Ruling — Primal: The Awakening

← Primal: The Awakening

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Primal: The Awakeningbg-303731-en-1e

To set up a scenario, follow these steps:

1. Place the combat board in the center of the table.[1]

2. Place the monster miniature in the center of the combat board so that the front sector is the bottom one.[1]

3. Place the hunter miniatures in the front sector.[1]

4. Place terrain tokens as shown in the image: Brush (4a), Cyricae (4b), Baethanis (4c).[1]

5. Place the round marker on the first space of the Round track.[1]

6. Keep all tokens indicated on page 13 (General Components) near the board.[1]

7. Set up the monster area as shown in the image.[1]

8. Place the monster board near the combat board, as shown in the image.[1]

9. Place the health marker on 10 on the Health track on the monster board.[1]

10. Shuffle the behavior cards to form the behavior deck and place it near the monster board.[1]

11. Place the Stance I card and its associated peril and objective cards below the monster board.[1]

12. Shuffle the base attrition cards to form the attrition deck and place it near the monster board.[1]

13. Each player performs the following steps:

a. Place your hunter board in front of you on the table.[2]

b. Place your starting equipment and potion cards on your hunter board in the spaces that correspond to their icons.[2]

c. Shuffle your action deck and place it to the left of your hunter board.[2]

d. Place the mastery card associated with your action deck face down (with the unfocused side face up) to the right of your hunter board.[2]

14. Assign the aggro token to one of the players.[2]

15. Each player draws 5 cards from their action deck to form their starting hand.[2]

16. Take the top 3 cards from the behavior deck and place them face down on the monster board in the three behavior slots.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook · p.16 · SETUP INSTRUCTIONS

[2] RULEBOOK Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook · p.17

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 178 ms · ask 3364 ms · total 3545 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 3545 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 60, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "The Hunt phase consists of playing the scenario associated with the active quest. Find the scenario that matches the active quest number in the Campaign book (all the scenarios are in numerical order in the Campaign book, starting on page 43). First, read the narrative introduction, and then set up ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 56, "score": 0.04612, "snippet": "Each time you start a new campaign, you begin with the Prologue scenario (page 3). After successfully completing the Prologue, follow the steps below to set up the campaign: 55 1. Place the quest board in the center of the table. 2. Assemble the quest deck by putting together all the quest cards fro", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 38, "score": 0.044388, "snippet": "CAMPAIGN RULES To successfully complete the campaign, players must complete all 11 chapters of the story. A chapter is complete, and players move on to the next chapter, when they successfully complete a quest from those available for that chapter. Note: If you play with the Hunter’s Trial variant r", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.044023, "snippet": "Follow the steps below to set up the scenario. Note: The image shows an example of a 2 player setup. Place the combat board in the center of the table. Place the monster miniature in the center of the combat board so that the front sector is the bottom one. Place the hunter miniatures in the front s", "headingPath": "SETUP INSTRUCTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "55 77 8. Each player performs the following steps: 8.1 Place your hunter board in front of you on the table. 8.2 Place your starting equipment and potion cards on your hunter board in the spaces that correspond to their icons. 8.3 Shuffle your action deck and place it to the left of your hunter boar", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 59, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "During the Quest Board phase, players collectively choose a quest from the ones currently available on the quest board (for more details on the quest board, see page 54). Place the selected quest card in front of you on the table: This quest is now the active quest for the current chapter and determ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 66, "score": 0.029907, "snippet": "The Expedition mode provides a standalone game experience outside of the campaign. An expedition is a one-shot scenario for 1-4 players, in which you can freely choose which monster to fight, as well as your hunter’s equipment and deck. In this game mode, you can experience the wide variety that the", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 63, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Chapter 11 is the final act of the campaign. When you get there, the story will reach its epic finale. Any special rules and instructions needed to play the final chapter will be explained in the Campaign book. Figure out the story: In the Campaign book, players will find a list of questions to be a", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP INSTRUCTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 17, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 785 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 785 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 0.89745 of 1414 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Oct 24, 2026 22:35 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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)		p.60	0.047619 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)		p.56	0.04612 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)		p.38	0.044388 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	SETUP INSTRUCTIONS	p.16	0.044023 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)		p.17	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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)		p.59	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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)		p.66	0.029907 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)		p.63	0.029851 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	SETUP INSTRUCTIONS	p.16	#4	0.044023 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)		p.96	#14	0.027313 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)		p.61	#21	0.022894 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)		p.32	#20	0.022898 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)		p.17	#5	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	PROLOGUE SETUP · GENERAL COMPONENTS · VYRAXEN COMPONENTS	p.14	#38	0.011905 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)		p.56	#2	0.04612 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)		p.60	#1	0.047619 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	SETUP INSTRUCTIONS	p.16	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)		p.17	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 178 ms · first delta 1237 ms · total 3545 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 178 ms · ask 3364 ms · gateway work 3545 ms · total 3545 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3285
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 450
tok/sec: 201.7 tok/sec — 450 output tokens in 2.231 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 28s ago)
gateway schema (read from the running child): schema head 0042_definer_search_path (live revision not readable by this principal)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 5h, checked 3s 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 720), 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.