The World
Five concepts define the game. Learn them and everything else is mechanics layered on top.
Crownless is an automated strategy RPG. Combat runs without your input. Outcomes emerge from behavioral states, Fracture structure, and the heuristic engine that resolves conflict between them.
Simulation: deterministic. AI: narrative only.Arbiter
Coordinator. Not soldier.
You are not on the field. You are the intelligence behind it. Arbiters are brokers of organized force: not soldiers, not governors, but something filling the space neither could maintain.
Your tools are contracts, rosters, and the patience to read outcomes and adjust. Control is indirect. You see what your Strays log, what the engine records, and what conditions report afterward.
Strays
Contractually present. Not loyal.
The word was institutional slang. Personnel deactivated without reassignment. It spread because it described something happening everywhere.
Strays carry four behavioral states: drift, morale, fatigue, complacency. These are not penalties. They are inputs to a decision function. A broken-morale Stray is operationally different. They are not loyal to you. They owe you a contract performance.
Bastion
Logistics problem. Not a fortress.
Your operational base. Where Strays rest, decay, and sometimes recover. Facilities affect behavioral state trajectories.
The Bastion is overhead cost that demands ongoing investment. Neglect it and your Strays arrive at Fractures worse than when they left.
Fractures
Deterministic. Not static.
Instability zones. Deliberately imprecise. A contested industrial site. A deteriorating infrastructure node. A sealed district held by armed factions.
Fractures are deterministic but not static. The engine knows exactly what happens given your inputs. Your uncertainty is always about what those inputs actually are — because Stray behavioral state is not fully visible until it manifests.
The Calling
Partial profiles. Partial trust.
The process by which Arbiters recruit Strays. Candidates have behavioral profiles and combat specializations, some visible at intake and some hidden.
Early missions reveal what the scan missed. This is not a bug. It is the cost of working with people who survived things that changed them in ways they do not always disclose.
Same inputs produce same outputs. Variance comes from behavioral state accumulation, not randomness at resolution.
All simulation, combat resolution, progression, and economy logic runs server-side. Nothing game-critical is client or AI delegated.
Behavioral states interact with heuristics. A complacent Stray does not just underperform. Their evaluation model stops adapting.
Groq LLM generates dialogue and world events. It does not score threats, assign targets, or touch the simulation.