solo-journaling/docs/oracle.md

Oracle and tables

The d6 oracle

A single d6 answers yes/no questions about the world.

d6	Result	Meaning
6	Yes, and…	It works, and there is a fortunate extra.
5	Yes	It works, plainly.
4	Yes, but…	It works, at a cost or with a complication.
3	No, but…	It fails, but there is a consolation or opening.
2	No	It fails, plainly.
1	No, and…	It fails, and there is an additional setback.

Ask one question at a time, and phrase it so both answers are interesting. The oracle answers the world; it does not decide what the PC wants.

journal oracle "Is the gate locked?" --campaign ashfall

Complications

The complication table supplies a twist. Roll it on and/but results, or whenever the fiction needs one:

journal oracle "Is the gate locked?" --complicate --campaign ashfall
journal roll complication-themes --campaign ashfall

The table is resolved like any other (see below), so a campaign without its own complication-themes.csv falls back to the one the game ships.

Spark tables

Any CSV in a campaign's or game's tables/ directory is a spark table. The header must contain min, max, and text; tags is optional.

min,max,text,tags
1,1,"A sign of recent passage",exploration
2,2,"Something out of place",mystery

• min/max are inclusive integers and define the die range. 1..6 is a d6; 1..66 reads as a d66; any contiguous range works.
• text is the result, quoted if it contains a comma.
• tags holds one or more tags separated by ; or |.

Lookup order

journal roll <name> searches:

1. campaigns/<campaign>/tables/<name>.csv
2. games/<game>/tables/<name>.csv

So a campaign can override a single game table without copying the rest. Use journal tables to see both sources, labelled.

journal roll sparks --campaign ashfall
journal roll sparks --tag mystery --campaign ashfall
journal roll sparks --count 3 --campaign ashfall
journal roll sparks --game generic

A tagged roll picks uniformly among matching entries rather than rolling on the range, since ranges stop being meaningful once the table is filtered.

Validation

journal check parses every table for a campaign and its game, reporting overlapping ranges and parse failures as errors, and range gaps and missing directories as warnings.

journal check --campaign ashfall
journal check --game generic