Update to v2

With the ending of my long-running campaign, I felt it was time to revisit this lovely project and incorporate what I had learned. Roughly in order of spreads:

Character section: reworked the text to make intent clearer, and to give the player a better grounding in what's going on, mechanically, and reassurance about what they don't need to know yet. Standardized the terminology of TN & steps. Added a quick generation method if you're not up for a conversational step.

Rewrote the example character build to be more explicit on how mechanics worked in the process, and included the final character sheet.

GM character section: reworked to make it clearer, reorganized to make it more obvious what goes with what, standardized terminology, and made it clearer that they probably need to read the rest of the book first.

System: renamed "Hesitation" to "Reflexes" and "Trauma" to "Harm". The former because I wanted a trifle more heroism in the approach, and the latter because I just hate the word "trauma". You can safely ignore this change if you like Hesitation & Trauma better.

Adjusted Saves to use steps applied to a TN instead of requiring a character-specific target number; this should simplify the character sheet, simplify rolling dice, and allow you to switch dice whenever you want to easily. Use those d100s, d12s, or d4s. Maybe not the d4s.

Reworked how reserve dice work, as adjustments were not explicitly called out as part of the process, and you couldn't improve your character later as intended without drawing some inferences.

Cleaned up how healing works, how aiding each other works, and explained how death is handled by default.

Conducting the Game: reorganized for a more logical flow. Added a section for the basic assumptions that serve as a foundation for play; empirical reality, tone, lethality, and "the line".

Included a bit more guidance on step caps, bonus limits, and the math. Streamlined the math on deriving TNs and the marginal range. Moved system math elsewhere so it doesn't interrupt the flow of learning the game.

Made it clearer how to adjust the TN for easier or harder situations.

Made it clearer marginal successes and failures are a tool for the GM, not a requirement for resolution, and codified the "marginal range"; in the original it was up to the GM's discretion entirely what was even marginal. You can still play it like this, if you prefer, of course. Also made it clearer that the GM can just never call for a dice roll, if they don't want to.

Added a section about prep, a very very light structure for keeping play organized, and some further reading (very minor).

Tables: Added a few more, and rearranged them all. Rewrote the character generation tables to be more robust, and spent four hours happily making characters just to test it.

Overall, a ton of typo fixes, wording adjustments for clarity and sense, and minor tweaks. It's the same game, fundamentally, with some tucks (mostly being more specific about dice rolls) and eases (mostly around the basic assumptions). Have fun!