STILLPOINT

Chapter One

Running STILLPOINT

You are the Tickwarden. You play the frozen world and everything paused within it; you describe what the Quick see, hear, and disturb; and you decide, fairly and swiftly, what happens when they act. You are not the players' adversary. You are the honest, curious referee of a world that is beautiful, deadly, and indifferent.

The four pillarsThe Old-School Way

Your signature dialThe Stillpoint Economy (★)

The named heart of this game is the Stillpoint — the moment the frozen world turns its attention on the Quick. Mechanically, it is your currency of menace. Keep a small pile of tokens (coins, glass beads) where the players can see it grow.

Always narrate the spend. The players should feel the world noticing them: a single frozen eye turning, a far-off bell beginning, impossibly slowly, to ring. The ★ pile is a pressure gauge they can read — and dread.

Chapter Two

The True History of the Stilling

No one among the Quick knows why time stopped. You do — or rather, you choose the truth that will give your campaign its spine. Below are the rumors the Quick whisper, and then three secret truths. Pick one, blend them, or invent your own. Whatever you choose, reveal it slowly, in fragments, as a reward for deep delving.

What the living believeThe Rumors of the Stilling — d10

Choose oneThe Three Secret Truths

I. The Held Breath

The world is the dream of a sleeping titan — the Stillborn the Quick find half-buried in the Pleating. It did not die; it gasped, and held the breath, and time is the rhythm of its breathing. To restart time, the Quick must make it exhale — which may wake it, and end the world a second way. The Wellsprings are wounds in its skin where its slow blood (live time) still seeps. Campaign spine: should the world be woken, even at the price of the dreamer?

II. The Cut Mainspring

Beneath the Gasp lies the Great Horologe, a machine the size of a city that kept the world's time. Someone — a faction, a fool, a saboteur whose frozen hand still grips the lever — cut its mainspring at the instant of catastrophe. The Stilling is mechanical, and it can be fixed. But the Mainspring is also the only thing holding back the disaster the Gasp was frozen mid-escaping. Campaign spine: a dungeon-crawl race to repair time before a rival faction weaponizes it.

III. The Mercy

Time was stopped on purpose, by the Wellspring Guardians, to halt an extinction already underway — a plague, an invasion, a falling star. Every frozen person was a heartbeat from death. The Stilling is not a catastrophe; it is a tourniquet. To restart time is to let the dying finish dying. The Hushed know this, which is why they fight to keep the world asleep. Campaign spine: the horror that the merciful thing and the right thing may not be the same.

Chapter Three

The Tableau: A Gazetteer

The Tableau is the known portion of the frozen world — perhaps a hundred miles of coast, city, and shattered mountain, all caught in one instant. Here are its great places. Use the map opposite; stock the blank spaces with the tables in Chapter Eight.

Candlemarch, the Quickhold

The greatest refuge of the Quick: a vertical shanty-city built inside the shell of a colossal cathedral frozen mid-collapse, its falling roof-stones hanging forever overhead like a held rockfall. Candlemarch sits in a rare TRUE-Tempo pocket — here time runs, fires warm, children age. Rope-bridges and scaffold-streets climb its frozen pillars. It is ruled, loosely, by the Hour-Council and defended by the Marchwardens. Everything the Quick need is sold here, and everything they fear is rumored here first. Use it as your home base: a place to bank Grains, buy dropglasses, hear rumors, and recover.

The Gasp

The capital that was, frozen at the precise instant of its catastrophe: a wall of white fire and a shockwave hang motionless over toppling towers and crowds caught mid-flight. The Gasp is the Tableau's greatest treasure-house and its greatest grave. Its Tempo is TUMULT — unstable, prone to RUSH thaws that finish the catastrophe in a heartbeat. Beneath it (the Cut Mainspring truth) lies the Great Horologe. Delvers who enter the Gasp do not all come back, and those who do come back changed.

