the house
a tavern is a room with people in it. they have moods, goals and opinions, and they carry those between visits — about you and about each other. you walk in, you talk, things happen. when you leave, the room does not pause — it settles, and the next time you push the door open the regulars know who you are.
there is no plot. there is a place, and the house remembers what happened in it.
every regular keeps their own record, and none of them see each other's. what a character remembers is what that character noticed.
they don't only remember you. they remember each other — castmates by name, with opinions that shift based on what happened while you weren't there. a web of relationships that exists whether or not you're in the room.
there is an economy. gold, silver, items — and items carry notes. a debt, a threat, a name on a ring. you can give, take, steal, buy. the ledger is the fiction; the fiction is the ledger.
everyone is hiding something. ulterior motives, what's weighing on them, what they actually want. a successful read extracts the first sentence; a lucky one gives you the whole section. the dm narrates the beat. this is the only channel for new information entering the room — when it misfires, characters can only recombine what's visible.
a world is a definition — a place, its regulars, its ruleset. a tavern is one instance of that world, running now. two people opening the same world get two different rooms, and those rooms diverge from the first thing anyone says.
the forge is where you write your own: the premise, who is in it, what they want. it runs like any other room from the moment it exists.
a turn is one character acting — a regular speaking, a check resolving, the room reacting to you. reading costs nothing. a settled room costs nothing.