Running Operation FALX¶
This page is the operational shape of the curriculum: how the fifteen periods map onto the six episodes, what a session sounds like, how the opening frame is delivered, where the CODEX fits between sessions, and how Mission Control tracks it all. Per-episode workflows, with every resource placed at its story beat, live on the individual pages of the Episode Guide.
The Shape of the Curriculum¶
The curriculum runs in six episodes of two parts each, across roughly fifteen periods. Episode 1 is the opening frame and the arrival at the Caucasus. Episodes 2 through 5 are the four stops of the journey, each pairing an act of restoration (Part A) with a moral choice that grows harder stop by stop (Part B), and Episode 6 is the finale: the team's telling of the story above Rome, and the closing frame.
| Period | Content | Episode |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Opening frame: recruitment interrupted, the Demiurge's transmission, Agent advocacy, entry into the TSTT | 1 · A |
| 2 | Caucasus arrival: Quintus, the broken chains, Prometheus named | 1 · B |
| 3 | Stop 1, Part 1: settle Vesta's hearth | 2 · A |
| 4 | Stop 1, Part 2: the theft of fire; receive the flame | 2 · B |
| 5 | Stop 2, Part 1: restore fading Vulcan with the flame | 3 · A |
| 6 | Stop 2, Part 2: convince Jupiter to accept the lightning bolt | 3 · B |
| 7–8 | Stop 3, Part 1: descend to Tellus; activate her memory | 4 · A |
| 9–10 | Stop 3, Part 2: the cross-cosmic appeal to Prometheus (it fails) | 4 · B |
| 11 | Stop 4, Part 1: ascend through the healed stops; the question reframed | 5 · A |
| 12–13 | Stop 4, Part 2: the confrontation at the Caucasus (it succeeds) | 5 · B |
| 14 | Rome: the team narrates its journey for Quintus | 6 · A |
| 15 | Closing frame: farewell, debrief, reward | 6 · B |
Pacing is flexible: the multi-period rows can grow or shrink to fit your class, and fifteen periods is a plan rather than a cap.
The Session Rhythm¶
A FALX session follows the same beat structure every time, which is part of what makes the curriculum manageable alongside a full teaching load:
- Read the prompt. Post the episode's immersion prompt or read it aloud. Each runs roughly 250 to 400 words, two or three minutes aloud, and moves from a quick recap through the scene and a beat from Quintus to the situation now in front of the team.
- The team deliberates. Every prompt ends on a task or a dilemma that the team has to settle together, declaring what their Recentius does and why. Stating the reasons aloud is the curriculum's first persuasion practice, and it starts in the very first session.
- You reply in character. Answer as the figure in the scene (Quintus, Vesta, Prometheus, Vulcan, Jupiter, Tellus), taking the team's move inside the fiction and moving the story forward. Each episode page's Agent Craft section gives sample replies for the moves teams most often make, each with an example team post, and a Rails line for what must and cannot happen, so you know where the walls are before you improvise.
- Watch the flame. From Stop 1 onward the team carries a piece of Vesta's fire, and it is the story's built-in feedback, brightening when the team succeeds at restoration or persuasion and steadying as the world comes back together. Let the flame do the commenting, because the narrator never grades the team out loud.
- Close and prime. Each episode page shows where a session hands off to the CODEX and which parts of it to assign next (see below).
Two conventions from Operation LAPIS carry over whole: let reasonable actions work, and re-rail in-fiction rather than out of character. The mythic events are on rails (the theft happens, the appeal fails, Jupiter accepts, the confrontation succeeds), but the team's moral position and the texture of every scene belong to them.
The Opening Frame¶
Period 1 is unlike everything after it. It runs through the FALX Terminal, an interactive console styled after the 1960s, and students believe they are starting Operation LAPIS until, partway through the easy opening tutorial, the Demiurge's transmission breaks in: the TSTT is coming apart, there is no time, and the untrained recruits are going in now.
The frame pauses twice for you, the Agent, to step out from behind the console as a character in the fiction. In the first pause you argue that your students aren't ready, since they haven't finished training; the Demiurge agrees and sends them anyway, and your part is to argue sincerely, lose well, and choose to go in with them. In the second, the room shows how it feels about going, eager or afraid, and the Demiurge answers that feeling without changing the outcome. The frame ends on a single word of Latin, "Ite," and a switch that carries the class into the first immersion at the Caucasus.
The full sequence, including your spoken lines for both pause points, is covered on the Introduction & Opening Frame page of the Episode Guide. The final terminal returns at Period 15 for the Demiurge's debrief and the reward.
The CODEX Between Sessions¶
Five CODEX entries carry the curriculum's Latin. Each has five parts (Key-texts, VERBA, GRAMMATICA, Culturalia, and Attunement), and each part does its own work at its own moment. The entries prepare students for what they are about to meet and support them while they are in it, and the fiction treats the reading as mission-critical intelligence: Quintus won't follow the trail until the team has read CODEX 1.
As a rule, each entry is assigned at the close of a session and finished before the next one, and each episode page places its parts one by one. A key-text comes before the scene it tells, the Culturalia before the scene it fills in, GRAMMATICA beside the key-texts it is taught from, and the Attunement reflection last, as a rehearsal for the moral or persuasive work of the coming session. The reflections for CODEX 4 and CODEX 5 matter most, because they have students draft in writing, ahead of time, the very arguments the team will make to Prometheus: first the cosmic-order case that fails, then the humanity-centered case that succeeds.
Full entry-by-entry detail and all live links are on The FALX CODEX.
Mission Control¶
FALX has its own curriculum type in Mission Control. When you create the cohort, choose Operation FALX from the curriculum dropdown; the choice is set once at creation and cannot be changed afterward. The FALX operative dossier is slimmer than the LAPIS one: all six episodes are visible at once with no drill-down.
Characters work exactly as in LAPIS. Teams share one of the eight Recentius personas, with the full character sheet: traits, Puncta Virtūtis, dēnāriī, and the Arma equipment screen. Expect advancement to be modest across six episodes; the character layer is there for identity and continuity into LAPIS more than for deep progression, and a single well-timed grant of Puncta Virtūtis or gear means a lot to younger students precisely because it is rare. See Character Mechanics for the machinery.
LP is awarded per episode part, exactly as in the LAPIS RPG. After each session, award LP to each operative in the episode's Part A or Part B slot based on their individual contribution to the team's discussion and declaration, calibrated to the same rubric LAPIS uses; see Latinity Points & Grading. For the finale, the Rome narration (Episode 6, Part A) carries the summative LP; the closing frame (Part B) is teacher-delivered, so its slot is usually left blank.
Each episode carries one attunement check and one key-text check, worth 160 LP apiece, marked with checkboxes on the LP grid or through the cohort-wide bulk-mark page. If you would rather grade the attunement work, the bulk-mark page's Score attunements as toggle switches the cohort to discrete 0–160 LP scores; see Latinity Points & Grading. Mark them as teams complete the corresponding CODEX components for Episodes 1 through 5; Episode 6 has no CODEX entry.
Extra-Operational Awards work as in LAPIS for anything outside the episode grid (a vocabulary check, the final performance as a rubric-scored artifact, a project). Carta Collēctiōnis and Mission-Specific Assets are LAPIS features and do not appear in FALX cohorts.
Next: The FALX CODEX, then the Episode Guide.