Ruling — Betrayal at Baldur's Gate

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Betrayal at Baldur's Gatebg-228660-en-1e

Before the haunt begins:

1. Set aside the Traitor's Tome and Secrets of Survival haunt books.[1]

2. Each player chooses an adventurer card and picks one side.[1]

3. Attach 4 plastic clips to your adventurer card, pointing to the starting values for Might, Speed, Knowledge, and Sanity.[1]

4. Shuffle the omen, item, and event cards and place them in face down stacks where everyone can reach them.[1]

5. Find the two longer starting tiles: the Elfsong Tavern/Inner Chamber/Kitchen tile, and the Catacomb Landing/Kitchen Basement tile.[1]

6. Separate the remaining tiles by their back and shuffle each of the three stacks, placing them face down where everyone can reach them.[1]

7. Each player places their adventurer's plastic figure on the Elfsong Tavern.[1]

8. Put the dice in a pile within easy reach.[1]

9. Determine who goes first by randomly distributing player aid cards (numbered 1-6); the player with the lowest-numbered card takes the first turn.[1]

10. Players take turns going to the left following the first adventurer, exploring the city.[1]

If a haunt features a hidden traitor:

1. Count out small monster tokens of one color, numbered 1 up to the number of players.[2]

2. Shuffle the tokens and deal one face down to each player with the 'S' showing.[2]

3. The player with the token numbered 1 is the traitor.[2]

4. Play continues from the person to the left of the haunt revealer and to the left as normal.[2]

At the start of a haunt:

1. The traitor takes the Traitor's Tome and leaves the room to read the starting haunt and necessary rules.[3]

2. The remaining players become heroes and read the haunt in Secrets of Survival together.[3]

3. The traitor returns to the room once everyone is ready.[3]

4. The heroes and the traitor perform any actions the haunt instructs in its "Right Now" section.[3]

5. The first turn starts with the player to the traitor's left and continues to the left away from the traitor.[3]

6. Each hero takes a hero turn.[3]

7. After each hero has taken a turn, the traitor takes a traitor turn.[3]

8. After the traitor turn, any monsters controlled by the traitor get a monster turn.[3]

9. The cycle continues with the first hero to the left of the traitor taking a turn.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook · p.3 · SETUP · RULES | 5 · HOW TO PLAY

[2] RULEBOOK Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook · p.8 · Haunts with a Hidden Traitor

[3] RULEBOOK Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook · p.7 · HAUNT SETUP · PLAYING THE HAUNT

One rule clearer, zero feelings hurt.

