Stress, reputation, oaths: the systems behind the prose

Prose will absorb anything. It will tell you the meditation calmed you while your hands keep shaking; it will award you credibility a gauge has no room for; it will call a promise betrayed when the person you made it to has been gone for eight chapters. Numbers won't. That's the entire reason the numbers exist.

This is a tour of the three systems players ask about most — and, in each case, the playtest failure that gave the system its current shape. Because none of this was designed in the abstract. It was designed against specific lies the prose told us.

Oaths: promises with paperwork

Swear something to a character in Unwritten — or accept their word to you; oaths run in both directions — and it stops being a nice sentence. It becomes a record: who holds your promise, what exactly was said, when it falls due, and what hangs on each side of it. Keeping it can earn the creditor's lasting regard, public reputation, sometimes a sharpened skill. Breaking it prices all three in the other direction — and the world's opinion travels.

An oath leaves the ledger in one of three ways, and the third is the one we're proudest of:

• Kept or broken by events. The story resolves it, the engine settles the account.
• Broken by deadline. A promise with a term expires when the act it was due in closes — deterministically, whether or not the narrator remembered. Deadlines are not vibes.
• Lapsed. The honest third state, added after a playtest: our tester swore to watch a man named Ordway — and then the shipwreck rewrote everything, Ordway vanished from the story, and the oath sat there, zombie-like, impossible to keep or break. Calling that a betrayal would have been the stat lying. So a promise whose creditor has genuinely passed out of the story now quietly dissolves: a small, private mark against your name for a word left unkept — and no drama, because the person it was owed to isn't there to be wounded by it.

Below the formal ledger there's a second, lighter tier. Not everything you say deserves a deadline — but a small assurance made in passing is still attached to the memory of the character who heard it, and resurfaces in how they treat you. Big promises get bookkeeping. Small ones get remembered.

Reputation: a number that refuses to flatter you

Reputation runs 0–100 and starts at 50, which means unknown — and unknown costs you nothing, a deliberate asymmetry we covered in the dice piece: renown helps, disgrace hurts, anonymity is simply neutral ground.

Two disciplines keep it honest. Single events can only move it so far — no one act of theatre makes you a legend by dinner. And the number you're shown is the change that actually happened: an early build once announced "+8 credibility" to a player whose gauge was already full. Gain: zero. Toast: triumphant. A stat that lies is worse than no stat at all, so now the display reads from the ledger, not from the intention.

Alongside the public number, every significant character keeps a private one — a relationship score with real bands, from hostile to allied, each band carrying obligations for how that character is allowed to behave toward you on the page. The standing rule given to the narrator: never write a character warmer than their score. A thaw is earned by events, never by default. Charm in the prose doesn't move the number; the number disciplines the prose.

Stress: the gauge that finally listened

Health measures what the world did to your body. Stress measures what it did to everything else — it climbs through danger, shock and ugly victories, and it changes how your character reads the world around them.

Its playtest lesson was the quietest of the three. Originally, stress only moved through dice and combat — mechanical causes, mechanical effects. Then we watched players do the obviously human thing: take a quiet turn to breathe. "I sit by the fire and let my hands stop shaking." The prose obliged, warmly. The number didn't move. The narration said respite; the state said nothing happened — the exact gap between story and truth this whole engine exists to close. Now deliberate rest is real: calm is something you can choose to spend a turn earning, and the gauge listens.

One asymmetry survived on purpose, from the same design conversation as the dice: harm scales with the risk you accepted, but relief doesn't scale at all. Rest is rest, whatever you were attempting when you earned it.

Why bother, in one paragraph

None of this shows up as a feature you can screenshot. It shows up as trust, forty turns in: the companion whose regard you earned behaves like it, the promise you dodged finds you at a locked door, and the quiet night by the fire genuinely helped. The full picture of what's tracked — health, skills, rank, companions, the moral ledger — is in the complete guide. The short version is the house rule that runs through everything we build: the story reports the world. It doesn't get to decide it.