How it works

Eight lines, and every one of them is in one of three states: not looked at, looked at and clean, or looked at and carrying something. Those are three different pieces of information and this page keeps them apart, because most of the arguments people have about a scene come from treating the first two as the same thing. A line you never checked is not evidence of absence. A room you actually stood in at the hour it usually happens, holding a thermometer, which was the temperature it was supposed to be — that is evidence, and it is better evidence than most of the exciting kind.

Each line you set is scored against a table of twelve possibilities, all of them written out below in this page's own words. A sign pushes some of them up and pushes others down. A clean line mostly pushes down, and that is the half of the arithmetic that earns its keep. What comes back is a shortlist in order, a tray of what your own lines have already ruled out, a count of what you have not looked at yet, and a confidence band that is deliberately capped. Nothing here is looked up anywhere: the table is inside the page, there is no request in it at all, and it cannot change between the moment you read it and the moment somebody opens your link.

Why a clean line beats a dirty one

A cold room is consistent with about half the table. A room you measured and found ordinary cuts that same half away in one move, for the price of standing about in a hallway. Positive signs feel like progress and mostly are not, because they cluster — the things that produce a cold room mostly produce the other exciting signs too, so a fistful of them narrows almost nothing. Negative results are boring to collect, impossible to be smug about, and worth roughly three times as much. The confidence figure is weighted to say so: it climbs faster when you rule things out than when you pile things on, and it will sit at the bottom of its range all day while you keep collecting signs that agree with each other.

The part that makes it a puzzle

Some of the twelve produce other members of the table on purpose. One wears a face and keeps the memories that came with it. One eats the dead and inherits whatever it ate. One arranges the entire scene because it wants an audience, and one means that the person telling you all this is not, at the moment, anywhere near you. So when the leader of your shortlist is something another live candidate could have manufactured, and you have not yet run the one check that separates them, this page refuses to name it. It says you cannot tell yet, names both, and gives you the cheapest test that breaks the tie. That refusal is the page rather than a limitation of it, and it is why the confidence band tops out where it does — there is no band above it and there was never going to be one.

What you take, and what is dead weight

The tail of every reading is a short packing list built from the shortlist rather than from habit: what is worth the space this time, what is a measuring instrument and therefore never wasted, and what you would be carrying for nothing on this particular job. Carrying the wrong thing is not neutral. It is weight, it is twenty minutes at the car, and it is the specific mechanism by which people talk themselves into the answer they already packed for. All of it is furniture for a story about a fiction — none of it is advice, and if something is genuinely wrong in a real building the answer is a licensed trade and a phone, not a bag of salt.

What this page will not do

It does not reproduce anybody's bestiary. The twelve entries are a line each, written here, and the grouping and the order belong to this page's argument rather than to any published book's contents. It quotes no dialogue, prints no image, names no episode and gives no season or date, because it has no need of one. And it never tells you what happened — only what the evidence you have is currently consistent with, which on most scenes is more than one thing and on a good many scenes is nothing at all.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan reference for the television series Supernatural. It is a free, unofficial fan tool — an unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Warner Bros. Television, The CW, or any official rights holder of Supernatural.

Every entry, sign, test and packing note on this page was written for it. No dialogue, script text, bestiary entry, image or artwork from any television series or tie-in book is reproduced anywhere in it. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of Supernatural. This corner is kept separate on purpose, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting otherwise.

Where the rest of them are

If you would rather be asked about yourself than about a room, the double quiz asks what somebody wearing your face would fail to reproduce — which is this page's problem pointed the other way — and the monster quiz asks what shape your own wrongness would take. The Supernatural section lists every quiz and tool in this wing, and the fan tributes hub has the rest of the corner. If you would rather play something than fiddle with a tool, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.