Enter the Vale

What a run actually is

You are a first-year cadet in the Riders Quadrant on the first of October. The valley is open, the dragons are already in it, and nobody is going to tell you what to do. You get a dossier with a name, a wing, a section, a squad and one weapon, and then you walk in.

A run is a branching sequence of decisions rather than a quiz with a score at the end. Each decision moves two or three of six internal values the game never explains to you while you are making it, and each one also leans the valley slightly toward one kind of dragon. Nothing tells you which, and the readout in the side rail is there only if you want it.

The six values, and why they are hidden

The engine tracks courage, instinct, cunning, loyalty, aggression and patience. They are deliberately not shown as a score you can optimise, because the vale in the books does not offer a progress bar. What each dragon is looking for is subjective, and a run that games a number would not be the experience the setting describes.

• Courage and aggression pull toward red and black, the colours the books describe as the fastest to temper and the most discerning.
• Instinct and patience pull toward orange and brown, the colours described as unpredictable and as the least documented of the six.
• Cunning pulls toward green, and loyalty toward blue, the colour the books call the most ruthless.

How the ending is decided

When the run resolves, the engine weighs your six values against each colour and each tail type, adds the leaning your individual decisions accumulated, applies the day conditions for your chosen route, and then adds a seeded variance so that two runs with identical choices can still end differently. Then the outcome is decided before the dragon is chosen, which is why a bond can be refused and why a refusal is a real ending rather than a failure state.

You can lose, and it counts

A dragon can refuse you. A dragon can kill you. There are two rarer endings that require specific combinations of decisions, and one of them is not a bond at all. Every finished run is written into your record, including the refusals and the burns, because those are what happened.

What you keep

A bond writes a dragon into your registry with a name, a colour, a tail type, an age, a rarity, a temperament and a bond strength, all generated from the run rather than drawn from a fixed list. The registry tracks how many colours and tail types you have found and tells you what is still missing. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account to make.