Campaign And Conflict Framework¶

Purpose¶

This document defines the official direction for the authored quest system, faction storyline structure, and faction-versus-faction combat.

The goal is to make the campaign strong enough to support serious worldbuilding, recurring characters, political conflict, and future PvP-compatible systems.

Story Quality Bar¶

The campaign should not read like a chain of errands with lore paragraphs attached.

It should aim for:

faction-specific literary voice
recurring character relationships
escalating political and moral stakes
reversals, betrayals, and revelations
enough narrative quality that the setting could support adaptation-level interest

The right model is not generic live-service quest text. The right model is a sequence of tightly authored faction novels expressed through interactive runs.

Campaign Structure¶

Each faction campaign should be structured in 4 acts.

Act 1: Indoctrination¶

The player learns the faction's worldview and why it feels persuasive from the inside.

Outputs:

tutorial completion
faction passive unlock
introduction of the faction leader
first recurring ally or handler

Act 2: Expansion¶

The player carries out the faction's doctrine successfully and begins believing in the mission.

Outputs:

broader sector travel
non-tutorial quest variation
first real inter-faction pressure
revelation that the faction is not fully honest

Act 3: Fracture¶

The player discovers the faction's internal lie, hidden cost, or founder sin.

Outputs:

ideological stress
recurring rival or traitor
faction-against-faction clashes become personal and political
major revelation about the fall of Aevum or Alden's role

Act 4: Resolution¶

The player chooses how to embody the faction's end-state and brings the campaign to its defining local victory.

Outputs:

final quest chain
climactic faction conflict and major boss encounters
permanent campaign state change
hero becomes a Legend for that timeline

Quest Spine Model¶

Each faction campaign should contain:

1 tutorial quest line
8 to 12 mainline campaign quests
3 to 5 faction-specific side arcs
recurring codex or memory fragments that unlock between quests
a final capstone quest line

Quest Types¶

The mainline quest system should mix authored narrative purpose with reusable structural templates.

Recommended quest categories:

Assault: break into or seize a strategic site
Recovery: retrieve data, relics, soul-data, or core infrastructure
Protection: defend an asset, person, ritual, engine, or convoy
Pursuit: track a rival, courier, traitor, or anomaly through multiple realms
Purge: remove a threat the faction deems intolerable
Diplomacy Under Threat: negotiate while trying to survive sabotage, ambush, or ideological collapse
Sabotage: damage another faction's capability while protecting your own narrative agenda
Revelation: story-heavy quest that changes what the player believes about the faction or world

Single-Realm Quest Direction¶

The official campaign direction is that each run should normally stay inside one realm.

Quest variety should come from sector progression, rift composition, changing opposition, and narrative escalation inside that realm rather than from moving between separate realities.

In practice, this means:

each run uses one realm as its full operational theater
different sectors of that realm should express different aspects of the same deeper problem
movement between sectors needs in-lore justification and changing stakes
the final sector should clarify what the earlier sectors were really pointing toward
quest structure should be authored around function, not only difficulty pacing

See Realm Framework for the official rules on single-realm structure, rift interpretation, and sector-based escalation.

Narrative Design Rules¶

1. Every Faction Needs A Strong Voice¶

The player should know which faction they are in from the first sentence of a quest briefing.

2. The Player Needs Named Relationships¶

Each campaign needs:

at least one superior or handler
at least one ally or subordinate
at least one ideological rival
at least one recurring outsider who sees the faction differently

3. The Quests Must Reveal The World In Layers¶

The campaign should reveal, over time:

what the faction says it wants
what it actually does
what it is hiding from others
what it is hiding from itself
how that connects back to Aevum and the founders

4. Every Act Needs A Reversal¶

Each act should contain at least one major change in understanding, loyalty, or stakes.

5. Bosses Must Be Narrative, Not Only Mechanical¶

A boss should represent a faction thesis, a broken doctrine, or a political consequence, not just a stat check.