The Pleating

A mountain range caught mid-avalanche: billions of tons of rock and snow frozen in a towering, motionless wave. Travelers thread the suspended debris-field beneath it, where a single greedy Pluck or loud Working can begin the slide. Deep within sleeps the Stillborn (the Held Breath truth) — a titan whose slow amber heartbeat can be felt through the stone, growing stronger the closer you come.

Wellsprings & the Lurchlands

Wellsprings are the holy grail of the Quick: hidden grottoes where live time still flows as glowing amber water — the only moving water in the world. To bathe in one is to be made whole: full Quick, no Hush, healed wounds. They are rare, often guarded by a Wellspring Guardian, and every faction wants them. The Lurchlands are the badlands between — regions of DRAG and half-Thaw where the Lurching roam, neither Still nor Quick, hungry for the warmth of the living.

Chapter Four

Factions & Powers

The Quick are few, and they cannot afford to be alone. Five powers contend over the frozen world. Each wants something from the party; each can offer aid or become an enemy. Track their regard with a simple Standing die (d6, 1 = sworn enemy, 6 = sworn ally).

Chapter Five

The Tickwarden's Tools

This chapter is your toolbox: how to run Tempo at the table, how to spring a Thaw, how to turn the Hush against the party, and the dice you roll behind the screen.

Running the clockTempo in Play

Assign every region and room a Tempo (Player's Guide, Ch.9). You may keep it secret and let the party read it through clues — a flickering of a frozen flame (DRAG warming toward TRUE), dust beginning to drift (RUSH), a wrongness in the air (TUMULT). Shift Tempo with ★ or with the Thaw clock below.

The Thaw Clock

For any scene that can wake, draw a 4-segment clock. Fill a segment when the party: makes a loud noise, fails a greedy Pluck, casts a clumsy Working, spends too long, or when you spend ★. When the clock fills, the scene Thaws: roll on the table, then run it as live, moving, often-lethal time. Telegraph every tick.

The Backlash Table (full)

When a Horologist's Working rolls a Backlash (a 1 on the d6), roll again here:

Dice behind the screenReactions, Morale & Encounters

Wandering Encounters (check 1-in-6 each watch; roll d10)

Chapter Six

A Bestiary of the Still

The frozen world is not empty. Some things were half-woken by the Stilling; some feed on the warmth of the Quick; some were made to keep the silence. Each stat block lists Guard (the TN penalty for hitting it), Grit, Attack Value (its TN to hit a Quick, before their Guard), damage and type, Morale, and a Threat rating for Grains.

The most common threat of the Lurchlands: people the Stilling caught imperfectly, frozen and thawed a thousand times until something broke. They feel the warmth of the Quick like a fire in a dark room and shamble, jerk, and stutter toward it. They are not evil. They are cold, and they remember being warm. Use them in packs to pressure the party's Hush, not their Grit.

Not a monster to be killed but a weather to be survived — the freeze itself, gathered into a shape of fog and absence. It does not chase so much as arrive, draining color and sound as it comes. The only victory against the Hush is to be elsewhere, warm, and moving. Save it for the campaign's darkest hours; one appearance should be remembered for years.

When a person dies in the frozen world, their final instant sometimes refuses to end, smearing into a translucent loop of a single repeated motion. Echo-wraiths are dangerous but tragic, and the cleverest parties defeat them not with blades but with understanding — solving the puzzle of what they died wanting.

Lean predators whose bodies are a patchwork of frozen sinew and ticking clockwork, Tickhounds hunt the one thing the frozen world is starving for: live time. A party heavy with dropglasses is a ringing dinner bell. They are cowards in ones, terrors in packs.

The campaign's great question made flesh (the Held Breath truth). Treat it not as an enemy but as a place, a force, and a choice. To stand in its presence is to feel the world's held breath in your own chest.

A cautionary tale that walks: a Quick who packed themselves in warding salt to escape the Hush forever, and paid by losing all warmth, all softness, all hope of the Wellsprings. Pitiable, treacherous, and a tempting source of dropglasses for a ruthless party.

