The systems you're meant to master. This is the honest floor of the rules — enough to make good decisions. It is not every hidden mechanism; some things you learn only by getting hurt.
Your body's ability to survive damage is stable and does not grow. Skill, reputation, and power make you more capable — never harder to kill. Between you and the meat sits protection, in three flavors: mundane (armor, cover, plating), enhanced (worn, augmented, grafted), and magical (warded, shaped). Protection absorbs the hit, degrades, and can be lost. When it's gone, the meat is next — and the meat is the same meat it always was.
Every environmental hazard — atmosphere, temperature, footing, force — checks one shared stack, in order. Each layer can reduce, cap, or negate hazards it's rated against, and ratings are typed: cleats beat mud, not slime.
A room's air can be breathable, void, poison, flammable, or water. Suffocation, ignition, and toxin all run their own clocks — and suffocation damage hits the meat directly, bypassing protection, because armor doesn't breathe for you. Temperature runs a band from Absolute Cold to Inferno; the outer bands deal damage, the inner ones slow and fatigue you first. A sealed suit doesn't make your body tougher — it makes the room lie to it.
Light is a level from 0 to 10, the maximum of natural (the day/night curve, weather-dimmed), artificial (until it's shot out), and what you carry. Light drives how far you see, your ranged accuracy, your ability to hide, and every shadow-based power. A moonless waste is functionally dark; a city street never fully is. Killing the lights is a real tactical action.
Weather lives over whole territories and regions and flows down — and a room feels it only through its exposure to the sky. Rain muffles sound and slicks footing; storms add wind and lightning; fog kills visibility and lifts the shadows; snow remembers your tracks. Each type scales in intensity, and both the weather and the time of day are things the node-net can be asked about. Ambush planners check the forecast.
Move without sneaking and you make sound — and the terrain writes the verb. Stone gives footsteps; flood gives splashing; snow gives a crunch; grating rings. Echoing halls carry it to the next room; water carries it far and strange; heavy armor is loud by design. Where the node-net is listening, loud movement enters the location trail even when no camera sees you. Silence has market value.
Reaching into a node buys you the best information in the world — trails, chatter, video, buried data — but losing a run costs you mentally, and that damage is real and slow to heal. Intel is a resource with a price, never a free lookup. That's the counterweight that keeps node-running from trivializing the world.