The roster

Rooks are 1987 desert recovery workers on a memory-extraction contract they have not read carefully. Layered expedition clothing, wrapped scarves, climbing harness, charm cords, analog instruments and a resin hand torch, because digital equipment fails near the site and only flame stays reliable.

Customisation is deliberately broad: four body frames, five outfits, ten cloth colours, eight skin tones, six headgear sets, five masks, eight face tattoos, six charms and four wear states. That breadth is not vanity. Your friends have to recognise you in near-total darkness at a glance.

What a Rook publishes about themselves is one number. Exposure folds crouching, darkness, movement and carried flame together, and that number is the only thing the tomb gets to read. Crouch in the dark with the torch out and you are close to unreadable.

Three and a half metres, verified at runtime against a 3.4–3.6 m spec band, carrying a was-sceptre attached to his right hand at 2.9 m. He hunts through a dedicated heat field that holds two different things: live sources, which can be tracked continuously, and residue, a fading memory of where heat used to be.

So a lit torch draws him. A snuffed torch leaves a cooling trail he follows into an empty room. A torch dropped on the floor is a thing he walks to and stands over while its owner leaves.

His signature is not damage. He grabs a Rook and carries them toward the next brightest fire, which in practice is wherever the rest of the crew is standing with their torches lit, and holds them up in front of them. The rescue window has three exits: hurt him and he drops them, put out the fire that started it and the judgement stops meaning anything, or do nothing and he ends it.

The most effective thing he does costs one line of code. At Recognition the Animator is stopped outright — a dead halt, mid-pose, for half a second, before he moves.

Throw a pot down the left corridor and it crosses the ceiling to the pot. Go silent after being heard and it arrives where you were and starts searching. Stay silent and it never finds you at all.

It spends most of its life folded into corners and hanging from ceilings at about a third of the volume it should occupy, so unfolding is a real silhouette change rather than an animation. Waking is four deliberate stages — freeze, angle toward the sound, unfold one limb, then move — which exist so an attentive player gets several seconds of warning and an inattentive one gets a creature dropping off the ceiling onto them.

Its locomotion is built from one idea: wrong sequencing. The hand moves first, the elbow rotates after it, the shoulder catches up, and the torso folds last, several tenths of a second behind. It is a delay line, so motion travels the wrong way up the limb. No single frame is anatomically impossible, which is why it reads as unsettling rather than broken.

It grabs and hauls victims up a wall. It also spits venom for a quarter of a player’s health, with a reload — the ranged option, so it cannot be solved by standing across the room.

It fetches dropped objects, brings them back and drops them a metre short before backing away, follows the group at a distance, and stares at doorways nobody has opened yet.

Underneath it keeps a per-player trust ledger, and the ledger is the mechanic. Trust is earned slowly by being near it calmly and leaving things lying around; it is lost by charging at it. Hit it once and it does not turn hostile — it screams, runs, and remembers who. Ten minutes later it comes back and helps everybody except you. The crew works out that the rat hates one of them before they work out why, and that conversation is the entire point of the creature.

Each rat is rolled at spawn into one of five temperaments, never shown to the player: Loyal, Nervous, Opportunistic, Corrupted, and the worst one, Pretender, which behaves exactly like Loyal until the moment it does not. Betrayal is a probability weighted by temperament, grudges held, how far the tomb has been pushed, and whether there is anything nearby worth taking. A run where the rat stays loyal has to remain possible, or the whole thing collapses into a known trick.

Its ears track the last thing heard, not players. They twitch toward a voice across the room and are still pointing the wrong way when somebody quiet walks up behind it. Anything else would let players read the rat’s ears to find their teammates.

It hits for very little, it strikes only to make room, and the moment it is frightened it runs. It prefers unattended objects, it prefers valuable ones, and it carries them to a nest somewhere dark.

The nest is the good part. It is not a spawn point; it is a place the creature chose, and it accumulates. A crew that chases a thief and loses it can open a door half an hour later onto everything it took from them, plus whatever it took from the expedition before theirs. Nothing generates that. It is simply where a scavenger has been putting things.

Whether an object is unattended is judged against the crawler’s own belief, not against where anybody actually is. A crawler that has heard nothing recently will walk straight up to your feet and take the relic while you watch it.

Cornered, it sheds loot rather than fight, which is the crew’s win condition against it and is reachable without killing the thing. Its silhouette has one job: to be mistaken for cargo. Frozen, with the covered head hanging and the pack shifted over, it should read at distance as a pile of crates. The moment it lifts that head is the moment a player realises what they have been looking at, so the lift is slow, single, and never repeated while they watch.