You asked
Before anyone takes a turn, how is everything laid out on the table?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Descent: Legends of the Darkbg-322708-en-1e
I looked through Descent: Legends of the Dark's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.
The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.
This section clarifies some common language and rules. Entries are organized alphabetically by topic. The Rules Reference in the app provides comprehensive details for all rules, including the clarifications presented here. When an ability refers to a 'roll,' it refers to any situation in which a he
Learn to Play 32 Quick reFerence rOund sTrucTure Each game round consists of the following two phases: 1. Hero Phase: During this phase, each hero takes a turn performing actions to move, attack enemies, and interact with tokens and terrain. 2. Darkness Phase: During this phase, time passes and enem
Heroes and enemies use abilities that are presented as keywords . A keyword is a shorthand for an effect that appears frequently. The rules for each keyword are as follows: Charge: After a card is flipped (which includes when it is placed in a hero's play area at the start of a quest), if the faceup
Each ability describes when it can be used. Most commonly, abilities can be used 'before,' 'after,' or 'during' a specific time or action of the game, as follows: ◊ If the timing of an ability uses the word 'before' or 'after,' the ability's effect can be resolved immediately before or after the des
Terrified: When time passes during the darkness phase, the hero suffers one fatigue on each of their cards that has a terrify token on it. (As normal, the hero suffers one damage for each fatigue token that cannot be placed in this way.) Scarred: When a hero flips a card that has a scar token on it,
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- warm abstain
-
- this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
- corpus profile
- live
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 258 ms · ask 9549 ms · total 9817 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 9817 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 30, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "This section clarifies some common language and rules. Entries are organized alphabetically by topic. The Rules Reference in the app provides comprehensive details for all rules, including the clarifications presented here. When an ability refers to a 'roll,' it refers to any situation in which a he", "headingPath": "clAriFicATiOns · cArd lAnguAge · cOndiTiOns · FATigue · heAlTh · herO Turns · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 499}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Learn to Play 32 Quick reFerence rOund sTrucTure Each game round consists of the following two phases: 1. Hero Phase: During this phase, each hero takes a turn performing actions to move, attack enemies, and interact with tokens and terrain. 2. Darkness Phase: During this phase, time passes and enem", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 499}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Heroes and enemies use abilities that are presented as keywords . A keyword is a shorthand for an effect that appears frequently. The rules for each keyword are as follows: Charge: After a card is flipped (which includes when it is placed in a hero's play area at the start of a quest), if the faceup", "headingPath": "keywOrds", "sharpsignalDocId": 499}, {"page": 30, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Each ability describes when it can be used. Most commonly, abilities can be used 'before,' 'after,' or 'during' a specific time or action of the game, as follows: ◊ If the timing of an ability uses the word 'before' or 'after,' the ability's effect can be resolved immediately before or after the des", "headingPath": "Timing · GOLDEN RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 499}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Terrified: When time passes during the darkness phase, the hero suffers one fatigue on each of their cards that has a terrify token on it. (As normal, the hero suffers one damage for each fatigue token that cannot be placed in this way.) Scarred: When a hero flips a card that has a scar token on it,", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 499}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Set Health Dial: Each player sets their health dial to the number that matches the maximum health value on their hero card. The Elf Huntsman 1 : During your turn, ^«®¥ã ϭ 'My family is gone. Their teachings are not.' Add 1 . Then you may suffer 1 Create Supply: Separate all tokens by type and place ", "headingPath": "seTup", "sharpsignalDocId": 499}, {"page": 27, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Throughout the campaign, the heroes gain recipes. Each recipe provides a hero with a list of materials and essences needed to craft a specific piece of equipment. To craft that equipment, the hero combines the listed materials with the recipe in the crafthall, which the heroes can visit between ques", "headingPath": "recipes", "sharpsignalDocId": 499}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "1 Component Assembly Insert 1 Lore Guide 9 Custom Dice 18 Map Tiles 40 Weapon Cards 42 Skill Cards 12 Explore/Sight Tokens 46 Terrain Pieces 18 Armor Cards 10 Injury Cards 80 Condition Tokens (16 of each type) 16 Plastic ID Markers (4 of each color) 6 Underlays 12 Trinket Cards 4 Reference Cards 56 ", "headingPath": "rules sTrucTure · cOmpOnenTs", "sharpsignalDocId": 499}]
- citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
- []
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 499 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 499 boosted
- answered-before recall
-
no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- debug row retained until
- Nov 7, 2026 06:07
retrieval — what the passage search returned
what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.
score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.
per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.
token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.
| fused rank | document | heading | page | fused RRF score | snippet chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK Descent: Legends of the Dark — Rulebook (corpus doc 499) | clAriFicATiOns · cArd lAnguAge · cOndiTiOns · FATigue · heAlTh · herO Turns · … | p.30 | 0.032787 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Descent: Legends of the Dark — Rulebook (corpus doc 499) | p.32 | 0.032258 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 | |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Descent: Legends of the Dark — Rulebook (corpus doc 499) | keywOrds | p.20 | 0.031746 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Descent: Legends of the Dark — Rulebook (corpus doc 499) | Timing · GOLDEN RULES | p.30 | 0.03125 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Descent: Legends of the Dark — Rulebook (corpus doc 499) | p.32 | 0.030769 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 | |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Descent: Legends of the Dark — Rulebook (corpus doc 499) | seTup | p.7 | 0.030303 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Descent: Legends of the Dark — Rulebook (corpus doc 499) | recipes | p.27 | 0.029851 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Descent: Legends of the Dark — Rulebook (corpus doc 499) | rules sTrucTure · cOmpOnenTs | p.3 | 0.029412 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it
what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.
the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 258 ms · first delta 9676 ms · total 9817 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 0 ms · retrieval 258 ms · ask 9549 ms · gateway work 9817 ms · total 9817 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 4527
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 132.4 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.068 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 3s ago)
- stream path
- streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
- watchdog
- first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
- num_ctx · think posture
- both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.
disposition
- outcome
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- abstain rationale
-
I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render
- decision
- NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
- pattern that matched
- BEFORE_FIRST_PLAY — "before the first turn" / "before we begin"
- matched words (in the normalized question)
-
before anyone
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 430), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one
Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.