Ruling — Earthborne Rangers

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Earthborne Rangersbg-342900-en-1e

To set up the game, perform the following steps in order:

1. If starting a brand new campaign, go to the Getting Started section on page 9 and choose one of the options listed there.[1]

2. Place your aspect card, role card, and common test reference card in your player area.[1]

3. Shuffle your Ranger deck and place it in your player area.[1]

4. Place a number of energy tokens equal to their corresponding aspect values onto your aspect card.[1]

5. Draw six cards from your Ranger deck (you may use a Mulligan to set aside any number of cards and draw an equivalent number of new cards, then shuffle the set-aside cards back into your Ranger deck).[1]

6. Together, choose a Ranger to be the lead Ranger.[1]

7. Shuffle the challenge deck and place it above the surroundings.[1]

8. Place your current location in the surroundings.[1]

9. If continuing a campaign, check the 'current location' line of your campaign tracker.[1]

10. Find the weather card (or cards) noted below the current day on your campaign tracker, and place it in the surroundings to the left of the location with the side named on the campaign tracker faceup.[2]

11. Find the corresponding cards for each uncompleted mission on your campaign tracker and place them in the surroundings to the right of the location.[2]

12. Build the path deck by adding all path cards from the set matching the terrain you were traveling on at the end of the previous day as noted on your campaign tracker.[2]

13. If at a pivotal location, add all path cards from the set matching that location; if not at a pivotal location, add three random cards from the Valley set.[2]

14. Add any other cards added by missions in play.[2]

15. Shuffle those cards together and place them above the surroundings.[2]

16. Read the campaign entry marked on the back of the location card.[2]

17. Perform all setup instructions on the back of the location card.[2]

18. Place any tokens as dictated by the cards in play, and resolve any instructions on weather or missions labeled 'Start of Day'.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook · p.10 · GAME SETUP · SET UP PLAYER AREAS 1 · DRAW STARTING HAND · ELECT THE LEAD RANGER 3 · SHUFFLE THE CHALLENGE DECK 4 · SET UP THE STARTING LOCATION 5

[2] RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook · p.11 · SET UP THE WEATHER CARD 6 · SET UP MISSION CARDS 7 · BUILD AND SHUFFLE THE PATH DECK 8 · RESOLVE ARRIVAL SETUP 9 · FINISHING TOUCHES 10

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 101 ms · ask 7580 ms · total 7689 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7689 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 10, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "To set up the game, perform the following steps in order. If you are starting a brand new campaign, go to the Getting Started section on page 9 and choose one of the options listed there. Place your aspect card, role card, and common test reference card in your player area. Shuffle your Ranger deck ", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP · SET UP PLAYER AREAS 1 · DRAW STARTING HAND · ELECT THE LEAD RANGER 3 · SHUFFLE THE CHALLENGE DECK 4 · SET UP THE STARTING LOCATION 5", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.046964, "snippet": "The play area is broken up into four distinct areas: The Surroundings: The surroundings set the stage for the game. They contain the cards representing the current location, the weather, and any missions the Rangers are trying to accomplish. Along the Way: When path cards are drawn, they are either ", "headingPath": "THE PLAY AREA · GETTING STARTED", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.046875, "snippet": "PLAYING A CAMPAIGN The story of Earthborne Rangers unfolds over a campaign across multiple play sessions, with each session representing one day. What you do each day is up to you. You can complete missions to progress the story, or you can head out and explore to uncover emergent moments and object", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "To build the path deck for your new location, combine several sets of path cards: Terrain Set: The locations in the Valley can be vast areas, and the path you take can dramatically change your experience of them. The terrain you travel across determines what kinds of features and wildlife you will e", "headingPath": "4. BUILD THE PATH DECK · 5. ARRIVAL SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.045285, "snippet": "hey reproduce, The story of Earthborne Rangers unfolds over a campaign across multiple play sessions, with each session representing one day. What you do each day is up to you. You can complete missions to progress the story, or you can head out and explore to uncover emergent moments and objectives", "headingPath": "PLAYING A CAMPAIGN", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.043364, "snippet": "To start a campaign of Earthborne Rangers , you build your own custom Ranger character. You'll bring all the cards you need together in a way that tells the story of who your Ranger is, how they spent their formative years, and what specialized training they've received before they completed the tri", "headingPath": "CREATING YOUR RANGER · RANGER CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Find the weather card (or cards) noted below the current day on your campaign tracker, and place it in the surroundings to the left of the location with the side named on the campaign tracker faceup. Read any campaign guide entries listed above the current day. Find the corresponding cards for each ", "headingPath": "SET UP THE WEATHER CARD 6 · SET UP MISSION CARDS 7 · BUILD AND SHUFFLE THE PATH DECK 8 · RESOLVE ARRIVAL SETUP 9 · FINISHING TOUCHES 10", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 29, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "The last page of the campaign guide is a tracking sheet that can be used to keep track of your campaign progress. You can also find a printable PDF of this sheet at earthbornegames.com . This sheet tracks all the information you need to reference during your campaign: At the end of each day, record ", "headingPath": "CAMPAIGN TRACKER · CURRENT POSITION · DAY TRACK · MISSIONS · REWARDS · NOTABLE EVENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP · SET UP PLAYER AREAS 1 · DRAW STARTING HAND · ELECT THE LEAD RANGER 3 · SHUFFLE THE CHALLENGE DECK 4 · SET UP THE STARTING LOCATION 5", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SET UP THE WEATHER CARD 6 · SET UP MISSION CARDS 7 · BUILD AND SHUFFLE THE PATH DECK 8 · RESOLVE ARRIVAL SETUP 9 · FINISHING TOUCHES 10", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 511 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 511 boosted
answered-before recall: this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.91652 of 1677 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 16, 2026 05:52

