Ruling — Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalonbg-264220-en-1e

After all players have set up their Characters, follow these steps for campaign setup:

1. Set the Starting Location (for the Fall of Avalon, use Location card 101) by placing it in the middle of your play space and placing all starting Character models there.[1]

2. Place one Menhir model on the Starting Location and put a Dial in the slot under it, setting the Dial to 8 for 1 player, 7 for 2 players, 6 for 3 players, or 5 for 4 players.[1]

3. Build the starting section of the map by checking the four Direction Keys on the edges of your Starting Location and attaching the corresponding Location cards to their matching Direction Keys.[1]

4. Prepare the Encounter cards by taking all Encounters and sorting them by color into four piles of 3/31 cards each, including a special "Your First Encounter" card.[1]

5. Prepare the Secret and Item decks by placing all Item and Secret cards into two piles next to the Encounters; you may sort Secret cards by number and must shuffle the Item deck.[1]

6. Take a fresh Save sheet to save your game and mark permanent Statuses.[1]

7. Distribute Help cards, giving each player one Icon Guide card and one Turn Order card (with the Action list on the back), while leaving the Combat/Diplomacy Help card on the table.[1]

8. (Optional) Designate one player as a Chronicler to help maintain game flow.[1][2]

9. Set up the first Chapter by finding the Chapter I Setup card and following its instructions to build the Event and Encounter decks, then shuffle all Random Event cards and place them aside.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook · p.7

[2] RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook · p.7

The table has its answer — dice up.

🔧 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 86 ms · ask 7596 ms · total 7683 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7683 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "VII) Create your 15-card Combat and Diplomacy starter decks. Pick the 15 basic Combat and the 15 basic Diplomacy cards with a banner that matches your Tray's color (see illustration below). The banner is located under the card's name. Shuffle these cards and place them to the left (Combat) and right", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "II) The Chronicler or all players save the state of the world: 1) Use your Save Sheet to note the current Location of all Character models, Guardian models, Menhir models, and special Dials, as well as the current value of each Dial. 2) Remove all models, Dials and tokens, and place them in the box.", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.046154, "snippet": "VII) Distribute Help cards. Each player should receive one Icon Guide card, and one Turn Order card with the Action list on the back. Leave the Combat / Diplomacy Help card on the table. VIII) Optional: pick your Chronicler. Designating one player as a Chronicler helps to maintain the flow of the ga", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.044982, "snippet": "X) The first day of your journey has started. Go to the 'Play- e 7 N R world seTup After all players have set up their Characters, follow the steps below. I) Set the Starting Location. The Starting Location for the Fall of Avalon is Location card 101. Place your Starting Location in the middle of yo", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.044002, "snippet": "Your Character will Travel from one Location card to another, spending Energy and revealing more Locations. To progress further, you often must activate one of the Menhir statues scattered throughout the realm. These monuments go dark after some time, and activating them requires considerable Resour", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.042671, "snippet": "aken KEN REA III) Place the T-shaped (Health) marker in the slot. It is also highlighted with two red chevrons. 6 track VIII) Create your 25-card Combat and Diplomacy Advance - N R CharaCTer seTup Each player completes the following steps separately. I) Choose your Character. Take this Character's c", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "In that case, mark status 'Saved by the Goddess' on your Save Sheet and go to Verse 500 in the Book of Secrets. This will restart you at the beginning of the Chapter with some pre-defined resources, but will let you continue your game. IMPORTANT: Relying on higher powers to keep you alive is not an ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 24, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "If 'You Are Going Insane', read the Nightmare instead of the Dream. guardians These dangerous enemies will keep roaming the area even after you Escape (see: Escaping Combat). If you Escaped from a Guardian Encounter, place its card on the Location where you have triggered it. At the start of each da", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 390 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 390 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 0.92689 of 1272 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 23, 2026 09:07 UTC

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	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.6	0.048139 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.13	0.048131 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.7	0.046154 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.7	0.044982 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.4	0.044002 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.6	0.042671 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.13	0.03125 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.24	0.029412 (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	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.7	#4	0.044982 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.4	#5	0.044002 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.2	#10	0.027778 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.6	#6	0.042671 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.14	#11	0.026944 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.22	#14	0.02532 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.6	#1	0.048139 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.7	#3	0.046154 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)		p.7	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)		p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 86 ms · first delta 4813 ms · total 7683 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 86 ms · ask 7596 ms · gateway work 7683 ms · total 7683 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4409
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 365
tok/sec: 132.4 tok/sec — 365 output tokens in 2.757 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 22s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 1s ago)
answerer node (the seat proxy's own header — this probe, not this ask): node1
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 319), 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.