The Court
Turns ownership, precedent, names, and promises into enforceable reality. It prefers a cruel rule to an uncertain one.
Step 01 · Two-minute primer
Welcome to the
city underneath.
Wonderground is an urban-fantasy tabletop game about capable people, impossible needs, and the supernatural bargains they believed they could survive.
What you keep.What you surrender.What you owe.
Where you are
A city beneath, between, and behind the ordinary one.
The Wonderground occupies abandoned tunnels, impossible basements, buried streets, hidden markets, civic machinery, and neighborhoods the surface has agreed not to notice. People work, raise families, repair buildings, trade favors, and try to remain ordinary while living beside forces that treat ownership as a law of nature.
Crews take work that respectable institutions cannot admit exists: finding erased people, crossing condemned districts, protecting communities, recovering dangerous evidence, breaking predatory arrangements, and surviving the attention earned along the way.
What presses against you
Five powers shape daily life.
The Law
Patrols borders, investigates disturbances, and decides which impossible things count as crimes.
The Quiet Firm
Offers shelter, work, treatment, and useful power, then builds systems that make leaving difficult.
Neighborhood Powers
Old markets, transit lines, shrines, buildings, and communities develop hungers, loyalties, and memories of their own.
Supernatural Forces
Saints, machines, names, storms, dead empires, impossible animals, and other impossibilities need mortal hands to act.
What every player should know
Five truths are enough to begin.
Ordinary life matters
Your Origin, work, failures, relationships, and practical skills are not backstory decoration. They are what the supernatural force could not give you.
Power comes from outside
Every character accepted a Grant from something stronger because ordinary effort could not solve an immediate crisis.
A Promise is finite
The Deal must contain something the character can demonstrably fulfill. It creates narrative pressure, not an automatic punishment track. People of the Wonderground rarely call what follows a Deal a curse. They treat it as something incurred, inherited, accepted, or allowed to come due.
The crew is necessary
Nobody survives the city alone. Every character needs another crew member for something their own Profession and Grant cannot solve.
The ending is visible
Complete the character’s arc by achieving the stated Want and upholding the Promise. More levels or power do not substitute.
Your character at level one
One person. Three foundations.
Profession
The practiced work, training, and instincts that remain available when magic is silent.
Grant
The first playable supernatural ability conveyed by the Deal. Its level-one rules are separate from the story of the Promise.
Promise
The finite thing you agreed to accomplish for the force. Completing it closes the narrative obligation; it does not buy power.
Power given shape
What is a Grant?
Before the Wonderground possessed streets, borders, institutions, or any consistent physical form, it was power without definition. That power became concrete through contact with anchored beings who understood promises, ownership, exchange, and consequence. Deal, Grant, Promise, and due are not decorative words. They are part of how the supernatural learned to take shape.
A Grant is the supernatural capability conveyed through a Deal. It is not the Force itself, the Promise made to that Force, or the consequences attached to the agreement. Those things explain where the power came from and why it was given. The Grant explains what the character can actually do.
One governing idea. Every Grant has a recognizable internal logic. It might project a phenomenon, alter a body, produce impossible devices, command something external, reveal hidden information, control an area, or create another focused supernatural effect. Its abilities may work independently or combine naturally with the character’s Profession.
Force
The stronger supernatural power that conveyed the Grant.
Deal
The exchange that brought power into the character’s life.
Promise
The finite thing the character agreed to accomplish.
Grant
The focused supernatural capability the character can use.
Manifestation
The recognizable way the power takes shape through its recipient.
How power takes shape
The Grant reveals what pressure had already written into you.
Player authorship: Every Grant should leave a recognizable sign, but you decide what that expression looks like. It may be permanent or visible only during use, subtle or extreme, physical or sensory. More powerful Grants often produce more dramatic manifestations, but whether the Grant changes your body remains your choice.
“A Grant does not give you the form you want. It gives physical expression to the pressures, habits, fears, and self-conceptions that were already shaping you.”
People & form
Describe who exists before naming every ancestry.
Wonderground leaves room for the table to establish its peoples together. A character may be Common, beastlike, scaled, small-statured, uncanny, permanently changed by a Grant, or something your group defines. This choice describes body, culture, and lived experience; level-one ability bonuses come from Personal Aptitudes instead.
Step 02
Build the life that existed before the Deal.
The Life Ledger will guide you through People & Form, Origin, Profession, Want, Deal, Principle, Anchor, and crew relationships.