Canon Foundation
The first game connects Auburn, Armacham headquarters, the South River Wastewater Treatment Plant, and the Rammelmeier Industrial Compound with the hidden Origin facility. Sequel material adds other research locations, including the facility beneath Wade Elementary. The campaign map arranges selected locations into a usable area; it does not claim the games supply this exact road plan. [S2, S9, S23, S24]
Using The Map
North is the top of the image by campaign convention. The river occupies the eastern side; a freight waterfront lies to the southeast. Downtown and the corporate towers are northeast of the civic streets. Residential blocks lie northwest of Auburn. The southwest industrial area includes Rammelmeier. Circular water-treatment tanks are visible near the lower center. The fenced compound in the northwest corner is assigned to Perseus for this campaign.
The separate key gives approximate placement positions as percentages from the left and top. These are editing aids for adding Friends & Fables pins, not geographical coordinates. The image contains no printed labels or grid. Do not use its artistic scale to infer exact distances. Travel is local but variable: a clear trip across adjacent districts may take minutes, while traffic, a closure, or a search can make it much longer.
Visible Places And Hidden Places
The city overview can be player-facing. The Vault and the nature of the underground Origin facility must remain GM-only until discovered. Their surface access shares a pin area with Rammelmeier; a city map should not openly display an enormous label revealing the central mystery. Likewise, the school can exist publicly without its hidden research purpose appearing in its public POI description.
Each location has a public description, a physical appearance, and separate GM information. Public descriptions say what a visitor could know. GM notes explain which leads can occur there and which details are original. A location should offer more than one interaction: asking a worker, observing a delivery, checking a record, helping someone, or arranging a legitimate visit can all move a story.
Opening Leads
The first original lead is a contractor discrepancy. A routine municipal entry shows a supposedly dormant Auburn property drawing new service work. A second copy of the order survives in a subcontractor's billing system. Marquez can obtain one side of the paper trail, while an employee or neighborhood contact can provide the other. The discrepancy points toward Rammelmeier without exposing the Vault on the first page.
The second lead is a pattern of disturbed sleep. Reed has seen patients describing the same long hallway, though he initially treats this as a clinical and social question. With appropriate consent, he can discuss anonymized patterns. A patient may volunteer to speak; no character needs to steal medical files to enter this thread. One report can be mistaken while another contains a verifiable detail.
The third lead is a frightened employee. Alice or Bishop notices an inconsistency while working on the Auburn study. An ordinary meeting, not an immediate firefight, allows the player to hear the concern. Corporate pressure increases if records leave controlled channels. The specific meeting, warning, and document trail are campaign inventions grounded in their established work.
These leads are independent. The player can ignore one without losing the campaign. Two can converge on the same conclusion through different evidence. A character with unusual abilities may notice an additional layer, but no route requires a power the player has not chosen.
Four Pressures
Track four qualitative pressures: site access, corporate suppression, Fettel's instability, and public alarm. These are GM tools invented for this campaign, not official mechanics. Use quiet, developing, urgent, and critical as descriptive stages. Advance a pressure when something in the fiction changes. Do not advance all four simply because a session ends.
Site access grows as inspections and restricted work approach the buried facility. Corporate suppression grows when sensitive evidence escapes control. Fettel's instability grows when the story establishes renewed psychic contact or credible symptoms. Public alarm grows when incidents become visible and corroborated. Each pressure should produce an observable effect before reaching its most dangerous stage.
Intervention Matters
Stopping a work order can slow access, but management may seek another route. Protecting an employee can preserve testimony, but their absence may attract attention. An honest conversation with Alma may change a local manifestation without resolving the corporate program. Interventions can succeed completely at their immediate goal while creating further decisions. Avoid erasing every success with an unseen superior countermeasure.
If the player exposes enough evidence early, authorities may act sooner than in the source plot. If they prioritize rescuing one person, another institution may continue working. If they cooperate with Armacham, they may gain access at the price of being observed or used. Give these choices consequences without labeling one correct route in advance.
If The First Crisis Begins
A Fettel-led Replica uprising becomes a major change in the setting. Communications, traffic, medical capacity, witness safety, and corporate decisions all react. Introduce the event through what characters actually experience: an interrupted briefing, a blocked route, conflicting reports, or a person asking for help. Do not teleport every NPC to their canonical encounter position.
A citywide disaster is not required to sustain the campaign. It can remain an investigation into a concealed threat, become a rescue-and-containment story, or diverge toward a struggle over what to do with the old facility. The player may prevent some events and fail to prevent others. Update the setting rather than restoring the game's sequence.
Franz Continuity Rules
Maintain the selected starting state, the player's chosen identity, the knowledge of each active NPC, and the results of actual scenes. Do not grant the protagonist a secret family connection, force a romance, kill a rescued NPC to match canon, or reveal GM secrets in casual public dialogue. Use the NPC portrayal notes as guidance, not dialogue scripts. Keep Alma's intentions partly uncertain while making her actions consequential.
When an event contradicts the original game because of play, record the divergence explicitly. Canon supplies history up to the opening and a plausible trajectory afterward. The campaign supplies the lived future.