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 teal-luminous essence that keeps a kingdom's fields alive — cold to the hand, glowing teal, and 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, difficult to survey, reach, and hold. Stripped wells never refill.
The grey wild / the wild	The failing land between the seats: treeline-less, physically unreliable, and 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 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 while its dwindling infrastructure draws on finite Glim.
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 industrial-services crown, newly seated. Leases pumps, conduits, precision parts, and extraction crews to whoever meets the price. Grey by trade, not cruelty: reasonable, and would rather its customers prosper enough to renew. 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.
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. Important setting pressure and future multiplayer infrastructure; the focused solo path does not require a player-run commodity market.

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 an independent company, a nearby community, or a rival crown.
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: standardized pumps, precision fittings, prosthetic workshops, and contract engineers 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 seal 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.

Opposition & risk

Term	Meaning
Claim company	An independent charter crew, community defense, mercenary band, or extraction company already holding the site Lanternhold wants. Crown reports may call them bandits or poachers; the recovered writ usually tells a less convenient story.
Rival squad	Another crown's fighters at the same Well. Their formation, equipment, and doctrine are readable through the same rules as yours; against a live Tactician, there is no script.
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, paid in PP: Cover, Parry, Brace, a counter, a mend, a strike on a foe an ally just afflicted, or a self-buff on a kill or a squadmate's death. 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.

Recruitment & the field

Term	Meaning
Recruitment	The raising of a squad: hiring, berths, and the send-off. Also the Recruitment 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	Decides who acts first in each round. The order it sets at the start holds for the whole battle.
Physical Atk	How hard the soldier hits with weapons and physical skills. Physical damage scales with it before the target's Physical Def is taken off.
Magic Atk	How hard the soldier's spells hit. Magic damage scales with it before the target's Magic Def is taken off.
Physical Def	Soaks physical damage from each hit before it lands. Armor and shields add to it. A hit that lands always does at least one damage.
Magic Def	Soaks magic damage from each hit before it lands. Armor and some shields add to it.
Accuracy	The soldier's base chance to hit. The skill's own hit rate scales it, then the target's Evasion is taken off. Blind drops it to zero.
Evasion	Taken off every attacker's chance to hit this soldier. Light armor raises it and heavy armor can lower it.
Crit Chance	The chance that a landed hit is a critical. A critical doubles the damage, spell and steel alike.
Guard Chance	The chance that the soldier guards a landed hit. A guard turns aside part of the physical damage, more with a better shield, and none of the magic. A soldier with no weapon and no shield cannot guard.
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	Points spent on reactions such as Riposte or Bodyguard. A soldier never has more than four in a battle, and each reaction spends one.
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, and Regen tick at the start of the soldier's turn; Stun, Blind, and Guard Seal change what the soldier can do; Marked changes who their enemies aim at. 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	Account categories behind the Reach's economy. They may be summarized as campaign consequences; broad stock trading is deferred from the focused path.
Recruits	Soldiers for hire waiting at the recruitment yard, each with a class and a price. Idle recruits 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 prototype simulation's weekly accounting boundary. The focused campaign advances through story and marches without requiring routine settlement bookkeeping.
Expedition / march	The one door into battle: a squad sent from the recruitment 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