🔧 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 175 ms · ask 6579 ms · total 6755 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6755 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.039655, "snippet": "w Set aside the Traitor's Tome and Secrets of Survival haunt books. You'll use them after the haunt is revealed. w Each player chooses an adventurer card. There's a different adventurer on each side of an adventurer card. Pick one. w Attach 4 plastic clips to your adventurer card . Each one should p", "headingPath": "SETUP · RULES | 5 · HOW TO PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1224}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "You can perform 6 different kinds of actions during each of your turns. You can perform these actions in any order, as often as each type allows in a turn. w Move (page 6) . w Discover a new tile (page 7) . w Use item and omen cards (page 9) . w Attempt a die roll (page 10) . w Use your adventurer p", "headingPath": "ON YOUR TURN · What type of tile am I on? · MOVE · Moving Between Levels", "sharpsignalDocId": 1224}, {"page": 31, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Once per turn, you may climb up or down from any tile (including annihilated ones). t Climb Down: Attempt a Speed 3+ roll while on a street or building tile, placing your adventurer figure on any annihilated catacomb-level tile (or the Catacomb Landing if none are annihilated) on a success. On a fai", "headingPath": "CLIMBING UP OR DOWN · IF YOU WIN . . .", "sharpsignalDocId": 1224}, {"page": 30, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "You may move through any walls or false features as if they were connected doors.. You rummage through the dead adventurers' sacks of loot, finding your beautiful pipes and clutching them in your claws. Never again will you let them out of your sight!", "headingPath": "SPECIAL MOVEMENT RULES · IF YOU WIN . . .", "sharpsignalDocId": 1224}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Many times during the game, you'll need to roll one or more dice . Each die has faces with 0, 1, or 2 dots. There's no limit to how many times in a turn you can roll dice. For example, you might need to make a die roll for a card you drew by moving onto a tile that also requires a die roll. You can'", "headingPath": "ATTEMPT A DIE ROLL", "sharpsignalDocId": 1224}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "You must place the tile with a door adjacent to the door you just exited, and attempt to connect any other doors on the tile as much as possible. You do not need to match colored door frames; they are referenced only when exiting. The adventurer then moves onto the tile and discovers it. See 'Discov", "headingPath": "GLOSSARY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1224}, {"page": 65, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Your party has been poisoned and must find a Potion of Vitality before you perish! The DM will guide you through the remainder of this haunt, revealing events each turn that might thwart or help your efforts. . . . half the starting heroes (rounded up) have been cured of the poison. The DM has a han", "headingPath": "WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE SITUATION · YOU WIN WHEN . . . · YOU MUST DO THIS AT THE START OF YOUR TURN · YOU MUST DO THIS AT THE END OF YOUR TURN · HOW TO FIND A POTION · TESTING A POTION · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1224}, {"page": 63, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "If you start your turn on a flooded tile that doesn't also contain the Apparatus of Kwalish, you must succeed at a Speed 4+ roll or drown! If you drown, Olhydra transforms you into a Morkoth. The traitor will explain what happens (it actually tickles a bit). As you hammer the last pipe onto the fram", "headingPath": "YOU MUST DO THIS AT THE START OF YOUR TURN · APPARATUS OF KWALISH · SPECIAL APPARATUS OF KWALISH RULES · HOW TO CONSTRUCT THE APPARATUS OF KWALISH", "sharpsignalDocId": 1224}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP · RULES | 5 · HOW TO PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1224}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Haunts with a Hidden Traitor", "sharpsignalDocId": 1224}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "HAUNT SETUP · PLAYING THE HAUNT", "sharpsignalDocId": 1224}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1224 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1224 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 0.90440 of 1841 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 6, 2026 12:40 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	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	SETUP · RULES \| 5 · HOW TO PLAY	p.3	0.039655 (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 Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	ON YOUR TURN · What type of tile am I on? · MOVE · Moving Between Levels	p.4	0.032787 (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 Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	CLIMBING UP OR DOWN · IF YOU WIN . . .	p.31	0.032258 (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 Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	SPECIAL MOVEMENT RULES · IF YOU WIN . . .	p.30	0.031746 (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))	251
#5	RULEBOOK Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	ATTEMPT A DIE ROLL	p.6	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
#6	RULEBOOK Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	GLOSSARY	p.9	0.030769 (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 Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE SITUATION · YOU WIN WHEN . . . · YOU MUST DO THIS AT THE START OF YOUR TURN · YOU MUST DO THIS AT THE END OF YOUR TURN · HOW TO FIND A POTION · TESTING A POTION · …	p.65	0.030303 (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 Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	YOU MUST DO THIS AT THE START OF YOUR TURN · APPARATUS OF KWALISH · SPECIAL APPARATUS OF KWALISH RULES · HOW TO CONSTRUCT THE APPARATUS OF KWALISH	p.63	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	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	SETUP · RULES \| 5 · HOW TO PLAY	p.3	#1	0.039655 (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 Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	Haunts with a Hidden Traitor	p.8	#31	0.014925 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	HAUNT SETUP · PLAYING THE HAUNT	p.7	#10	0.026748 (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 Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	RIGHT NOW · WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE TRAITOR · YOU WIN WHEN . . . · YOU MUST DO THIS AT THE START OF YOUR TURN · DISCOVERING NEW TILES · MIND TICKLERS	p.64	#18	0.023138 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	KITCHEN/KITCHEN BASEMENT · TRADING POST · WEAPON SHOP/WEAPON SHOP BASEMENT · What if There Isn't a Rule For That?	p.11	#36	0.014085 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	IF YOU WIN . . .	p.25	#20	0.022791 (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 Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	YOU MUST DO THIS AT THE START OF YOUR TURN · SANITY SPILL · SABOTAGING THE EXECUTIONER'S BLOCK · BEHEADING	p.60	#14	0.024568 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	GLOSSARY	p.9	#74	0.009524 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	SETUP · RULES \| 5 · HOW TO PLAY	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	Haunts with a Hidden Traitor	p.8	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Betrayal at Baldur's Gate — Rulebook (corpus doc 1224)	HAUNT SETUP · PLAYING THE HAUNT	p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 175 ms · first delta 3966 ms · total 6755 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 175 ms · ask 6579 ms · gateway work 6755 ms · total 6755 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2993
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 554
tok/sec: 202.2 tok/sec — 554 output tokens in 2.740 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 14s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 4s 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: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 1154), 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.