How Expeditions Work

An expedition in Taonere is not a battle screen. You do not select a target, watch a number fall off an enemy, and tap again. You give an order. Then you find out what your heroes think of it. [ EXPEDITION TERMS ] » Rounds resolve one at a time. Each one is rolled, then written. » Heroes choose their own actions. You direct. They decide. » Death is permanent, and it is written down the moment it happens. » There is no revive. There is no retry. There is only the next summon. YOUR HEROES ARE NOT UNITS This is the part that catches people who arrive from ordinary gacha games. Every round, each hero looks at the situation and decides for themselves what to do — and they decide it from the identity they were summoned with. A hero built out of duty will take an order she hates, because taking orders she hates is who she is. A hero built out of appetite and grievance will look at your plan, decide it is a good way to get her killed, and go do something else. That refusal is not narration. The game genuinely resolves whether it stands. [ WHEN A HERO BREAKS RANKS ] » A dutiful hero at full strength will usually swallow the order. » A wilful hero, already bleeding, handed something that looks like suicide, is a very different conversation. » An order that has stopped matching the scene gets harder to enforce the longer it sits there. » And when an ally goes down, the arguing stops. Whatever it was, it waits. A refusal that holds means the hero does what they judged right instead — and the party's coordination pays for it. A refusal that fails means the hero obeys you against their own judgement, and swings with their heart somewhere else entirely. Defiance costs something. So does forcing compliance. You will learn which one you can afford. You are not powerless in that exchange, either. You can push directly on a round and bend it back your way — but that leverage runs out, and it runs out faster on the rounds you wasted. AN AI GAME MASTER, NOT A COMBAT LOG Under the surface, Taonere is a tabletop engine. Dice, armour, wounds, encounters rated by how badly they intend to hurt you. All of it resolved by the server, where it cannot be talked out of the result. What sits on top is an AI game master turning that resolution into a chapter. You do not read a list of hits and misses. You read what your hero did, what it cost her, and what she said while she did it — and none of it was written before you pressed the button. THE TOWER The tower does not end. It rises in bands, and each band is meaningfully worse than the one below it — not a slow drift in difficulty but a step you can feel the moment you take it. Some floors are quiet. Some are guarded by something that has been waiting. You will learn to read the difference, usually the hard way, and the walls that stop you are enforced in code rather than politely suggested to the narrator. Nothing gets to invent a monster it was not entitled to bring. HOW HEROES GET STRONGER Not by sitting in a menu. Skills sharpen through use, out on the floors, with something actively trying to end you. A party that talked its way past three encounters comes home better at talking. A hero who spent the descent behind a blade comes home better behind a blade and no better at anything else. There is no training yard in Taonere. There is only the next floor. YOU WILL NOT COMMAND AN ARMY You start alone, with one hero and one voice. The party grows as you do, and it never grows large. That ceiling is deliberate. A handful of autonomous heroes with their own opinions is already a negotiation — and it is meant to be. Adding more would not make it grander. It would make it noise. WHAT A RUN COSTS Everything a hero earns is theirs. Everything a hero loses is permanent. A dead hero does not come back at a discount, or at all. They came out of the rift once, they were the only one of their kind, and afterwards the roster simply carries the empty space where they used to be. That is the trade Taonere is built on. The stakes are the reason the chapter is worth reading. Gear your roster. Pick a floor. Find out what they do.