Your quest, scrawled on a stained rag by the Reeve: “The Duke’s new war-automaton has gone berserk and is turning the eastern pastures into craters. Also, old Widow Hagstone’s well is making a wet groaning noise. Fix both. Reward: a full chicken and not being evicted.”

And you do. You reach into your sack. You pull out not a weapon, but a (polished scrap), a gear (salvaged from a child’s toy), and a single daisy (from Widow Hagstone’s garden). You assemble the Empathy Engine . It doesn’t change Rustmore by force. It simply reflects his own loneliness back at him, amplified by the gear’s rhythm and the flower’s fragility.

For the first time, he sees that breaking things didn’t make him strong. It made him a broken thing himself.

– You use the Sack of Startlement (a burlap bag containing a spring-loaded fake snake, a squeaker, and a jar of angry fireflies). No one is hurt. Several guards flee in tearful confusion. One laughs so hard he drops his keys.

Broken plowshares, bent nails, shattered lanterns. You find Scrap everywhere. You hoard it. You smell faintly of rust.

A resource that builds when you fail. Every time a contraption backfires, a lever snaps, or a spring launches a bucket into your face, you gain +1 Ingenuity. At 5 Ingenuity, you unlock a “Redneck Patent”—an improvised solution that shouldn’t work but absolutely will.