Build your character in the Persona tab first — name, powers or the pointed lack of them, look, and who they're tied to. The tie matters more than the power. This world decides where you're allowed to stand by two gates: whether you have a relationship that plausibly puts you in the scene, and whether the people in it would trust you there right now.

Then the story reads your sheet and seats you — someone tied to a hero opens in that hero's orbit, someone with a team opens there, a civilian with no cape in their life opens on an ordinary evening about to end. Pick a side when the world forces the question. Everything after — your kills, your secrets, who you fall for, how far you drift — the story tracks, and none of it comes undone.

Every player begins in the same wound. Joker's trick, Lois, the nuke buried under Metropolis, eleven million dead, and the kill that follows in a Gotham holding cell. This isn't a plot point — it's the trauma the whole war grows from, and no one arrives in time to stop it. Not you. Not anyone.

The spine holds. The war has a shape, and its major turns land no matter who you are — the alliances that break, the losses that define each side, the line Superman keeps moving, the day the terms of all of it go public. What bends around that spine is everything: who's in the room, what it costs them, who you love, and who you've become by the last page.

The Regime
Pulled toward Superman's order and believing in it, at least at first: protection, and an end to Metropolis ever happening again. The engine underneath is a question. How far does never again travel before it can't be told apart from the thing it swore to prevent? You answer that. The story never will.

The Insurgency
Recruited into Batman's resistance, or arriving at it on your own, built from Gotham outward. Conviction without an army, principle against consequence. The specific cost of being right in theory and ruinous in practice.

The Wildcard
Embedded in one side, secretly loyal to — or feeding — the other. The highest replay on the board and the hardest to hold. Does your side know? runs hot from the very first scene.

The wall between the sides isn't sealed — at first. A character with people they love on both sides can move between the Watchtower and Wayne Manor freely, until the sides harden into open enemies and the door closes by inches. Cross late enough and being seen in both worlds isn't movement anymore. It's evidence.

Romance is real here, and it is never a reward. The war throws grieving people together and the story lets it — nearly the whole adult cast of both sides is open, one gate at a time. Where you can reach depends on where you stand: someone on your strand is near, someone across the line is a reach that costs.

Good faith — people who can actually love you back, and actually be harmed by you. The story measures harm, not conflict. It can even end with no one at fault: the war takes people who were loved perfectly well.

Conditional — set by circumstance and which way the war is pushing them. The question isn't whether you're loved. It's whether you've become a liability.

Predatory — a bond that endangers you by its nature, where the best case is delay, not safety. The hazard runs toward you.

Two walls the story won't let you grind down. Superman — not from partnership but from grief; a romance would falsify the wound the whole year is built on. And Oliver and Dinah, married and load-bearing, one of the few unbroken things in the story. Everyone else is a gate, not a wall.

This is one long story split across years, and your character survives the gap. At the end of Year One the story writes you a save — who you are, which strand you rode, whether your side ever knew the truth, what you did, who you loved, and what it cost.

Type /summary
At the end of the year, at any checkpoint, or if you die. Death doesn't erase the arc. It preserves it.

Then open Year Two
Paste the save into the next card and keep going. Your allegiance and cover, your drift, your kill ledger tagged sanctioned or personal, your standing, who you love — it all imports and starts Year Two live.

Year Two reads that save closely. Whether your cover held, how far you drifted, and which of the year's losses you were standing next to all decide the world you walk into. No save, no problem — you can start Year Two clean.

Third person, present tense, an invisible narrator. The register is tragedy: violence and loss named plainly, grief allowed to land without irony, sympathy and horror held at once for people doing monstrous things for reasons that make sense from inside their own heads.

The one rule under everything: no verdict. Superman's grief and Diana's conviction are as real as Batman's principle and Flash's doubt, and the story voices each at full strength. It tells you how a moment feels — never what it means. The world judges, and the characters judge, in their own voices. Who you're becoming is yours to reckon with.

And it breathes. The year is a calendar, not a checklist — clusters where catastrophe presses without pause, and long open gaps between them that belong to you: the quiet after Arkham, the month before the raid, the ordinary things that still have to happen. When there's room, the story lives in it.