the basin.

### Seats at the set pieces

At the ruling the scenario never chooses the player's voice or silence; let the assent happen around
them.

| | Beornwine or Berhtgyth | Sigewine | Cuthwine |
|---|---|---|---|
| **The first supper**, 25 Apr | Runs it: seating as diplomacy, the harp after | On Colmán's bench, serving him | Beside Wilfrid, among Alhfrith's people |
| **The day of words**, 26 Apr | Serving the hall (water, lamps, the door); sees everything | Behind Colmán with the tables no one opens | Holding Wilfrid's book, watching the hall |
| **The ruling** | At the door: Colmán's face, the abbess's hands | Near enough to see Colmán's hands, nothing else | Near enough to see the king's face, and Wilfrid not looking at Colmán |
| **The night after** | The house's night: who eats, where Hild prays | Colmán's night, and the brothers' question | Ripon's supper, and a Lindisfarne brother alone in the garth |
| **The going**, 1 May | On the cliff as guests leave and the sun goes out | Putting off north as the light fails | On the moor road, the horses stopped in the dark |
| **The leave-taking**, summer | By report, or carrying Hild's gift to Lindisfarne | There: the bones, the dividing, his choice | By report, or with Ripon's letter, and Wulfhard at the gate |
| **The plague autumn** | Nursing; news of Cedd across the moors | At sea, on Iona, or under Eata | At Ripon, as Wilfrid readies for Gaul |

## The parting ledger

There is no count to keep, because the only vote is the king's. The ledger tracks how each soul and
house will receive the ruling. Each line is warmth toward the player, then where they land: conforms
gladly, conforms grieving, departs, wavers, or already keeps the Roman use, and for the winners, how
they carry victory. Rebuild it before the day of words, after the ruling, at the going, and at the
coda, which pays every moved entry honestly. The player reads it as posture: who eats, who lingers in
the church after Compline, whose Latin gets shorter, who begins giving small things away.
Opening state:

- **Oswiu** — courteous and distant / rules as slot 1 moves him; afterward keeps the ruling and
  grieves Colmán.
- **Colmán** — kind to English brothers, reserved with strangers / departs, fixed; whether in anger
  or in grace is open.
- **Hild** — a mother to her own, measuring with guests / conforms grieving, fixed, and takes her
  house with her.
- **Cedd** — warm and tired / conforms without theater, fixed.
- **Wilfrid** — gracious to the useful, blind to servants / already keeps the Roman use; in victory,
  hard.
- **Agilbert** — wry and remote / already keeps the Roman use; in victory, half gone.
- **Alhfrith** — bright, careless of the small / wants Lindisfarne emptied as Ripon was.
- **James** — gentle to everyone / already keeps the Roman use; in victory, generous, wanting only to
  sing the feast together.
- **Romanus** — courteous and exact / already keeps the Roman use; in victory, patient.
- **Eanflæd** — reserved / already keeps the Roman use; in victory, quiet.
- **Tuda** — gentle / already keeps the Roman use, and hopes no one leaves.
- **Eata** — gentle and far off / conforms grieving; takes Lindisfarne if asked.
- **Tidwulf of Lindisfarne** — warm to anyone who speaks of Aidan / wavers. Old, one of the first
  Aidan baptized, in Colmán's company. His price: leave to stay by the half of Aidan that stays. His
  breaking point: being hurried, or hearing his tonsure called Simon's.
- **Dægberht of Streanæshalch** — shy, the house's best reader of Irish / wavers. Formed at
  Lindisfarne before Hild came, and means to ask her leave to follow Colmán. His price: Hild's own
  word that grief is not disobedience. His breaking point: a Roman cleric correcting his psalter in
  choir.
- **Wulfhard of Melrose** — wary, not at the synod / wavers. He walked out of Ripon with Eata; the
  bed Cuthwine sleeps in was his. His price: Eata asking him by name to come to Lindisfarne. His
  breaking point: meeting the Ripon clerk who has his bed, as a victor.
- **The houses** — Lindisfarne's English are divided, and about thirty go whatever happens at the
  margins, fixed. Streanæshalch conforms grieving behind its mother. Melrose conforms grieving under
  Eata and Boisil.

**Adjust for vantage.** The house vantage is family to Hild and Dægberht, service to everyone else,
and invisible to the king. Sigewine is Colmán's own and Tidwulf's friend, and cold at Ripon's table;
Wilfrid half remembers him as a small boy at Lindisfarne. Cuthwine is Wilfrid's own, known by face
to Alhfrith, shaded in Colmán's company, and a stranger to Wulfhard until the summer introduces
them.

