Notes from the publisher

Ardenwake is made by Mission Intelligence Systems, whose work is the conditions an organization produces its results from. Nothing inside the realm says so, and that is deliberate: a story that stops to name its lesson stops being a story, and a lesson that is felt first is the one that lasts. This page is for the player who has felt it and wants the names.

What a day in Emberford practices

The company describes organizational conditions with four words, and every one of them is something you did or failed to do on the morning after the flood.

• Attention. Five people wanted you and there were twenty-six hands. What you looked into first, and who you passed over to do it, was attention allocated, and the people passed over noticed.
• Alignment. A commitment in the realm names what it displaces. That sentence is the difference between a plan people share and a list of things everyone agreed to separately.
• Authority. Who may decide without asking. The warden can assign work and the elder can convene the council, and the apprentice who saw the real fault could do neither, so she said nothing.
• Adaptability. The day you set to look again arrives, the signal you wrote comes back, and you either stand by the promise or change course in front of the people it concerned.

What is recorded, and where

The realm lives in this browser and is sent nowhere. If you agreed at the threshold to keep a record of how you decide, that record is kept on this device only, as observations of what you did with what you could see, and it is never shown to an employer. Decline it and the game is unchanged. Nothing you write in your chronicle leaves with it either.

What it is not

It is not a test, and nothing in it is a basis for selecting, ranking, promoting or removing anybody. A day in Emberford is one vantage point on one morning. If the conditions felt familiar, the company offers a way to read them in your own organization, which is a different instrument and asks different questions.