The Economy of Dark Provinces

 A.  Core Principle

Cooperation is a virtue, and does not itself generate Stress.  Stress is generated by pressure, not virtue.  More precisely: Stress emerges when collective capacity is stretched to meet situational demand.  Stretched capacity is produced by free-riding, misalignment, uncertainty, fatigue, scale, and overreach—not by cooperation itself.  The game’s economy exists to determine where pressure is absorbed:

• by the system (resources, information, legitimacy), or
• by individual players (Stress, deck mutation, social fallout).

B.  The Economy Is Layered, Not Singular

Dark Provinces does not have one currency. It has stacked economies, each operating on different time horizons:

1. Existential survival
2. Legitimacy and external response
3. Capacity and information control
4. Social coordination
5. Individual advancement
6. Psychological degradation

Misreading currencies across layers is the primary source of “bad play” and collapse.

C.  Ranked Currencies and Capabilities (By systemic value, not emotional payoff)

Tier I — Existential Survival

1. Hand Size (functional capability)

Definition. Your Hand Size is the set of trait cards you can bring to bear at any time—both adaptive q and expedient p. Your expedient p cards include trauma cards and also represent the emotional or other baggage you have collected. 

Your hand size starts at 11 cards (after Session 0 drafting and initial discard), and no new cards are drawn during a session; instead, Fatigue and effort steadily reduces what remains in-hand. This makes hand size a true in-session economic scarcity.  Even with loot and other effects, you can never recover cards that will make your hand size larger than the hand size you began with at the start of the game session.

Fatigue pressure (in-session). After each challenge, every player discards 1 card for Fatigue; Partners also discard the card they committed (effort). As a result, a Partner typically loses 2 cards per faced challenge and a Free-Rider loses 1, compressing available options as the session advances.

Capability composition. Because your hand contains both adaptive q and expedient p cards, shrinking hand size increases the probability that remaining tools are risky (expedients, won’t-work exposures, backfires) unless proactively managed with healing/cancel traits. Examples include H+ Fair Bargain and E+ Desperate Prayer, which can cancel Won’t-Work at a Stress cost.

Campaign growth via upgrades. Between sessions, Glory may be spent to recover fatigued cards and upgrade specific traits to Mid-Tier versions (Tier 2/3/4) provided the card contributed to a successful challenge (1 Glory to recover, then pay 1 Glory for the tier). Removing a trait costs Tier + 1 Glory.

2. Doom 💀

Doom is the next highest-value resource in the game, after hand size, with increasing Doom representing the approach of a cataclysm.

Doom is a hard-fail clock.

When 10 Doom is reached, the campaign ends regardless of individual success.

No amount of Glory, Loot, Trust, or Stress reduction compensates for Doom accumulation.

If a choice involves a reduction of Doom, achieving that outcome often outweighs other alternatives.

Tier II — Legitimacy & World Response

Party Reputation ☺ ☹

Second only to Doom.

• Governs faction reactions and hostility
• Shapes future challenge difficulty and available solutions
• Acts as a multiplier on outcomes and scoring
• Collective and persistent

Reputation converts patterns of play into external constraints.

Tier III —Capacity Preservation & Information Control

This tier contains the game’s most powerful indirect stabilizers.

1.       Scouting 👁 - Hidden-information control. 

Scouting includes any effect that reveals:

• Challenge card fronts or backs
• Hidden penalties (Won’t‑Work, Backfires)
• Expedient cues
• Upcoming challenge order or composition

Economic function:

• Prevents misalignment
• Avoids accidental penalty activation
• Reduces forced Expedient use
• Stops Stress before it is generated

Scouting often preserves multiple currencies at once (Doom, Glory, Loot, Trust, Reputation, Stress), making it more valuable than its text suggests.

2.       Adaptive Healing ↺ (with Deck Fixing)

Adaptive Healing is not just recovery.

It has two economic functions:

• Capacity recovery — restoring usable cards
• Deck fixing — selectively fatiguing low‑leverage or situational traits to preserve high‑value, broadly useful ones

Many Adaptive Healing effects:

• Benefit two players
• Allow simultaneous deck fixing
• Stabilize late‑session deck quality

Adaptive Healing frequently equals or exceeds the value of Loot, especially as Fatigue accumulates.

3.  Loot 💎

Still a core stabilizer.

• Restores capacity during a session
• Prevents Fatigue collapse
• Converts into advancement between sessions
• Politically relevant (Leader‑assigned)

Loot fixes quantity of capacity; Healing reshapes quality.

4.  Expedient Healing ⇄

Expedient Healing restores capacity by borrowing against the future.

What it does well:

• Emergency capacity recovery
• Deck fixing under crisis
• Stabilizes collapsing situations now

What it costs:

• Stress
• Trust erosion
• Reputation damage
• Sometimes indirect Doom advancement

Expedient Healing is debt‑financed stabilization. It is stronger than incentives, weaker than true stabilizers.

Tier IV — Social Coordination Capital

Trust (Individual) 👍 👎

Enabling, but not sustaining.

