Ruling — Root — RuleSage

You asked

hirelings. Most hirelings are associated with a faction, and Marauder Expansion are

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Rootbg-237182-en-1e · Root: The Marauder Expansionbg-330149-en-1e

I looked through Root'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.

RULEBOOK Root — Learning to Play · p.2 · Introduction

Root is a fast-paced game of adventure and war. You will play as one of four factions vying to show that you are the most legitimate ruler of the vast Woodland. Marquise de Cat Whenever any Marquise warriors are removed, you may spend a card matching their clearing to place those warriors in the cle

RULEBOOK Root — Learning to Play · p.24 · Piece Glossary

Warriors, which can move around the map and battle pieces of other players. /They add to rule. Buildings, which start on faction boards and can be placed in empty slots in clearings. /They add to rule. Ruins, which fill slots in clearings. /The Vagabond can explore ruins to find items and empty thei

RULEBOOK Root — Learning to Play · p.19 · Relationships

Your Relationships chart represents how friendly or hostile other factions are toward you. You can improve a relationship with a faction by giving them cards with the Aid action. During the same turn, you must take the Aid action the number of times shown between their current relationship space and

RULEBOOK Root — Learning to Play · p.23 · A Warning

On the winter map, the randomness of clearing suits can introduce many new challenges to each faction. Keep the map's geography in mind when picking factions, and understand that certain factions may gain new advantages and disadvantages in each possible layout. A Note from Leder Games : Sometimes e

RULEBOOK Root — Learning to Play · p.10 · Daylight

First, you can cra/ft any cards in your hand using workshops. /Then, you can take up to three of the following actions. » Battle: Initiate a battle. » March: Take up to two moves. » Recruit: Place one warrior at each recruiter. You may take this action only once per turn. » Build: Place one building

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 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,vps

answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)

gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70

timings

search 87 ms · ask 3875 ms · total 3963 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 0 ms · generation 3963 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

[{"page": 2, "score": 0.028442, "snippet": "Root is a fast-paced game of adventure and war. You will play as one of four factions vying to show that you are the most legitimate ruler of the vast Woodland. Marquise de Cat Whenever any Marquise warriors are removed, you may spend a card matching their clearing to place those warriors in the cle", "headingPath": "Introduction", "sharpsignalDocId": 75}, {"page": 24, "score": 0.026333, "snippet": "Warriors, which can move around the map and battle pieces of other players. /They add to rule. Buildings, which start on faction boards and can be placed in empty slots in clearings. /They add to rule. Ruins, which fill slots in clearings. /The Vagabond can explore ruins to find items and empty thei", "headingPath": "Piece Glossary", "sharpsignalDocId": 75}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.025873, "snippet": "Your Relationships chart represents how friendly or hostile other factions are toward you. You can improve a relationship with a faction by giving them cards with the Aid action. During the same turn, you must take the Aid action the number of times shown between their current relationship space and", "headingPath": "Relationships", "sharpsignalDocId": 75}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.025526, "snippet": "On the winter map, the randomness of clearing suits can introduce many new challenges to each faction. Keep the map's geography in mind when picking factions, and understand that certain factions may gain new advantages and disadvantages in each possible layout. A Note from Leder Games : Sometimes e", "headingPath": "A Warning", "sharpsignalDocId": 75}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.025189, "snippet": "First, you can cra/ft any cards in your hand using workshops. /Then, you can take up to three of the following actions. » Battle: Initiate a battle. » March: Take up to two moves. » Recruit: Place one warrior at each recruiter. You may take this action only once per turn. » Build: Place one building", "headingPath": "Daylight", "sharpsignalDocId": 75}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.024411, "snippet": "You may take the following actions. Unlike in Birdsong, these cards come from your hand, not your supporters. » Cra/ft: Cra/ft a card, using sympathy tokens. » Mobilize: Add a card to the Supporters stack. » Train: Spend a card whose suit matches a built base to place a warrior in the Officers box. ", "headingPath": "Daylight", "sharpsignalDocId": 75}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.023854, "snippet": "Most action in Root unfolds on the map of the Woodland, consisting of 12 clearings connected by paths . R A river runs through some clearings. Only use the river if the Riverfolk Company, an expansion faction, is in play.", "headingPath": "The Map", "sharpsignalDocId": 75}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.023402, "snippet": "+0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +4 +5 Outrage When a player removes sympathy or moves any warriors into a sympathetic clearing, that player must add a matching card from Guerrilla War In battle as defender, you use the higher Crafted Items Vagabond can give you cards to take these items. their hand to your supporter", "headingPath": "Daylight", "sharpsignalDocId": 75}]

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 75 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true

base rulebook doc 75 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 12, 2026 23:34

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. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.

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 Root — Learning to Play (corpus doc 75)	Introduction	p.2	0.028442 (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 Root — Learning to Play (corpus doc 75)	Piece Glossary	p.24	0.026333 (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 Root — Learning to Play (corpus doc 75)	Relationships	p.19	0.025873 (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 Root — Learning to Play (corpus doc 75)	A Warning	p.23	0.025526 (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 Root — Learning to Play (corpus doc 75)	Daylight	p.10	0.025189 (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 Root — Learning to Play (corpus doc 75)	Daylight	p.16	0.024411 (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 Root — Learning to Play (corpus doc 75)	The Map	p.5	0.023854 (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))	221
#8	RULEBOOK Root — Learning to Play (corpus doc 75)	Daylight	p.18	0.023402 (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.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 80 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.

floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.

arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Root: The Marauder Expansion — Rulebook (corpus doc 900)	Hirelings	p.12	#9	0.016393 (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))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Root: The Marauder Expansion — Rulebook (corpus doc 900)	Advanced Setup · Advanced Setup in Detail	p.17	#40	0.010753 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Root — Law of Root (corpus doc 56)	H.3 Rules	p.26	#18	0.014286 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Root: The Marauder Expansion — Rulebook (corpus doc 900)		p.1	#23	0.013333 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Root — Law of Root (corpus doc 56)	G. Glossary	p.25	#24	0.013158 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Root: The Marauder Expansion — Rulebook (corpus doc 900)		p.20	#26	0.012821 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Root: The Marauder Expansion — Rulebook (corpus doc 900)	Are hirelings considered enemy pieces? · Can I add hireling warriors to my own warriors when moving or battling? · Do hirelings count as my faction pieces? · Can I play an ambush card if someone is battling my hireling? · Can I take actions with my hirelings in ways outside the hireling's card? · Can my hirelings use my abilities? · …	p.16	#14	0.015152 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Root — Law of Root (corpus doc 56)	C.4 Marauder Expansion	p.24	#12	0.015625 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 87 ms · first delta 3846 ms · total 3963 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 87 ms · ask 3875 ms · gateway work 3963 ms · total 3963 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3024
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 140.6 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.064 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 38s 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: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 6), 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.