cmp-003 · pregame arena · teacher's playbook

Session Zero: Studio Qibla

Written last, per the dimension build standard, because everything it points at now exists. The teacher runs this once, against a known table, before the first crossing.

0 · Before the table — gating

Audience gating is a session-zero operation by the teacher against the known table, never a construction-time censorship. Read your players first, then read the era you expect them to choose.

Content flags by era. Sengoku: war, conscription, animal labor, a furnace tradition where death is notably not taboo. Heian: epidemic and famine, abandoned dead at the ruined gate. Interwar: tuberculosis as a lived fear, police-state pressure. 1945: firebombing, hunger, the documented suffering of children — the heaviest era; gate it deliberately, age-adjust openly, and let the table choose another door if this one is too near. 1963–64: the lightest; loss here is a buried bridge.

Prep stack for the default era: the fifteen-domain inventory, the spatial grid, the roster with day-rhythms, and the era clock. All four live in the codex under cmp-003.

Limits sheet (teacher's tool). Before the first crossing, collect two short lists from the table, on paper or out loud, teacher's choice: hard limits — what never appears in the fiction at all — and soft limits — what may exist but stays off-camera or handled with care. Keep the sheet beside the era flags above and re-read it when the table picks an era. Gating stays the teacher's call at all times; the AI never asks the table about audience or limits.

1 · Opening speech (say it your way)

"Every story you love was built from older stories. Tonight you walk into one. Inside, the story is sealed — you can explore every corner of it, but you cannot rewrite a sealed thing. Somewhere, though, every story has a back door: the real place its maker stood when he made it. Find that, and you walk out of the movies entirely, into real Japan, any century you like. From that day on, you go wherever you want."

The one rule, told as table law: we can visit anything; we can't steal anything. If a creature comes from old folklore or real history, it can live at our table. If it belongs to a living maker, we can name it, study it, and talk about it — never copy it. Pointing is always allowed. Copying is the only sin.

2 · The triple

Players choose three values; record them on the bookwormcard top line. At the table the question is asked as which liminal space we enter — tunnel mouth, well rim, torii gate, marsh edge, bamboo stalk, tower stair, door-dial, camphor hollow. The crossing-kind keys its family of films; naming a film outright remains a legal shortcut.

Which film. Any of the twenty-four. The film keys its own canonical threshold — tunnel, well, tower, marsh, gate, door-dial, bamboo, camphor hollow.
Where. Default: the era's anchor grid below. Free travel governs — the table may answer with anywhere.
When. Default: the era's committed date below. Same freedom.

Off-grid and off-date, improvise from the fifteen-domain inventory. That is what it is for.

3 · Characters

Two clocks, per the bookwormburrows character rules: the bookworm (the player's persistent self, survives every campaign) and the character (local to this campaign, dies inside it, earns moves that die with it). Build characters after the triple, so the era can flavor them.

4 · The first crossing — three beats

Approach. Stage the threshold's folkloric seat from the grid. Describe before naming.
The liminal beat. A held pause at the boundary. Check each character's kegare state: clean states cross clean; contaminated states arrive marked, never blocked.
Arrival. Inside the film layer. Canon is canon. The seal holds.

Kegare quick-loop (the adjudication cycle): contamination enters through contact — death, blood, broken taboo, eating the wrong table's food. It never blocks action; it marks the character, and the world reads the mark (spirits notice, doors stick, prices change). Cleansing is an economy, not a punishment: water, salt, a shrine visit, a service rendered. Track states lightly, out loud, so players learn the grammar by playing it.

5 · Inside the seal — the exegetical game

Film characters at the table: inside the seal they appear as the text’s own voice — you narrate canon. They get no statblocks, no roster entries, no published depiction anywhere. Talking about them at the table is pointing, and pointing is always legal.

Players cannot rewrite a sealed film; what they can do is notice its seams. Every creature, threshold, and custom inside has older bones showing through. When a player asks "where did this come from?", that question is the game working. Each answered seam is a breadcrumb toward the maker's real ground.

6 · The seal-break — the chain-walk

When the party reaches the Sayama hinge — the real forest, the old farmhouse, the well, the shrine gate, the storehouse with the mark near the roof — run the ritual:

Recognition. Something here is older than the house.
The chain-walk. The players choose one beloved thing from their film and recite its provenance chain backward, out loud, tenant to seat to source, as far as they can trace it.
The opening. At the chain's far end, the terminus opens. They cross through it into real historical Japan — any era, anywhere. From this beat, free travel is absolute and the hinge is the junction between centuries.

Run the recognition beat. Past the terminus, the ancestors are waiting as full game pieces — the nameless grove spirit, the grinning carrier-cat, the faceless one, the moon princess in her own thousand-year words. Never say the tenant’s name first; the players will. When one of them says “wait — this is what it was made of,” that sentence is the lesson landing. Let it land.

The between-world homework gate attaches at this beat once the deliverable architecture lands.

7 · The five defaults — quick sheet

Era	Default date	Anchor grid	Roster lead
Sengoku iron country	Kamiarizuki week, 10th lunar month, mid-1500s	Sugaya takadono & sannai	The murage [roster-sengoku]
Heian capital	Aoi Matsuri, 15 May, c. 1000	Suzaku Avenue & the Rajōmon ruin	The rice-broker [roster-heian]
Interwar	Kigensetsu, 11 February 1935	(open city — inventory-driven)	The café waitress [roster-interwar]
Home front	5 June 1945 and the weeks after	The Niteko Pond block	The tonarigumi captain [roster-1945]
Olympic Tokyo	10 October 1964, opening day	The shitamachi block	The sentō master [roster-1964]

All five are defaults under the free-travel stamp. Windows and grids are anchors, never locks.