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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	GAME SETUP · SET UP PLAYER AREAS 1 · DRAW STARTING HAND · ELECT THE LEAD RANGER 3 · SHUFFLE THE CHALLENGE DECK 4 · SET UP THE STARTING LOCATION 5	p.10	0.048916 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	THE PLAY AREA · GETTING STARTED	p.9	0.046964 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)		p.28	0.046875 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	4. BUILD THE PATH DECK · 5. ARRIVAL SETUP	p.15	0.045695 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	PLAYING A CAMPAIGN	p.28	0.045285 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	CREATING YOUR RANGER · RANGER CARDS	p.32	0.043364 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	SET UP THE WEATHER CARD 6 · SET UP MISSION CARDS 7 · BUILD AND SHUFFLE THE PATH DECK 8 · RESOLVE ARRIVAL SETUP 9 · FINISHING TOUCHES 10	p.11	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
#8	RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	CAMPAIGN TRACKER · CURRENT POSITION · DAY TRACK · MISSIONS · REWARDS · NOTABLE EVENTS	p.29	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

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 — not 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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	GAME SETUP · SET UP PLAYER AREAS 1 · DRAW STARTING HAND · ELECT THE LEAD RANGER 3 · SHUFFLE THE CHALLENGE DECK 4 · SET UP THE STARTING LOCATION 5	p.10	#1	0.048916 (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 + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)		p.3	#9	0.028739 (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 + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	CUSTOMIZING DIFFICULTY WITH WEATHER	p.30	#13	0.027418 (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 + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	CREATING YOUR RANGER · RANGER CARDS	p.32	#6	0.043364 (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 + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	SET UP THE WEATHER CARD 6 · SET UP MISSION CARDS 7 · BUILD AND SHUFFLE THE PATH DECK 8 · RESOLVE ARRIVAL SETUP 9 · FINISHING TOUCHES 10	p.11	#7	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	THE PLAY AREA · GETTING STARTED	p.9	#2	0.046964 (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 + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	4. BUILD THE PATH DECK · 5. ARRIVAL SETUP	p.15	#4	0.045695 (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 + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	OBSTACLE · PERSISTENT · SETUP · UNIQUE	p.27	#27	0.0125 (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
[1]	RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	GAME SETUP · SET UP PLAYER AREAS 1 · DRAW STARTING HAND · ELECT THE LEAD RANGER 3 · SHUFFLE THE CHALLENGE DECK 4 · SET UP THE STARTING LOCATION 5	p.10	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	SET UP THE WEATHER CARD 6 · SET UP MISSION CARDS 7 · BUILD AND SHUFFLE THE PATH DECK 8 · RESOLVE ARRIVAL SETUP 9 · FINISHING TOUCHES 10	p.11	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 101 ms · first delta 5297 ms · total 7689 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 101 ms · ask 7580 ms · gateway work 7689 ms · total 7689 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2449
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 481
tok/sec: 205.0 tok/sec — 481 output tokens in 2.346 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 6s 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: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

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: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 440), 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.