Glossary

The Reach's vocabulary, in one place — the world and its light, the crowns that feud over it, the map they feud across, and the words a Tactician needs at the muster table and on the field.

The world & its light

Term	Meaning
The Reach	The fading continent. Once fertile, it now goes grey from the interior outward, a little more each Age. Its crowns feud over the light that remains.
Glim	The luminous essence that keeps a kingdom's fields alive — cold to the hand, throwing no shadow. Spent, it holds warmth and growth in the soil; drawn from a Well, it is the prize of every march and the price of every promotion. There is less of it every season.
The Well	A pooling of Glim in the deep wild — the destination of every march and the thing every other crown wants too. The richest lie past the treeline, guarded by things that were never people. Stripped wells never refill.
The grey wild / the wild	The dead land between the seats: monster-haunted, treeline-less, reclaiming a little more ground each Age. Where Glim runs out, the wild takes over.
The treeline	The soft border past which no voice, no scrying, and no runner reaches. Beyond it a squad has only its written orders.
The fading / the decline	The world running down, one failed harvest at a time. It is published — everyone watches the same total fall. Skill decides whose fields fail first, never whether they fail.
Age	The great cycle of the Reach. Each Age the wild takes the land between the seats and the renewal gives it back; the seats themselves never go dark. Lanternhold has held through six.
Season	One stage of an Age's decline, and the clock the crowns race against — the world-total Glim falls the whole while.
The powder age	The era now dawning: the Reach's first crude blackpowder loose in the world. A mood in the smoke and a line on a ledger, not yet a weapon in any hand you field.
Blackpowder / powder	Milled from saltpeter scraped out of spent wells — profane, cheap, and spreading. It ends a swordsman a mender might have saved, and does nothing to a well-thing that steel hasn't already failed to do. Cindral sells it by the sealed sack.
Saltpeter	The raw stuff of powder, dug from dead wells. Cindral buys it and iron both, tightening the iron rate from the demand side.

The crowns & factions

Term	Meaning
Crown	A kingdom of the Reach and the seat it rules from. Crowns are permanent — geography, not opponents assigned. A border feud can be older than any one season of it.
Lanternhold	Your hold — the player's crown. It marches on bronze, staves, and hedge-craft; the powder age is happening to it, not yet in its hands.
Sarn	The militarist crown. Treats squads as ammunition and iron as food; runs a war economy that devours the iron rate. Seated at Kargstead.
Colthe	The mercantile crown. Buys the best steel and the best doctrine, and keeps factors who move the rates on purpose. Seated at Bray Colthe.
Cindral	The powder crown, newly seated. Mines saltpeter from dead wells, mills the Reach's first blackpowder, and hires out firelock companies to whoever meets the price. Grey by trade, not cruelty: reasonable, and would rather you lived to keep buying. Seated at Cindral Mills.
Greywatch	Your oldest border feud — a neighbor seat, not one of the three great crowns. Its Tactician, Osei, writes a patient, mender-heavy line and never commits before the third turn.
The Countinghouse	The institution that posts the Reach's rates — the shared price board of the continent. It won't print a rate for powder; that one is too new and too apt to go off in a warehouse.
Factors	The traders who work the roads between seats. No crown deals with another; every crown deals with the factors, and the factors deal with everyone.
The Reach's rates	One published price each for grain, timber, and iron, the same from any coast, moved by every crown's trade and no one's alone. The second number everyone watches fall or rise, beside the Glim.

The map & its places

Term	Meaning
Seat	A crown's permanent place on the world map — a point of light the dark has never swallowed. Seats never fight; the land fails and renews around them.
Hold / Holdfast	Your city — the seat you rule from between marches.
The world map	The board of marches: seats you cannot attack and Wells, Ruins, and Camps you can. Each site posts its distance and what taking it pays.
Well (site)	A drawable source of Glim. Won and held, it pays weekly income and Glim; the water is usually already claimed by monsters or a rival squad.
Ruin (site)	An old place cleared once for a lump of loot, not held for income.
Camp (site)	A bandit or raider nest — cleared and then held like a Well for its weekly take.
Kargstead of Sarn	Sarn's seat. Its Marches are forever mobilizing.
Bray Colthe	Colthe's seat, where the best steel and doctrine are bought and the factors move the rates.
Cindral Mills	Cindral's seat: saltpeter out of dead wells, powder out of the mills, firelock companies for hire.
The Embermere Well	A shallow Well held by well-poachers who screen their heavy the way a squad screens its mender.
The Fordwell	A Well held by a mixed bandit-and-hedge band — a sellsword's line stiffened by a renegade friar and a hedge witch.
Ruins of Vhal	An old vault guarded by a warden, a hollow acolyte, and a well-thing keeper — cleared once for its loot.
Redbrand Camp	A raider nest under the Redbrand boss — cleared, then held for its weekly take.
The Shield Wall	The barracks memorial. It holds only the names of soldiers lost under the Last Writ — chosen, short, and heavy.

What you fight

Term	Meaning
The monsters of the Reach	The wild's own things, clustered on the Glim. They don't fight in ranks or reason — they swarm, endure, and some are large enough that "kill it" is a plan. They gather in proportion to how hard a Well is drawn, and never touch a caravan carrying no Glim.
Well-thing	The stranger sort of monster — the ones that wear marks nobody carved, screen a heavy, break off a kill to mend a packmate, and never seem surprised by gunfire. Nothing about them reads as animal except the teeth.
Rival squad	Another crown's fighters at the same Well. No monster to blame afterward — and, against a live Tactician, no script either. Increasingly they carry powder.
The Last Writ	The opt-in high-stakes contract, signed at the muster table: the richest deep-Well rewards, and no one coming to carry anyone home. Deaths under it are permanent; every other loss is recoverable.

