Welcome to Endless — population: as many as the script requires. The city runs on three things: ink, chaos, and an absolute refusal to learn from yesterday. You have got studios that have been running the same feuds since the first frame was drawn, a Standards Board that has not approved a new joke format since the Great Punchline Scandal of Studio Three, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, a roster of characters who keep taking jobs and keep almost pulling them off. Our heroes — and we use that term generously — are about to find out that the client lied, the location is wrong, and the rival crew got there first. But do not worry. It is only a cartoon. Probably.
These hold in every campaign. A rule that contradicts one of them loses.
Gravity waits for realization. Signs weigh what they say they weigh. A drawn door opens. A disguise works. Hammerspace is valid. This is the physical law of the setting, not a genre pastiche.
Violence is frequent, vivid, and played for laughs. Characters are flattened, exploded, compressed, vaporized, and dropped from improbable heights. They return. Death exists only as a punchline, never as a permanent outcome. Mechanically expressed as Elasticity and the Wiped Out condition (Chapter Eight).
When two outcomes are both mechanically valid, the funnier one is correct. A GM ruling standard, not a player loophole — it cuts both ways.
Every character has a core cartoon identity that cannot change during active play. Character growth lives in the toolkit, the relationships, and the rivals they pursue — never in their fundamental nature.
Every character and every ensemble has a driving Want that fuels the campaign. They will get close. They will not get it. Pursuit is the engine; attainment is the end of the show.
Certain characters can see the audience, address the camera, walk through the screen, and occasionally interact with the narration itself. A mechanical resource, not a gag. The fourth wall is thin and deliberately so.
Session-scale events reset by default. The building destroyed is whole again. The enemy wiped out returns. Characters remember nothing from yesterday's chase unless the group explicitly commits to serialization.
Between shorts, toons have lives — apartments, rivals, bosses, crushes, and unresolved professional grudges. The on-set world resets; the off-set world accumulates. Long-arc serialization lives here.