The Handbook

A printed manual is a promise that the thing it describes will not change.

The cover of the interval handbook: the word INTERVAL, A HANDBOOK beneath it, and the world's id.

Every game used to come with one, and the promise was always a little false: a patch shipped and the book on the shelf quietly became wrong. Here it can be kept. The rules were fixed when the world was founded and cannot be altered, by anyone, so a copy of this book describes a world that cannot move under it. Not this year, not ever.

It says what the world is made of: the nine crafts, the seventeen trades you can swear to, why nothing outside your own trade passes seventy, what a pack holds, what a shield costs, what lives here. It does not say what to do, where anything is, or how to get rich. Those are not rules, so they are not in it.

The last page carries the founding hash, and the first has a line for your citizen's name.

PRINT THE HANDBOOK
52 pages · A5 · free, like everything here

How to print it

It is imposed for saddle stitching, which is why the pages look shuffled on screen. That is not a trick to stop you reading it there; it is simply what a booklet is, and the sheets only make sense folded.

  1. Print it on A4, double sided, landscape, flipping on the short edge.
  2. Fold the whole stack in half.
  3. Two staples in the crease.

If your printer cannot do double sided, print the odd sheets first, put them back in, and print the even ones.

Nothing in it can go out of date, because nothing in it can be changed. It is generated from the rules themselves rather than written beside them, so every number in the book is the number the world uses. If you ever weigh the rules and get a different name than the one on the last page, you are somewhere else.

While the window downloads

That is what it is for, really. Get the window going, and read this in the meantime. It is the car ride home from the shop, given back.