The old power — the arcane

Term	Meaning
The collegium towers	Wizardry proper — a lettered, licensed art taught in the tower-schools of the seated crowns. Precise, expensive, and increasingly nervous about the mills.
The hedge-craft	The wild art of the deep Reach — witches working venom, hex, and rot, learned closer to the wells than any tower would allow. Lanternhold marches with it.
The reliquary light	What the clerics and their orders channel: mending, blessing, and the warding of the light against the grey. The most respectable of the three traditions, and the most quietly commercial — the order that heals your squad keeps the ledger of what it cost.
Class	A soldier's trade and stat mold — Fighter, Hunter, Cleric, Witch, and their senior forms. See the class reference.
Promotion	Raising a proven soldier into a senior class for Glim (Fighter→Knight, Cleric→Bishop, the Witch line ending at Archmage, …). The soldier keeps every art they knew and gains the new class's on top. See Glim & Promotions.
Vanguard / Mender / Marksman	The three squad archetypes the game teaches first: the front-rank anchor, the cloister-trained healer, and the back-line shooter.

Doctrine & the Chronicle

Term	Meaning
Tactician	You. The mind behind the squads; the one who writes and never swings. Kept behind walls, protected and feared, because a good one is worth an army.
Standing Orders	The rules a soldier carries into the wild — and the reason no Tactician needs to shout. Past the treeline, your writing is the only order a squad will ever get.
Doctrine	The whole of a soldier's — or a Tactician's — way of fighting; what the writs, together, add up to.
Writ	A single soldier's inscribed Standing Orders: numbered rules above, reactions below, read top to bottom.
Rule	One line of a writ: If conditions, Then a skill, Aimed by preference. The first rule with a valid target fires. See how rules work.
Filter / Gate / Prefer / Prioritize	The four condition kinds. Filters and Gates decide whether a rule fires; Prefers and Prioritizes decide whom it strikes first.
Reaction	An off-turn answer written on the writ — Cover, Parry, Brace, a counter, or a mend — paid in PP. See reactions & PP.
Rider	An effect that travels on a landed blow: a status like Poison or a stat wound like halved defense, each with its own chance.
The Chronicle	The kingdom's instrument of foretelling and replay. It can foretell any battle already fully written, and cannot read a page another hand is still writing. Every resolved battle becomes a chronicle any participant can re-read, blow for blow.
Foretelling	A true reading of a coming battle whose every writ is already sealed — bought in Glim that scales with how deep the squad marches.
Rehearsal chamber	The Chronicle's other mode: sparring your writ against a scouted dossier of an opponent still writing theirs. Informative, never a promise.
Dossier	A per-rival file of standing orders your scribes reconstruct from how the enemy moved — partial, sometimes stale, sometimes wrong. Reading it is gameplay.

The muster & the field

Term	Meaning
The Muster	The raising of a squad: hiring, berths, and the send-off. Also the yard you deploy from.
Squad	Up to six soldiers in the 2×3 line, marching under one banner.
Formation	The 2×3 grid each squad holds — Front/Back rank × Left/Center/Right column. It defines a Full Row and a Full Column. See formation.
Front-rank protection	The law that melee attacks cannot reach the back rank while any front-rank soldier stands. Ranged skills marked ignores row protection slip past it.
Initiative	The measure of who acts first. The turn order it sets holds for the whole battle.
AP — Action Points	A soldier's per-battle strength to act. Every skill costs some; rules that can't be paid for are skipped. Granted at the muster, never refilled mid-fight.
PP — Passive Points	The reaction purse: never more than 4 per battle, spent one reaction at a time.
Skill	A single action a rule can spend AP on — a strike, a spell, or a mend, with its own cost, chances, and riders. See the skill reference.
Status	A lasting condition on a soldier: Poison, Burn, Regen, Stun, Blind, or Guard Seal. See Statuses.
Holding	A turn spent standing ready, because no rule could fire: conditions failed, no valid target, or no AP to pay.
Verdict	The plate that ends a battle: The Well Is Held, The Well Is Lost, or The Field Is Spent — and the Glim drawn.

The hold's accounts

Term	Meaning
Crowns	The hold's common coin, for hiring and the mundane.
Grain / Timber / Iron	The hold's three tradable stores, priced by the Reach's rates. What a hold cannot grow, it buys dear.
Levies	Soldiers for hire waiting at the muster yard, each with a class and a price. Idle levies still draw wages.
Upkeep	The weekly cost of a standing squad and hold — settled at each week's end against income.
Unrest / Devotion	The mood of your districts. Hungry or insolvent weeks heat unrest; quiet weeks cool it; unrest inflates wages, devotion swells a Well's Glim.
End the Week / settlement	The seal that moves time forward. Each week applies one settlement — income minus upkeep minus wages — and posts the week's notices.
Expedition / march	The one door into battle: a squad sent from the muster yard to a site on the world map, costing march-days out and back.
Veteran mark	A small, permanent stat mark a soldier earns by surviving a battle that nearly killed them — up to three, kept for good, never a level or XP.

Count your squad twice at dusk. What the ledger misses, the morning will not return. — From the Codex