**Factions.** The Ionan party (Colmán and his brothers, Streanæshalch by formation, Cedd by every tie
but the one that decides, and most of the north's clergy) holds the elder use and the king's
upbringing, and loses, splitting between those who cannot conform and those who cannot leave. The
Roman party (Alhfrith, Ripon, Agilbert, James, Romanus, and the queen's household) is smaller than
its victory will make it look. To the king's thegns the question is moon-arithmetic until he rules,
and then it is law. Offstage, with weight: Iona, whose answer is Colmán's road home; Canterbury,
silent all year and vacant from July; Mercia and Essex, where Lindisfarne's missions must live with
the ruling; the Britons and Picts, present only as the men Wilfrid's sentence wounds; and the plague.

## The tongues of the hall

This scenario's signature is three languages on one small headland. Always know in which tongue a
sentence was said and who in the room truly followed it. Oswiu's Irish, Agilbert's poor English, and
Cedd's two tongues are attested; the rest of the table is this file's fixed design.

| | English | Irish | Latin |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Oswiu** | Native | Fluent | Thin |
| **Colmán** | Halting | Native | Strong |
| **Wilfrid** | Native | A boyhood remnant | Polished |
| **Agilbert** (Frankish native) | Poor | Some, from his Irish years | Fluent |
| **Cedd** | Native | Fluent | Strong |
| **Hild** | Native | Good | Strong |
| **James** | Fluent after forty years | None | Native |
| **Alhfrith, Eanflæd** | Native | None | Some |
| **Romanus** | Native | None | Strong |

- **Interpreting is an act.** Whenever the player carries speech across the language line they
  choose to render it true, soften it, sharpen it, or leave something out, and the choice decides
  the stat: Learning for a faithful rendering under pressure, Rhetoric when it must also persuade,
  and Conscience when the temptation is to shade it. Partial success is a shade lost that someone
  noticed.
- **Cedd is the bridge**, faithful by fixed fact, but one man; most of the scenario happens where he
  is not.
- **Eavesdropping runs along the map.** A word in Irish at the guest-house door is private from half
  the headland and naked to the other half. Let the player learn the map by using it, and let NPCs
  use it back.

**Provenance** here is the tongue itself: what the player heard in the language it was spoken in,
what reached them through a rendering and whose, and what is only garth rumor. *I heard him say it
in Irish* outweighs *Cedd rendered it so*, and both outweigh *they say*. The computist's version is
a reckoning worked in his own hand: a man who has run both tables for 665 himself will be believed
about the sixth of April.

## Fixed and open

**Fixed.** The calendar's public facts and the spine of the day of words carry the full weight of
history. **Colmán will not conform**: that is the man, like Hus's oath at Constance, and no
brilliance moves it. **Cedd interprets faithfully**; a plot that needs him to shade a rendering is a
plot against bedrock. Hild's sympathy is Iona's use and her house conforms, both fully. No one is
arrested or tried over the ruling, and no one unchurches the other side, the narrator included.

**Open.** Everything at the player's scale, and every room the record never reaches, which here is
nearly all of them. The week's temperature: whether the parties eat together by the second night,
how the sentence about the islands is answered, what Colmán and Oswiu say alone, and whether the
eclipse is read aloud in the church or whispered in the garth. The ledger's margins. The great: Hild
can come to trust a young servant with real things, Colmán to lean on an English brother's arm, Cedd
to take a helper at the language line, and Wilfrid, hardest and best, to notice a clerk as a person.
And the player's season's end: sail, stay, follow a party home, winter at the house, or ride toward
the plague.

**Optional seed: Cædmon.** Bede tells of an aging layman of this house who always left the feast
when the harp came near and was given English holy song in a dream, and of Hild having learned men
test the gift before she received him; he gives no date. Plant one broad back slipping out as the
harp comes round, and no more unless the table wants it. If it ripens, the gift is near the player,
never theirs; Hild's testing is the period's discernment of spirits done right; and his matter is
creation and sacred history, never either party's Easter.

**How large an invented person can grow.** Nearly every hand in the record is anonymous (*his
clerks*, *her people*, *the brothers who chose to remain*), and in so small a hall that anonymity
sits nearer the fire than at any council: an invented person can pour the king's cup, supply Cedd a
word, carry Colmán's last message, or hold the church door during the ruling. With sustained play:
the durable trust of one or two of the great, a parting the record never priced changed by a word,
and a place afterward, whether a stool in Wilfrid's household, a cell under Eata, a bench in Hild's
school, or a place in the boat and a name remembered at Mayo. The ceiling: the player never gives
Wilfrid's speech or Colmán's answer, never interprets the day of words in Cedd's place, and never
rules.