• Determines leadership eligibility
• Unlocks synergies
• Shapes credibility and votes

Trust multiplies existing capacity but cannot replace it.

Tier V — Individual Incentive

Glory ☀

Intentionally over‑rewarded in the short term.

• Fuels deck upgrades
• Rewards freeriding
• Individually rational, systemically risky

Glory is designed to tempt defection and assist end-of-session recovery, not preserve stability.

Tier VI — Psychological Load Management

Stress ⚡☯

Lowest raw value.

• Stress is recoverable
• Some Stress is inevitable
• Stress reduction without capacity or alignment is temporary

Stress reduction matters primarily to:

• Prevent imminent Blow‑Ups
• Preserve keystone players
• Delay late-session deck mutation

D. Other Trait Abilities acting as Hidden Currencies

Several recurring trait effects function as economic levers, even though they are not tracked as persistent currencies:

1.  Penalty Cancellation ⊗ (Won’t‑Work / Backfires)

• Prevents Stress generation
• Protects Reputation and Doom
• Often equivalent to Scouting + capacity preservation

2.  Outcome Band Protection (e.g., Miss → Bare, Bare → Solid)

• Extremely high leverage
• Prevents cascading failure
• Saves multiple currencies simultaneously

3.  Leadership Control ♔

Leadership eligibility is a meta‑currency:

• Controls Loot distribution
• Shapes table risk tolerance
• Determines who absorbs blame and pressure

E.  Final Synthesis (Design Truth)

Dark Provinces is not a game where cooperation costs Stress.  It is a game where cooperation supplies capacity, and Stress records who absorbs pressure when capacity, alignment, or information fail.  Doom governs survival.  Reputation governs legitimacy.  Scouting and Healing preserve capacity before it breaks.  Loot sustains action.  Trust enables coordination.  Glory tempts defection and facilitates end-of-session recovery.  Stress marks displacement when the system can no longer protect its people.  This economy is internally coherent, teachable, and aligned with the game’s thematic goals.

Adam-Ondi-Ahman: The Basin of Cleaving Stone

Dark Provinces: Broken Waters is set in a dark fantasy religious‑horror landscape inspired by the historical Nabataean heartland surrounding Petra. In the fiction of the game, this region is known as the Basin of Cleaving Stone—a desert basin carved by floods, wind, and belief, where survival depends on water control, and water control depends on faith.

The Basin is not a wilderness. It is an engineered sacred landscape: a city cut directly into rose‑red rock, temples that double as hydraulic regulators, caravan roads that follow ritual injunctions as much as geography, and underground cistern networks older than the doctrine that now claims them. Every arch, path, tunnel, and channel carries both practical purpose and symbolic weight. In the Basin, infrastructure is theology made stone.

A LAND SHAPED BY WATER AND FEAR

Water defines the Basin’s history. Flash floods carve canyons overnight. Droughts last for years. Whoever understands the flow of water—its storage, redirection, and timing—holds power over life itself. Over generations, this necessity transformed engineering into ritual and record-keeping into liturgy. Measurement, distribution, and maintenance became sacraments. Deviation became heresy.

The ruling orthodoxy teaches that water flows only by divine sanction, and that obedience ensures survival. Shrines mark valves. Oaths seal floodgates. Ledgers carry as much authority as scripture. To redirect a channel without authorization is not merely illegal—it is blasphemous.

Yet beneath this rigid order lies an unease the Basin cannot suppress. The infrastructure has operated too long. The systems are too old. Certain flows do not match doctrine. Certain ruins are sealed not because they are unstable, but because they contradict what people are supposed to believe about why the water still comes.

FAITH AS ADMINISTRATION

Religion in the Basin is not just ecstatic and mystical. It is also bureaucratic, procedural, and punitive. Faith is enforced through permits, audits, quotas, and ritual inspections. Minor deviations accumulate into suspicion. Suspicion becomes investigation.

That is where the inquisitors are sent.

The Basin’s authorities do not ask whether the doctrine is true. They ask whether it is functioning. You are dispatched when order holds but confidence does not—when crowds comply but whisper, when systems run but require increasingly elaborate explanations.

The horror of the setting is not excess. It is maintenance. People are punished not for rebellion, but for asking questions that cannot be logged, measured, or contained.

THE BURIED TRUTH

Scattered across the Basin are ruins from earlier belief structures: forgotten cistern cults, sealed amphitheaters, obstructed channels, and tomb‑temples whose inscriptions fail to align with accepted scripture. Flood marks appear where water “should not” have reached. Acoustic chambers distort speech in ways that suggest rites no longer practiced.

The Abban faith insists these remnants are misunderstandings, errors, or corruptions. Privately, its custodians are not sure. The truth—whatever it is—has been deliberately fragmented, distributed across architecture, ritual, and silence such that no single discovery can overturn the system at once.

The Basin endures because its people do not know what would happen if the dissembled truth were re-assembled.

A SETTING BUILT FOR SOCIAL PRESSURE

The Basin of Cleaving Stone setting is designed to force difficult collective decisions. Every location is entangled with scarcity. Every faction benefits from stability and fears exposure. Every attempt to “do the right thing” risks destabilizing the infrastructure that keeps thousands alive.

