Normally, only one person can directly invest in a token, and cannot invest more points than they have Focus at the time. A venture is a special form of collaborative effort that results in the creation of a token, and it can have as many points of Focus invested in it as all the players involved have.
In a normal venture, each player involved can invest only once. However, there are also shadowfinding ventures; in these ventures, each player can invest multiple times, but every player involved must have a shadowfinding ability. Shadowfinding ventures specifically involve seeking resources in shadow. (If you want to shadowfind, but you are the only person involved, you are better off simply writing a normal Focus-invested token, since the rate of return on Focus invested into shadowfinding is variable. Tokens can't give you more than a +6 bonus in a Contest, and in a War, you can spend as many tokens as you'd like, so there's no mechanical need for an individual to be able to repeat-invest in a token.)
The leader of a venture creates the initial venture by using:
+venture/create title investing Focus with stat
or, for a shadowfinding venture:
+venture/shadowfind title investing Focus with stat
He then writes a description for it (which will become the description for the token), invoking the editor with:
+venture/desc venture-number
He must also set the permissions for who is permitted to contribute to the venture using:
+venture/auth venture-number = authorization-list
Players who are authorized to contribute have two options: they can either invest in the venture honestly, or they can choose to betray the venture. This is done with:
+venture/invest venture-number using stat spending Focus
or
+venture/betray venture-number using stat spending Focus
The leader of the venture "closes out" the venture by using:
+venture/end venture-number
No one in the venture can see how much the other people involved invested — only that they did.
At that point, a computation is done to determine the success of the venture. Broadly, the higher the value of the stats invested in the venture, the more successful the venture is likely to be. Also, ventures benefit from having a breadth of invested stats, so having at least four participants, each using a different stat, increases the chance of a more positive return on the Focus investment.
If there's only one betrayer, the success of the venture is unaffected, but having more than one betrayer severely affects the venture's success. The calculation results in a pool of a total number of points of Focus (which may be more or less than the total points invested by the players).
At that point, any betrayers take their slice of the resulting Focus — each receives Focus equal to that Focus pool divided by the number of players. All players involved in the venture will be told who betrayed them.
All the remaining points in the pool will be placed in a token owned by the venture leader.
All players involved in the venture will receive +mail about the venture's results.