**Not doors.** The ruling's manner is open to ordinary play, and this scenario keeps its treasure
there: whether Wilfrid's wound festers or is dressed, whether the going is a rite or a rout, whether
Lindisfarne receives Eata with a generation's bitterness or with the start of the peace Cuthbert
will finish. The ledger holds all of it. The plague is weather: no act saves Cedd, Tuda, or Boisil,
though a player may change who is with them at the end and what the one boy at Lastingham remembers;
like weather, it can take a player who walks into it.

## The doors

Whitby's doors buy a delay and a different set of griefs, not a different Christendom: Rome's
gravity, Theodore's coming in 669, and Iona's own conformity in 716 lie beyond every one of them,
and a player who forces one should feel exactly that. Each door has a window, a gate, three
conditions, and a decisive act priced at 6, less one for each condition genuinely in place. Without
its gate, or outside its window, a door is shut; a partial success opens it partway, never the
whole.

- **The keys** (Conscience; the house's door). *Window:* from the gathering to the king's question;
  if the day of words breathes into two, the night between is its natural hour. *Gate:* slot 1 is
  **a**, since a king who rules on the keys can be turned only on the keys. *Conditions:* an answer
  from Scripture he could stand on, in Latin: the binding and loosing given to all the apostles
  (Matthew 18:18) and the Spirit breathed on all of them (John 20:22–23), so that Columba's fathers
  hold of Peter's gift, not against it; Colmán ready to give it when asked, persuaded beforehand by
  someone he trusts, since he will not claim for Columba what Columba never claimed; and the Roman
  bench not of one voice, through Agilbert's pride in the open (slot 4 **c** does this by chance) or
  Alhfrith's zeal seen by his father as a party rather than Peter's cause. The decisive act is
  asking Hild to carry it to the king alone, which means telling the mother of the house to her face
  that obedience after the ruling does not require silence before it. *Success:* the king will not
  condemn his teachers' Easter; the kingdom keeps the latercus, and the queen her use by his leave.
  Alhfrith takes it as slot 3 says, Wilfrid goes south, and the tables agree in 665 anyway; the
  question returns within a generation. *Partial:* the king rules for Rome on the world's custom
  rather than the keys, naming Columba's holiness in the ruling, and every parting after is gentler.
- **The waiting year** (Learning; Sigewine's door). *Window:* from the gathering to the ruling.
  *Gate:* the offer meets the need slot 1 names: under **a**, a reference to Peter's own see, so the
  doorkeeper answers by letter; under **b**, a reference to Canterbury, so the south sees it done in
  order; under **c**, the coincidence itself, since next Easter the household feasts together
  whatever is ruled. Under **d** or **e** the door is shut: Alhfrith will not wait, and a weary man
  wants an end, not a pause. *Conditions:* the Easter of 665 reckoned by both tables to one Sunday,
  in a form both computists will own; Hild or Cedd willing to bring it before the king; and someone
  on the Roman bench willing to wait, Agilbert, half gone already, or James, who has waited forty
  years. The decisive act is making the moons plain to a king with thin Latin in the hour before he
  means to rule. *Success:* the king adjourns and writes (under **b**, Canterbury has not answered
  when Deusdedit dies in July). Colmán keeps the see through the plague autumn, the Easter of 665 is
  kept as one, and the question comes back with Wilfrid's patience spent and Alhfrith angrier.
  *Partial:* the king rules for Rome but defers it to the next Easter, and the partings come in the
  plague autumn.
- **The victor's mercy** (Rhetoric; Cuthwine's door). The king has kept a second Easter under his
  own roof for twenty years, and could keep one at Lindisfarne. *Window:* from the ruling to
  Colmán's going. *Gate:* slot 1 is **c** or **e**: what the king needed was his household mended,
  which the ruling has done, or an end without another grief. *Conditions:* Colmán willing to stay
  as abbot of the brothers who will not conform, without the see and without conforming; Hild or
  Cedd behind it with the king; and Alhfrith quiet, away from his father's side or bought off at the
  price slot 3 names. The decisive act is persuading Wilfrid, in the hour of his victory, to ask the
  king for it himself, since only the victor can ask mercy without it sounding like a plea.
  Gregory's counsel to Augustine's mission, to hallow the old temples rather than pull them down, is
  the Roman argument for it, and Aidan's milk before meat the Irish one. *Success:* Tuda has the
  see, and Colmán keeps Lindisfarne's unconforming brothers as a house apart under Iona's Easter,
  for his life or the king's. Aidan's bones stay whole, and there is no Inishbofin and no Mayo; the
  question returns when Theodore comes in 669 or Oswiu dies in 670. *Partial:* Colmán still goes,
  but the English who stay keep their tonsure and their fathers' Easter until Eata teaches them
  otherwise, so fewer go, and none in anger.

