The Sortis Vellum

Draw a card. Do what it says. The deck — not you — decides what the world does next. You are the explorer who records it. Work a little or a lot in a sitting; the world keeps its own time.

Reading a card

Travel & the current panel

You hold a current panel and keep working it until the world moves you on. Every draw flips a Travel toss — Stay and you keep working where you are; Travel and you move Steps panels in the ink's direction, landing on a new current panel automatically. Foundation cards always take you to fresh ground. Tune the odds with the slider in the Atlas (starts 50/50) — lower it to develop panels more deeply before moving on.

The categories

• Foundation Births a new panel — ruins, drowned land, scarred earth, wilds. Always takes you to that new ground.
• Terrain Shapes the current panel — water, forest, farmland, stone, waste. These roll Sectors.
• Develop Builds settlements, roads, and monuments. Settlements rise through population tiers; these age the world.
• Art Adds to the panel by hand — collage, personal photos, found text, inverted or black-and-white imagery, or a chosen subject. Image, not infrastructure.
• Discovery Unearths tomes and relics from the old world, feeding the Lore Book.
• Hero Births, activates, and falls heroes (and villains). Needs a panel to be born on.
• Event Something befalls the current panel — resolved with the living heroes there.
• Lore Stops the action so you can write: journal entries, history, legends, myths, tragedies, religions, otherworldly events, and new canon (which collects in the Tome).
• Meta Rewrites the deck itself — retire, edit, or forge cards.
• Force Cataclysm. Offstage for now; add it when you're ready.

The traits

• advance Completing the card pushes the World Age +1 year. Building takes time.
• lore Prompts a Lore Book entry — name it here, write it in your vault.
• roll Calls for a die (a d10 for hero alignment and event outcomes).
• meta Tells you to change the deck.
• sectors Creates space — rolls an area between the card's own min and max.

Population

Settlements begin as a Camp (400) and climb — Holdfast 800, Reach 1200, Bastion 2400 — when Develop cards grow them. Grow a settlement from the Atlas (or the Grow a settlement capture on a Develop card).

When the world is empty

Heroes, events, terrain, and lore need somewhere to happen, so until you've forged your first panel only Foundation (and Meta) cards will surface. Forge the origin panel in the Atlas, and the rest of the deck opens up.

The daily loop

1. Draw a card. Note the Travel toss and any Sectors roll.
2. Resolve — roll the d10 if asked, then fill the capture fields (the coordinate defaults to your current panel).
3. Do the work on the panel — Steps tell you where, Sectors tell you how much.
4. Build the note → Copy, and paste it into your vault.
5. Complete & log. Captured records also commit to your Atlas. Draw again, or stop for the day.

Capture for the vault

Every draw can emit a ready-to-paste Markdown note with [[links]] and #tags filled in, the coordinate pre-set to your current panel. Capturing a Panel, Place, or Hero also writes it into your Atlas. Lore auto-names Yr{year}{coord}-{n}, where n runs as one running timeline across the whole year, so the world's history reads in order and links out to each panel.

The deck is alive

Meta cards retire, rewrite, and forge new cards — New Law even hands you a randomly-assigned kind, steps, and ink, and asks you to name the law. Nothing is lost: retired cards wait in Retired, ready to return. Over the years the deck drifts away from the one you started with, and you won't have decided that on purpose. That drift is the point.