What Is a Structure?
A Structure is a place — a house, a keep, a shrine, a storeroom, a bridge. It is somewhere things are kept and things happen, given an actor of its own so that it can be described, own its contents, and be pointed at.
Its unique capability is simply that it is a place that persists. Unlike the other actor kinds, a Structure has no properties of its own at all — and that is deliberate. It is the plainest actor in the system: a name, a description, the gear stored in it, the actions you attach to it, and the effects laid on it. What distinguishes it from a Vehicle is not a mechanic but a fact about the fiction — it does not go anywhere, and so it has no occupants and no journey.
Use it when a location deserves to be a thing in the game rather than a note: an inn the party keeps returning to, a cache in the woods, a temple with a standing blessing on it.
When to Use a Structure
Use a Structure when:
- A place recurs in play and you want its contents and description to persist
- Stored goods should belong to the place rather than to a character
- A location carries a standing effect — a ward, a consecration, a curse
- You want actions attached to a place (a lever, a ritual performed only there)
For something that moves and carries people, use a Vehicle instead. For a body of people, use a Cohort.
What a Structure Contains
- Gear — everything stored in the place. There is no limit on how much.
- Actions — procedures attached to the place.
- Effects — active effects on the place, such as wards or consecrations.
What a Structure Does Not Model
A Structure is scenery with an inventory, not a combatant:
- No condition. It has no structural integrity, no hit points, and no damage model. Walls cannot be battered down by the rules; a siege is narrated, not resolved against the Structure.
- No capacity. A storeroom holds as much as you say it does — nothing counts or refuses the contents.
- No occupants. A Structure does not track who is inside it. If who is present matters, that is a matter for tokens on the scene, or a Cohort if the people form a standing group.
The Structure Sheet
The Structure sheet has these tabs:
- Facade — image and description
- Profile — the private dossier, movement rates, and attributes
- Gear — stored contents and equipment
- Actions — available actions
- Effects — active effects
All five are the common actor tabs, and they behave exactly as they do on a Being: the Gear tab is the same inventory ledger (a structure’s stores instead of a character’s possessions), and the Actions and Effects tabs are identical. They are documented once, in Understanding Sheets under Common Actor Tabs — see that page for the columns, controls, and how to add, stow, and remove things.
The Profile tab carries three things, and it is where a structure’s private notes live:
- Attributes — normally empty for a structure. The section is kept so a world that wants to give a keep a Condition a rating of its own can.
- Movement — the travel rate for each medium, with a star marking the active one.
- Biography — the dossier, the private description only you and the GM see. The public description a player sees stays on Facade.
The one difference: a Being’s Gear tab reports carried weight and encumbrance, because a character is slowed by what it carries. A structure does not move, so its Gear tab reports the total weight of its contents alone.
Intrinsic Actions
A Structure defines no actions of its own. It carries only the actions every actor shares:
| Action | Shortcode |
|---|---|
| Edit | editDocument |
| Delete | deleteDocument |
| Make Default Medium | makeDefaultMedium |
All three belong to every actor and are described on Base Item, which covers what each one does, how it is invoked, and what it produces — the shared document actions are the same wherever they appear.
Make Default Medium picks which movement medium an actor is currently moving in, driven by the star control in the movement table on the structure’s own Profile tab. A structure does not move, so in practice it stays on the None row; the control is there because movement is a capability every actor carries, not because a building is expected to use it.
The contents stored in a structure are ordinary gear items with actions of their own — see Gear and the page for each kind of gear.
See also
- Actors — the four actor kinds and how to choose between them.
- Vehicle — the moving counterpart, for anything that carries people.
- Gear and Working with Gear and Equipment — the goods a structure holds.
- Actions — attaching an action to a place.
- Understanding Sheets — the tabs a structure shares with every other actor.
- User Guide — back to the index.