The Tavern

Why it's a room

Logging in puts you at /table. It looks like a tavern because a dashboard has nothing to offer you on a night when you have no game booked, and a room does: a fire somebody else has been keeping up, a board with tonight's notices, and occasionally other people.

Everything below is a section of that one page.

Every door in that last row goes somewhere that exists. That's a rule — a door onto a page that isn't built teaches people that doors here don't open.

Presence is where your attention is

Everyone in the tavern is somewhere, and where they are says what they're doing. It is not a movement system: your location is set as a side effect of doing something — sitting down, leaning on the counter, opening a game — and never from what you've scrolled past.

The default is in the room: through the door, reading the board, not settled anywhere. That matters more than it sounds. When the fire was the fallback, "who's at the hearth" secretly meant "who's online" and there was no way to leave. So a seat is something you take: Pull up a chair, and Get up when you're done. Getting up puts you back in the room; nobody is logged out by standing up.

Your own panel at the top shows your face, your purse and where you are — and it's the only place a balance is drawn, so it can't disagree with itself.

Posture: available, quiet, dozing

• Dozing happens on its own if you haven't said or done anything for about twenty-five minutes. It's cosmetic, and it gates nothing at all — not chat, not reading, not coppers. Any keystroke wakes you. The only cost of nodding off is that other people can see you nodded off.
• A drink lifts dozing. That's the mechanic, and it's why drinks exist.
• Quiet is you pressing Leave me be. It expires by itself after a couple of hours, because a permanent do-not-disturb is a thing people set once and forget, and then look permanently unavailable — the exact problem it was meant to solve.

Quiet is not invisibility. You're still listed, still counted, still in your chair, just not up for talking. And a drink does not clear it. That asymmetry comes from one rule that settles every hard case in this room: coppers must never buy access to a person. Dozing is involuntary, so a drink lifting it is the room saying "stay a bit". Quiet is a decision, and nothing in the economy overrules a decision.

If you want to be genuinely absent, that's the privacy setting on your profile. Quiet exists so fewer people reach for it.

The fire

The only shared object in the building. Everything else at the hearth is yours — your drink, your chair, your coppers. The fire is the one thing where a stranger's action changes what you see.

Its level is worked out fresh every time anyone looks, from two numbers: how many people are about, and how many logs are still burning. Nothing ticks it down; a log stops counting after about three quarters of an hour and the fire drops on its own. People raise it, but only so far — logs go further, far enough that someone alone in the tavern can reach the top on wood alone.

Add a log costs two coppers, cheaper than a coffee, because it's the one thing you can buy here that does nothing for you at all. It's for whoever comes in next. Arrive at 3am to a dying fire, throw a log on, and the next person walks into a warm room.

It never goes out. There's an embers floor, nothing notifies you that it's low, and a log is only ever refused because the fire is already as high as it goes. Decay should read as the hour, never as neglect.

Small mercies

• The door. Coming back after four hours or more counts as arriving, and the room says so — but only once you've been in a few times. The first couple of visits nobody looks up.
• The weather comes from the date and is the same for everybody that day, so "filthy out there" is worth saying. The light through the shutters is your own clock.
• Sound is off by default; the toggle is the speaker in the header and it's remembered. The fire crackles louder as you scroll towards it, rain taps the window, the door goes when you walk in.