hanse

every folk village with a bell gets its coast tested: eight compass bearings out from the bell, no further than ninety-six blocks to open ocean and then to water deep enough to float in — and the test breaks off the moment it reaches a chunk nobody has loaded, because no gate here may drag the world in to answer a question. a bell whose coast is confirmed becomes a haven. two havens within three thousand blocks make a lane, and the lane alternates by the day: what was received is owed back.

a voyage takes a lading out of the home village's own wealth — six percent of it, one to four, and never a coin that would take the town below nothing — and delivers it to the far town with increase, on a day counted out of the distance between their bells. none of it ever passes through a player's hands. and the ship is only real when someone is there to see it: stand within a hundred and sixty blocks of the anchorage and a keel sloop is put on the water and stands out under full canvas; stand nowhere near, and the same voyage is kept in the book and paid on the same morning.

hanse draws nothing of its own. every timber on this page is a sibling's — keel's ship, wharf's pier, folk's bell — and it hard-depends on folk and keel rather than reaching them through tags, which is a knowingly-taken exception to the house rule and written down as one. the crew, the sea post and the hired hand are phases two to four: today the sloops sail empty.