Death: kill the player and deadly places

Death is not lose. lose ends the game directly; the three constructs here run the platform's death machinery instead: the death text speaks, a died event fires, and at the end of the turn the engine re-checks whether the player is actually dead. That re-check is a real window: a story policy that revives the player during the turn (a reincarnation rule, a guardian angel) vetoes the ending and play continues. With no such policy, the story ends in defeat.

kill the player [<phrase-key>] [when <condition>] is a statement, peer to win and lose, legal anywhere statements go: on and after clauses, every turn daemons, action bodies, inside select and each. The phrase key is the death text (define it like any phrase) and doubles as the recorded cause; bare kill the player records the cause killed and shows only the platform's ending text. The when suffix gates it like any statement:

  on crossing it
    kill the player bridge-death when it is frayed
    phrase bridge-holds
  end on

While the bridge is whole, the kill is skipped and bridge-holds speaks instead, the same shape as the conditional lose.

<direction> is deadly: <phrase-key> marks a fatal exit, mirroring is blocked:. The fatal direction is deliberately not an exit at all: typing it never runs the going action; the command is rewritten into the platform's internal death action, so the player sees the death text and nothing else, no movement prose, no refusal. The player retreats another way.

create Aragain Falls
  a room
  west to the Rocky Ledge
  south is deadly: falls-death

  The roar of the water is everything.

The conditional form is deadly while <condition>: parses but is not wired yet: a load error tells you so, and the live equivalent is an on going it clause carrying kill the player when <condition>.

deadly: <phrase-key> marks the whole room as a no-escape position: every verb except a safe allowlist (look and examine, by default) is fatal, including objectless ones like WAIT and INVENTORY that no per-entity clause could catch. Reserve it for the genuinely inescapable spot, not as a generic hazard flag:

create Over the Falls
  a room
  deadly: over-falls-death

  You are over the falls. This was a mistake.

In TypeScript the underlying trait adds two more dials: safeVerbs widens the allowlist, and chance makes the room probabilistically deadly. A survived roll simply lets the verb run normally, with no message. Neither dial is expressible from Chord today. The standard library reference documents the machinery underneath all three constructs: the died event's shape, the veto window's mechanics, the health trait, and the internal redirect action.