Clarity

The rule the whole cooperative game rests on is one sentence in the Tomes: you may never reveal or hint at what is in your hand. Everything hard about playing together comes out of it. You can see how many cards your partner holds and nothing about which.

Clarity is how you earn the right to see one.

What it costs

Expunge an entity exactly and one slot turns over. Not a kill, an exact one, with no Ruin spilled over the top. That is the hardest thing this game asks and at a table it has been rare: across the first three, two of seven, two of four and three of six.

It is mutual. The same moment you see their oldest card, they see yours. The count belongs to the descent rather than to either of you, which is what makes the two views impossible to disagree about.

Three at most. A table that plays well would otherwise end up seeing the whole hand, and then the rule above is dead rather than earned. Three of seven leaves real ignorance and is genuinely reachable. It is also the difficulty lever, if this turns out too generous or too thin.

Cumulative, not a run

The Breach counts consecutive clean banishments and a spill wipes the run. That works alone: you broke it, you know exactly when, and the sting is the mechanic doing its job.

At a table it would be your partner breaking your reward. That is how a cooperative game teaches two people to resent each other, and no amount of elegance is worth it. A spill fails to advance you and never takes back what you earned.

The oldest card first

The slot shows the card that has been in their Redoubt longest, and when they play it the next one behind takes its place.

So the window moves rather than growing. You cannot plan two turns out on what somebody else is holding, and the thing you are counting on can be spent by the person holding it while you watch. There is no trading and there will not be. The risk is the point.

What it does not do

It does not tell you what is coming, only what is there. It cannot reach past three. And it is two seats only for now, along with the shared Echoes: three players is the easiest configuration ever measured here and already carries a real Heretic in the deck, so it gets neither until somebody shows me otherwise.

Renamed the same day. This is called Channelling now, and what it opens is a channel: look through it and it stays open, reach through it and it closes. Clarity was borrowed from the Dream Law’s own Power, which is also about information and a banishment made perfect, so the word was colliding before it had been in the game a day. And a channel is two-way, which is the whole property this mechanic has and the one thing the old name could not say. The entry above is left as it was written.