Free Archetype is on.
Build at level 5 with the campaign’s established ancestry boundaries and ordinary PF2E progression.
Front matter
High stakes, high trust.
This campaign can be merciless to characters only because it is scrupulous with players. Those are two different things and they are kept apart deliberately.
Pathfinder 2e RemasterStarting at level 5Lethal, fair, consequential
Why this page exists
Before the world, this.
The chapters that follow include an industry that turns people into working parts, a contract that is a death sentence written as an insurance policy, and an opening in which four characters wake up somewhere they did not agree to be.
That is the material. None of it is a surprise, none of it is a twist, and none of it obliges anybody to sit through a depiction they did not agree to. Lethality is not a substitute for consent, and safety tools do not lower the stakes — they are what makes it possible to go after stakes like these together.
Build and advancement
Build the whole level-five character.
The opening takes your equipment from the fiction, not from your character sheet. Record the complete loadout now so recovering it can matter in play.
Automatic Bonus Progression is off.
Choose normal level-five equipment and fundamental runes. Your gear begins play seized; it has not ceased to exist, and it should remain on the sheet.
Advancement is milestone.
The party advances together after completed campaign turns and major objectives. Discovery, politics, survival, and combat count equally; there is no XP tally to chase.
What the GM commits to
Eight promises, kept in public.
- Rolls are honest. Enemy hit points, checks, and damage are not quietly changed to force an outcome.
- Exceptional danger is signalled before it lands. At least one warning will be obvious. Another may reward investigation.
- Adversaries play from what they know. They act on their own goals, morale, and feelings — not on a reading of your character sheet.
- Retreat, surrender, negotiation, rescue, and failing forward are all real. Whenever the fiction supports them, they are on the table.
- You will be told when a choice could kill you. If the risk would be obvious to your character, it will be obvious to you.
- Death and dying are resolved exactly. Hero Points are awarded by the rules. A lethal campaign does not get to quietly remove the game’s own recovery.
- Captivity, restraint, forced labour, and memory alteration are session-zero topics. Being in the premise does not waive anybody’s limits on how it is depicted.
- A safety signal stops play immediately. No debate, no explanation asked for.
What the table asks of you
Seven in return.
- Build someone who will work with the party and engage with danger. The campaign cannot be fair to a character who refuses to be in it.
- Treat warnings as information. A warning is not evidence that the GM will rescue you afterwards.
- Know your own sheet. Your actions, reactions, and core features. That is the whole ask.
- Share what you know and carry a plan for getting people back up. Tactics are a group activity in this system.
- Accept that a legal, informed choice can end a character’s story. That is the trade that makes the stakes real.
- Keep conflict between characters separate from conflict between players. The first is fun. The second is a different conversation, held elsewhere.
- Your character’s past is yours. You may invite a deeper twist. You never have to accept one, and you can withdraw the invitation later.
Tools
Complete these together, in session zero.
A boundary can change at any time, including in the middle of a scene, including after you have already agreed to something.
Lines
Content that does not appear at all. No negotiation, no justification required.
Veils
Content that may exist in the fiction but is never described on screen. We cut away and pick up after.
Pause and rewind
Say “pause”, post X in chat, or use the agreed signal in Foundry. Play stops. We back up as far as needed.
Open door
Anyone can step away from the table without permission and without explaining afterwards.
Debrief
Every session ends with one highlight and one thing to adjust. It takes four minutes and it is worth them.
Your own history
The missing span covers capture and transport only. Nothing earlier can be written for you without your agreement, and you can revoke that agreement after it has already come up in play.
On this folio
What the site will not do.
Everything published here is safe for players. A plate may contain an honest, ambiguous detail that matters later, but it never supplies the GM-only interpretation or reveals why that detail matters. If a page withholds something, it says so on its face.
The chapters will grow as the campaign proves things. Corrections will be marked as corrections. When common knowledge turns out to be wrong, the old entry stays visible with the amendment beside it, because that is how a record works and because you should be able to see what your characters believed at the time.
The folio has no accounts, analytics, or server-side character storage. A Statement of Particulars draft stays in your browser; its private link keeps the answers after the # so they are not sent to the host. The hosting service may set a short-lived anti-abuse cookie.