The setting reinforces the game’s central question:  What do you sacrifice to keep a system running—and who decides what the system is for?

You are not explorers in a neutral world. You are agents dispatched to navigate through a brittle equilibrium, where revelation can unravel supply lines, where mercy can trigger riots, and where silence may be the most efficient form of violence.

You are not sent to save the Basin.

You are sent to decide whether it deserves to continue existing as it is—and whether you are willing to bear the cost of whichever answer you choose.

Factions of the Dark Provinces

 

The Powers of the Basin

The Basin of Cleaving Stone survives through a fragile balance of water, faith, trade, and fear. No single faction fully controls the region. Instead, seven major factions compete to shape the future of Adam-Ondi-Ahman and the surrounding provinces.

Throughout the campaign, challenge cards identify which factions are affected by the players' actions. Success, failure, honesty, expedience, mercy, or brutality all influence how these factions perceive the inquisitors. Over time, faction attitudes towards the inquisitors may rise or fall, unlocking opportunities, creating enemies, or reshaping entire regions.

Each faction possesses legitimate concerns, valuable knowledge, and dangerous blind spots. The inquisitors must decide which interests to support, resist, expose, or reconcile.

A faction's approval can provide resources, information, legitimacy, or protection. Its hostility can create new challenges, increase existing pressures, and complicate future choices.

The Abbans - Keepers of doctrine, law, and the sacred infrastructure

The Abbans are the dominant religious and political authority throughout the region. In the Basin, they oversee temples, water distribution, taxation, recordkeeping, and public order. To most citizens, they are simply the government.

The Abbans teach that survival in the Basin depends upon obedience to sacred law. Water rights, trade permits, and civic authority flow through their institutions. Their priests, inspectors, and wardens maintain the vast hydraulic systems upon which civilization depends.

The Yashemi - Seekers of hidden truth

The Yashemi believe the official history of the region has been deliberately altered. They preserve forbidden teachings associated with Yashem and search for evidence buried within ruins, forgotten records, and sacred sites.

Persecuted and forced into servitude, the Yashemi operate through scattered cells, coded messages, secret gatherings, and hidden archives.

Some seek reconciliation. Others seek revelation or revolution, regardless of the consequences.

The Qorihori - Guardians of the thunder scrolls

The Qorihori are scribes, hermits, ascetics, and mystics, many of whom dwell in canyons, caves, and remote sanctuaries beyond the confines of the Basin.

They preserve fragments of ancient knowledge concerning storms, thunder, and the forgotten powers concealed beneath the Basin. They rarely seek power and distrust nearly every political movement.

Many believe they possess vital knowledge regarding the storm gate and the true nature of the ancient ruins.

The Merchants' Consortium - Masters of trade and supply

Caravans feed the Basin and the regions beyond. Water alone cannot sustain civilization; food, tools, stone, timber, textiles, and information all move through merchant networks.

The Merchants' Consortium is not a single guild but a coalition of trading tribes whose influence often rivals that of religious authorities.

They measure success through prosperity, contracts, and stability. Their loyalty is frequently practical rather than ideological.

The Wardens - Protectors of order

The Wardens serve as investigators, guards, escorts, and enforcers. Some answer directly to Abban authorities, while others operate with substantial independence.

Most Abbans view them as protectors against banditry, riots, and heresy. The rest see them as capricious instruments of violence, surveillance and coercion.

Wardens often find themselves balancing public safety against justice, obedience against conscience, and duty against truth.

The Desert Tribes - Survivors of the open wastes

The Desert Tribes include nomadic families, guides, raiders, scouts, and independent settlements beyond direct regional control.

Many possess generations of practical knowledge concerning weather, hidden paths, water sources, and forgotten ruins. Although outsiders often view them as a single faction, the tribes maintain diverse loyalties and frequently disagree with one another.

The Cistern Keepers - Engineers of survival

The Cistern Keepers maintain reservoirs, aqueducts, sluices, flood controls, and water records. While many formally serve the Abbans, they possess loyalties that transcend politics.

The Cistern Keepers understand a simple truth: belief systems may rise and fall, but failed infrastructure kills people immediately.

Many of the Basin's greatest secrets are hidden within the systems they maintain.

Faction Attitudes

Each major faction tracks its attitude toward the party on a scale from –3 to +3.

Attitude	Meaning
+3	Trusted Allies
+2	Supportive
+1	Favorable
0	Neutral
-1	Suspicious
-2	Hostile
-3	Active Opposition

Faction attitudes change when reputation shifts or when challenge card outcomes directly affect a faction's interests.

High faction approval may provide:

• Additional information
• Reduced challenge difficulty through narrative support
• Access to new opportunities
• Political protection

Low faction approval may result in:

• Restricted access
• Increased opposition
• Escalating conflict
• More severe consequences following failure

No faction track is intended to be permanently maximized. Tensions arise because helping one faction often creates friction with another. Inquisitors are therefore challenged not merely to choose allies, but to navigate competing visions of truth, survival, legitimacy, and power.