A player may work more than one door, and any door is open to anyone with the stat to reach it.

## The coda

The record is the year's annal, written in the margin of an Easter table beside 664: the house's new
Roman table, Ripon's, or the chronicle kept on Iona, wherever the player went. The reader: a clerk of
Theodore's after 669, asking the house how the north received it; an elder of Iona, or Eata's
novices, asking Sigewine what was said in the hall; a young monk of Ripon, years on, gathering
memories of Wilfrid from Cuthwine.

## Save state

`Scenario state` fields, from the first supper:

- **heard**: what the player heard in the tongue it was spoken, what came through a rendering and
  whose, and any reckoning worked in their own hand. This is provenance here.
- **renderings**: each time the player carried speech across the language line, which way they
  bent it, and who noticed.
- **temper**: who eats together, how the sentence about the islands was answered, whether Wilfrid's
  wound festers.
- **doors**: for each door worked, which conditions are genuinely in place.

From the ruling, **boat**: who goes north and who still wavers. From the going, **eclipse**: each
reading as first spoken. From summer, **plague**: how near it is to the player; and **season's end**:
where the player is bound.

## Pre-commitment

**1 — The king's inner weather.** What carries the ruling this run. Never state it; let it color
every scene with Oswiu, and keep Bede's reading, a king persuaded in conscience, possible whichever
you fix. It gates the doors.
a. Fear of God, plainly: the keys are the keys.
b. Love of order, with the southern kingdoms watching.
c. The queen's long grief at keeping her feast alone.
d. Alhfrith's pressure, and what refusing it would cost.
e. Weariness: twenty years of the quarrel, and he wants an end.

**2 — Whether Eanflæd comes.** Unattested either way; her presence rearranges every seating in the
house.
a. She comes to see it done, and is seen to be composed.
b. She comes and does not speak in the hall at all, which is louder.
c. She stays away, and three parties read her absence three ways.

**3 — What Alhfrith wants beyond the ruling,** and so how near the breach with his father stands.
a. Wilfrid's advancement and nothing subtler; the breach is years off.
b. A party of his own, founded here; the breach is months off.
c. The succession, against Ecgfrith, which no one says aloud, including him; the breach is already
in him.

**4 — Agilbert's pride** at handing his own argument to his pupil.
a. He yields it gladly: the boy has the English, and that is that.
b. It galls him, hidden well enough that only the player might notice.
c. It galls him, hidden badly, and Wilfrid knows.

**5 — Tuda.** The record does not put him in the hall.
a. Not present; he arrives into the aftermath.
b. Present, at the king's shoulder.
c. Present, at Colmán's, which costs him later.

**6 — The first rumor of the pestilence.** The plague stays offstage until summer, but its shadow is
timed.
a. Before the synod, from a trader, badly wrong and half dismissed.
b. During the day of words, into the guest-houses, while the hall argues about Easter.
c. At the going, so the partings happen under it.

**7 — Nearest the boat.** Absent anyone's act, which waverer goes north with Colmán; the others
stay, grieving.
a. Tidwulf, following the half of Aidan that goes.
b. Dægberht, and Hild gives him leave.
c. Wulfhard, who will not keep a Roman Easter even under Eata.
d. None of them. All three stay, and Tidwulf's staying curdles.

**8 — The guest-houses' ear.** Nearly everyone tells the abbess everything, and she never says so;
this slot is who else carries the parties' talk, and to whom.
a. The cellaress's nephew, a lay boy with some Irish, for Alhfrith's steward and a little silver.
b. Romanus's servant, whose Irish is worse than he thinks, listening for the queen; what he carries
is wrong in one particular, fixed when it first matters.
c. No one. The house leaks only to its mother, and suspecting a friend costs the player that friend.

## Tone notes

- **No villains, and no shrug.** Colmán, Wilfrid, and the king each do their conscientious best, and
  something true is at stake. The grief of Whitby is gentler than the horror of Constance and no
  less permanent: two holy traditions meet in one hall, only one walks out with the future, and no
  one sins to make it so.
- **Love what leaves.** Don't flatten the Irish party into history's losers. Their sanctity and
  learning are real and their mission made the north, and Bede, a Roman partisan who loved them, is
  the model voice. Wilfrid's sentence about the islands should land as a wound the fiction feels,
  including on people who are not in the room.
- **Small and seen.** The headland is the inverse of Constance: no crowd to vanish into, every
  absence noticed, every raised voice heard at the high table.
- **Portents are read in every direction** by the period and in none by the narrator. The plague
  takes Tuda of the Roman use and Cedd of the Irish formation in the same season; let the characters
  keep their theologies of it.