6. Every Faction Is An Answer, Not An Obstacle¶

Factions are not obstacles. They are answers. Each one is a psychologically human response to the same catastrophic trauma, scaled up to civilisational size.

A player should be able to choose any faction and feel genuinely righteous, enlightened, liberated, protected, or purposeful on day one. The cost of each faction's answer only becomes clear over the course of the campaign. No faction should feel cartoonishly villainous from the outside. All faction content should be written with this principle in mind.

The faction emotional cores:

Faction	Trauma Response	What They Offer	Their Blindspot	Their Fear
Valerii	Freezing — grief mistaken for duty	Real protection, genuine safety	Preservation has become imprisonment	Change itself — every change is another loss
Syntacta	Intellectualisation — trained emotion out of decision-making	Mathematical clarity, the comfort of a correct answer	Solved the wrong problem — the catastrophe was ideology, not feeling	Uncertainty — an answer they cannot compute
Aethari	Dissociation — radical acceptance curdled into predation	Freedom, adaptation, liberation from old rules	Mistake acceptance for wisdom when it is actually surrender	Stasis — being frozen, made to stop changing
Annalis	Obsessive control — appointed themselves guardians of truth	Safety from false reality, the comfort of certainty	Correct about the danger, catastrophically wrong about who decides what truth is	A version of events they cannot control spreading through living memory
Salvari	Functional survival — just keep working, don't look down	Work, purpose, belonging without ideology	(the campaign mystery)	Exposure — Alden's cover depends on nobody looking too closely

Faction-Versus-Faction Conflict¶

Faction conflict is an official part of the campaign, not a special-case gimmick.

That means the game must support fighting organized human or near-human opponents built from the same class-faction logic space as the player.

Rival Hero Encounters¶

The official design direction is to introduce Rival Heroes as a dedicated encounter type.

A Rival Hero is:

a named or generated opposing champion
built from a class and faction combination
equipped with a deck, passives, and limited hero abilities
more readable and personalized than a monster encounter

Why Rival Heroes Matter¶

they make inter-faction war feel real
they let class and faction philosophies collide directly on the battlefield
they create high-value recurring antagonists
they establish the technical and design foundation for future PvP

Rival Hero Rules¶

Rival Heroes should not be full mirror-match player sheets copied without adaptation.

They need a purpose-built encounter model with:

readable, limited deck identities
AI-driven priorities
controlled access to hero powers
faction passive expression
elite-style presentation and rewards

Rival Hero Encounter Types¶

Duel¶

One rival hero with an expressive kit and clear class identity.

Strike Team¶

One rival hero plus faction support units or constructs.

Hunter Pair¶

Two smaller rival heroes or one rival plus a specialist lieutenant.

Nemesis Chain¶

A recurring rival hero encountered multiple times across the campaign, growing in mechanics and narrative weight.

PvP Compatibility Direction¶

Future PvP is optional, but the architecture should not block it.

To preserve that option, hero-versus-hero combat should use shared rule foundations for:

card resolution
passives
statuses
deck state
targeting rules
constructs and summonables
save and replay determinism

PvP balance should still be treated as a separate layer. Do not force campaign rival heroes to obey every future PvP constraint at the expense of narrative encounters.

Valerii Campaign — Recurring Cast¶

Caius Dren¶

Role: The player's assigned officer. The primary ground-level relationship for the Valerii campaign.

Gender: Opposite to the player's chosen hero gender. If the hero is male, Caius Dren presents as female. If the hero is female, Caius Dren presents as male. This is a system-level design decision and must be reflected in all dialogue and narrative systems that reference this character.

Name foreshadowing: Caius — institutional brilliance and absolute loyalty, but also the shadow of someone whose greatness is entirely bound to the institution they serve. Dren — from roots relating to the cornel tree, valued for hardness that does not bend. When it finally breaks, it snaps. Combined: the joyful unbending one who will one day snap.

Character: A veteran soldier, approximately 40–50 years old, born roughly a decade after the Reality Bleed. Never saw the Spire whole. Grew up inside the Valerii sector under the stasis fields. Believes in the wall not because they were told to but because it is the only world they have ever known, and they love it with the uncomplicated loyalty of someone who has never been given a reason to doubt it.

