A campaign that remembers itself

A campaign is three descents. Until this week it kept two numbers about each one, whether you won and how many you put down, and a room only ever holds the descent being played. So beginning the second destroyed the first, and there was no copy anywhere.

The victory screen made it worse rather than merely allowing it. Between descents it hid every number you had just earned and offered one bright button: Descend again. The obvious thing to press was the thing that deleted the game.

A sitting now leaves a record whole: the moves, the deal it was dealt from, the rules it ran under and what it banished. That is enough to rebuild that descent from scratch, on its own, later. Not the narration: that can be regenerated from the moves, which is the difference between eleven kilobytes a sitting and thirty.

The Cycle entire

Because the sittings survive, they can be added up. A fourth panel in the Reckoning shows the descents in order, each named by the Empyrean beneath it, and what they come to together. A finished campaign opens on it now: landing on a single descent shows you a third of what you just played, which is precisely the reading that made three descents feel like three games.

The clean rate there is summed, not averaged. A descent that fell after two entities cannot weigh the same as one that banished thirteen.

And you can save the whole Cycle as one file, each sitting still replayable on its own.

And every campaign descent after the first can be replayed at all

The cards you carry are dealt on top of the next descent’s hand and struck out of its deck, so a saved descent that did not record them rebuilt from a different Gathering, and every card after the deal belonged to somebody else. A real descent was refused at move three, on a card its player had demonstrably played, because the replay had left it in the deck.

Three levers were missing for the same reason. They travel with the moves now.