The Dream Rite edition

Descending alone used to end one of two ways. You got through the twelve or you did not, and how you got through them was a number nobody looked at.

That has changed, and the change came out of watching real descents rather than out of a plan.

Expunged, and Subdued

Put an entity down on exactly its remaining Dominion and it is Expunged: face down on the Gathering, to be drawn again. Spill Ruin over it and it is only subdued. It is beaten and it is not gone.

The arithmetic is the whole rule, and it is the player’s own:

The Banished are the Expunged plus the Subdued.

Settling a debt moves an entity between the two halves. The count of twelve never grows, which is the property everything else rests on.

A clean run is worth something

Expunge two in a row and you earn a Breach. It buys either a subdued entity back, standing again at full Dominion to be finished properly, or a Summon: commit as many cards as you like to the Grave and the Muster rebuilds you. You are buying which cards you hold, never how many, and an entity wakes to pay for it.

Call a Breach before you have struck the entity in front of you and you belay that fight, intact and for nothing. Strike first and you break off instead, and everything you dealt is returned to it. A Breach is not a way out of a fight you are losing.

The debt comes due

Nothing subdued is forgotten. When the Pantheon is spent, anything still owed breaches on its own against whatever you have left. And once nothing remains to reveal, every fight must be Expunged: subdue one then and the Unbound are consumed.

Battles can be won and the war still lost.

How hard you want it

One dial in the Gathering, and every name describes the Pantheon rather than you. Quietus opens no debts at all. Restless returns one after two clean in a row, Vengeful after three, Relentless after four. Implacable never returns one until the Pantheon is spent, and then returns all of them at once, against a deck you have already emptied.

And the medal counts the right thing now

Winning alone was graded on Echoes spent and nothing else. That was right when the Echo was the only axis a solo player had, and it stopped being right: a descent that Expunged eleven of twelve took the lowest grade, while one that left three entities subdued and spent no Echoes would have taken Gold.

It counts blemishes now. An Echo spent is one, and so is an entity left subdued. None is Gold, one is Silver, two or more is Bronze.

The grade can finally see the thing the rest of the board celebrates.