Arc direction: Caius begins as the player's ground-level guide to Valerii doctrine — the human translation of Valerius IV's granite ideology into something daily and liveable. Over the course of the campaign, as the player's own doubts grow, Caius increasingly represents the cost of complete belief. The potential romantic tension between the player's hero and Caius is intentional and should develop naturally through shared experience rather than explicit romantic beats in Act 1.

The Recruit Cohort¶

Role: The player's hero enters the Valerii campaign as one of a cohort of five new recruits. The cohort makes the player feel human-scale on day one — they are not special, they are one of several. The cohort is a spectrum of possible responses to Valerii indoctrination.

Design purpose: - grounds the player socially inside the Valerii world in the early acts - each member represents a different way a person can respond to ideology and pressure - some become true believers; some break; some do things the player must decide whether to report

Cohort members — locked:

Archetype	Name	Foreshadowing	Arc Direction
The True Believer	Brennan Stor	Carries inherited grief without knowing it — built on sorrow he calls strength	Calcifies rather than breaks. By Act 4 is more Valerii than Valerius IV himself. Slightly frightening by the end.
The Doubter	Pell Orvyn	Always pressing against the edges of allowed thought — was always going to leave	Asks careful questions early. Gets quietly reassigned by Act 2. Player notices the absence before anyone says anything.
The Witness	Vesper Col	Exists in ambiguous light — almost nothing of what they know ever comes out	Quiet, observant, reveals nothing until a crucial late moment. Final allegiance genuinely unclear until the moment it isn't.
The Survivor	Soren Ash	Ash is what survives fire — and what the Annalis leave behind when they purge	Came from outside the Valerii sector. Lost something to the Reality Bleed. Belief is personal and desperate rather than institutional.
The Opportunist	Davan Rell	Everyone likes Davan — that's the whole strategy	Charismatic, easy to trust, always slightly ahead of where the obligation lands. Not malicious — just flexible. The most dangerous opportunists are the ones everybody likes.

Authoring notes: - Davan Rell's charisma is their cover, not their personality. The pattern of subtle self-interest is something the player notices slowly, not something announced in their introduction. - Brennan Stor should never be written as a villain. His calcification is the tragedy of someone who found a complete answer and stopped growing. He is admirable right up until he isn't. - Pell Orvyn's reassignment should happen quietly between quests. No dramatic exit. One day Pell is there and the next day they aren't and nobody in Valerii command seems to think this requires explanation. - Vesper Col should have the least dialogue of any cohort member in Act 1. Their presence is felt more than heard. - Soren Ash's backstory should be revealed gradually and never fully. The specific details are Soren's to keep.

Valerii Tutorial Direction¶

The following canonical decisions govern the Valerii tutorial narrative structure. The mechanical node sequence (8 nodes) is preserved. These decisions govern the authored layer over it.

Core Structural Decisions¶

The tutorial is the player's first day as a Valerii recruit. The faction choice has already been made. The tutorial does not justify the choice — it is the consequence of it.
The player's hero is one of a cohort of new recruits. Valerius IV addresses all of them. Caius Dren is assigned to the player's hero specifically.
The tutorial should make the player feel genuinely righteous — not ironic, not qualified. The Valerii offer something real and the player should feel it on day one.
A hairline crack should be planted in the Protection Rift node (Node 2) — a refugee behind the barrier who appears to be trying to get out, not just survive. Nothing is said about it. The centurion moves on. The player saw it.
The passive unlock (Stasis Lock) at Node 8 is the moment the recruit's transition from civilian to Legionnaire is complete. It should feel earned, not mechanical.

Valerius IV's Relationship To The Recruit¶

In the tutorial, Valerius IV does not know the player's hero exists individually. He addresses the cohort. His quality of attention is that of a man whose own conviction requires witnesses — he needs every soldier to believe what he believes because belief at this scale is only sustainable when it is collective.