Tall, faceless constructs of brass and frozen marble, the Regulators were made (by whom, no one knows) to keep the Stilling undisturbed. They are not evil, not even truly alive — they are a rule given legs. The surest way to survive one is to give it no reason to wake. The surest way to die is to take what the frozen world is keeping.

The nearest thing to a deity the Quick will ever meet, and your best instrument for doling out the campaign's truths. A Guardian rarely fights; it judges. Treat encounters as social and moral set pieces, and let the Wellspring's blessing be a reward the party must earn, not merely find.

Chapter Seven

Treasure, Wonders & Relics

The frozen world is the richest treasure-house ever imagined — and most of its riches are worthless. Gold buys bread, nothing more. What the Quick truly hunt is time: dropglasses, Wellsprings, and the rare Wonders of the world that was.

The real hoardTime as Treasure

When stocking a delve, think in Ticks, not coins. A frozen wine-cellar might hold a thousand bottles (worthless) and one dusty dropglass (priceless). Reward exploration with Ticks banked for Grains, and reward cleverness with Wonders.

Relics of the world that wasWonders — d10

Chapter Eight

The Great Tables

Prep less; roll more. These tables build your world at the table — frozen scenes to plunder, places that have begun to thaw, the people of the Quick, the rumors that send heroes into the cold, and what the Hush does to those it is slowly taking.

Instant dungeonsThe Frozen Scene Generator

Roll once on each column to conjure a paused place worth delving. The frozen instant is your dungeon; the Tempo is your clock.

People of the QuickNPC Generator

HooksRumors of the Tableau — d12

The slow coldMarks of the Hush — d10

When a Quick reaches Hush 6 (the Stiffening) and at each point thereafter, roll or choose a sign of the cold taking hold — a roleplaying cue, and a clock the whole table can see.

Chapter Nine · A Starter Adventure

Under the Standing Wave

A complete first delve for 3–5 Quick of 1st level. The drowned district of Lowmere lies frozen beneath a tidal wave caught mid-crash — and the wave has begun, ever so slowly, to fall. Somewhere in its glassy shadow glows a Wellspring. The party has perhaps a day before the ocean finishes what it started.

The Hook

In Candlemarch, an old Picker named Holt Saltfingers is dying of the Stiffening (Hush 8 and climbing). He has a map to a Wellspring in Lowmere, the drowned district — but he's too far gone to reach it. He'll trade the map for a promise, and gives the party an empty Wellspring-flask so they can bring the cure to him: fill the flask at the Wellspring and bathe his brow to break the Stiffening, or, failing that, carry his daughter Vesha — Stilled at the district's edge — out before the wave falls. (Hardier parties may instead haul Holt down on a litter to bathe him at the source — far riskier, and it fills the clock faster while he slows them.) Either way, the clock is running.

The Approach

Lowmere is reached by a frozen sea-stair down into the wave's shadow. The light here is green-grey and underwater, though no water moves — yet. Fish hang in the air. A gull is frozen mid-dive. The whole district is STILL Tempo, for now.

Keyed Locations

The Three Endings (and there are more)

• Mercy: they bathe Holt or wake Vesha and escape before the wave falls. Holt's line endures. Modest treasure, great Grains, a friend in Candlemarch.
• Greed: they strip Lowmere of every dropglass and Wonder and run. Rich — but the clock likely catches someone, and a Regulator now knows their faces.
• Disaster: they linger too long, the wave falls, and the survivors crawl out with whatever — and whoever — they could carry. The Tableau's most honest ending.

However it ends, the party leaves knowing the first truth of the frozen world in their bones: you cannot save everything. Choose, and keep moving.

Behind the screenTickwarden's Quick Reference

Threat → Grains (per foe defeated, when fighting was the right call)

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You hold the clock now, Tickwarden. Wind it slowly. Let them feel each tick. And when at last the world begins to move — be ready, for the wave has been falling all along. — inscription within the Tickwarden's case