Tutorial. For new players. You have Holonovel installed and an MCP client connected, as described in Getting Started. By the end, you'll have started the bundled starter Novel, understood its candle-and-key loop, and known how to resume, remove, or reset it.

Torre Nosferatu is a ruleset-free gothic-horror Novel that ships with a fresh Holonovel install. You wake at the top of a seven-floor tower with one candle and no memory of climbing. Every floor hides a key to the stair down. The wax burns with every step. Five strangers are hunting the same exit, each on their own light. Count Orlok rides the edge of your candle and never crosses it.

The tower is authored, not generated. Rooms, items, and changes persist. Backtracking returns you to the floor you altered, not a fresh one. The Novel holds 85 rooms, six NPCs, and 17 lore entries, with two countdowns: The Candle (60 wax) and Dread (8).

Source: REQ-565, holonovel/content/torre-nosferatu.source.json.

You do not need a rulebook, a converted PDF, or a built ruleset. The starter teaches the parts every Holonovel game shares:

• Moving through a persistent world model.
• Reading scene state and sensory description.
• Talking to NPCs who remember what you did.
• Watching a countdown change the pressure.
• Discovering lore by keyword rather than by exposition.

The Spire, the top floor, is a gentle tutorial: wax, exploration, and at most one teaching creature. Social play, Dread, and traps begin on the sixth floor and deepen as you descend.

On the first start of a data directory, the server copies the packaged Novel into novels/torre-nosferatu.json and writes a sentinel at starter-seeded.json. The seed runs before the server lists Novels, so the starter is available immediately.

"List my novels."

"Switch to Torre Nosferatu."

If the Novel is already active, resume it by name:

"Resume Torre Nosferatu."

The server's data directory is set by TTRPG_DATA_DIR. It defaults to .holonovel-state inside the server checkout.

Set TTRPG_STARTER_NOVEL=off before the first start to skip the seed. The values none and false also opt out.

Deleting the Novel is sticky: the sentinel stops the server from recreating it. To seed it again, stop the server, remove both files, and restart:

rm .holonovel-state/novels/torre-nosferatu.json
rm .holonovel-state/starter-seeded.json

The server seeds the Novel only when both the save and the sentinel are absent.

1. Find the light. Wax is the clock. A stub, a pool, or a cache buys another stretch of play.
2. Find the key. Each floor's key unlocks the stair down. The floors are winding graphs: several stairwells, loops, and dead ends.
3. Choose the company. The five survivors trade, hoard, and race. Warmth and cruelty both count. They are not a party; they are a crowd with the same problem.
4. Watch the weather. Dread is the tower's mood. It rises with cruelty and with time, and it changes how close Orlok can come.
5. Reach the ground floor. The front door is the only exit. Escape on your own light, not another's wake.

When the candle gutters, Orlok closes the last of the dark. A snuff with no match to relight it does the same. He does not chase; he collects.

The survivors are Vlask the hoarder, Sister Marta the archivist, Ilona the bitten, Petr the innocent, and Nadja the rival. Each has a voice, a goal, and a reason to spend your wax or save it. Count Orlok is the sixth.

Orlok is not a combat encounter. He is the consequence of running out of light. He speaks rarely, only when Dread shifts, and never explains himself. The outline is the character: a long, thin silhouette at the edge of the flame.

The starter's story beats are setup, escalation, turning point, and climax. The details below stay behind a spoiler fold.

The starter is a normal Novel. You can export it, checkpoint it, clone it, or capture its NPCs and rooms to the Codex. Nothing about it is a demo mode.

"Export the campaign."

"Capture Vlask to the Codex."

Characters created in the starter live in that Novel. The permanent roster is separate; import a character into the Novel if you want to keep playing them elsewhere.

The starter is missing. Check that TTRPG_STARTER_NOVEL is not set to off, none, or false, and that the server had write access to its data directory on first start.

The starter came back after I deleted it. That should not happen: the sentinel at starter-seeded.json marks the data directory as already seeded. If you delete only the Novel and keep the sentinel, the server does not recreate it. To seed it again, remove both files.

I want a different starter. Set TTRPG_STARTER_NOVEL to the slug of another packaged Novel, or to off and create a Novel by hand.

• Getting Started — install and connect a client
• Novels — the full campaign lifecycle
• Codex — keep the people and places for another campaign

Last updated: 2026-10-22.