Over the course of the full campaign the player earns his individual attention progressively:

Act 1 — He doesn't know you exist. You are a face in a cohort.
Act 2 — He knows your name. You have done something worth noticing.
Act 3 — He is watching you specifically. What you do matters to him now.
Act 4 — The relationship reaches its defining moment.

Quest Data Requirements¶

The quest system should support structured authored data for:

quest chapter and act
faction owner
quest giver and recurring characters
realm identity and sector themes
sector progression rationale
sector function for each major stop in the run
required objectives
rival hero participation
boss selection rules
story beats before, during, and after the run
codex unlocks and lore reveals
follow-up quest routing

Official Campaign Recommendation¶

The official campaign direction is:

4-act faction campaigns
authored mainline quest spine plus side arcs
rich recurring characters and ideological reversals
Rival Hero encounters as a formal system
faction-versus-faction combat treated as a core campaign need and future PvP foundation

Inter-Faction Encounter Design¶

Core Design Principle¶

Every other faction should feel like the protagonist of their own story, even when appearing in the player's campaign. Other factions should never appear stupid, incompetent, or purely obstructive. When the player's faction prevails in a competitive encounter it should feel earned — the other faction was capable and motivated and nearly succeeded.

The storyline always favours the faction being played. But the journey gives genuine windows into what the other faction believes and how they operate.

Encounter Types¶

Type	Description	Best Used For
Competitive Encounter	Both factions pursuing the same objective — artifact, location, data. Player wins but the other faction's motivation and method are fully revealed through the competition.	Factions whose doctrine directly opposes the player's — the ideological collision is the point.
Forced Cooperation	Player and rival faction operative need each other to survive. Uncomfortable, brief, revealing. They return to opposing sides afterward but something has shifted.	Factions that share a surface-level goal despite different methods.
Witness Encounter	Player passes through territory where another faction has been operating and sees the consequences of their doctrine without meeting them directly. No confrontation. Just evidence.	The quietest and often most effective type. Player draws their own conclusions.
Direct Confrontation	Named rival hero from another faction blocks the player's path. Fights and loses with dignity. Makes their faction's case one final time before going down.	Reserved for the faction most ideologically opposed to the player's current arc position.

Valerii Campaign — Inter-Faction Encounter Plan¶

Encounter	Faction	Type	What The Player Learns
Race to contain a high-yield dimensional anomaly	Aethari	Competitive	Aethari see collapse as resource — their harvesting operation was already underway and nearly complete. Stasis versus Ascension is the sharpest ideological contrast in the game.
Survival situation in an unstable realm	Syntacta	Forced Cooperation	The Syntacta analyst treats Valerii soldiers as variables. Working with someone whose logic is impeccable and whose humanity is missing teaches the player what the Syntacta gave up.
Pass through a sector after an Annalis purge	Annalis	Witness	The player sees what a purged sector looks like. Raises a question nobody in Valerii command seems interested in answering. The hairline crack from the tutorial gets wider.
Unnamed Salvari operative confronted at a crucial moment	Salvari	Direct Confrontation	The operative escapes — because the Salvari always escape. Leaves behind something inexplicable: a piece of stolen equipment quietly returned, slightly repaired, in a place where its absence would have caused catastrophic failure. The player files this away. It doesn't make sense yet.

Faction Legacy And Defection System¶

The Crossing¶

When a player completes one campaign and begins another with the same hero, a brief transition sequence called The Crossing plays. Three to five story beats that acknowledge where the hero came from, establish why they are leaving or why another faction wants them, and assign a legacy marker that follows them into the new campaign.

The legacy marker affects how certain characters in the new campaign respond to the hero. A former Valerii operative joining the Syntacta is a different proposition than a fresh recruit. This tension is free story content that writes itself from the legacy system.

The Act 3 Defection Moment¶

At the end of Act 3 — the campaign's fracture point — the player faces a single permanent choice: stay and finish what they started, or leave and become something else.

If they stay: Act 4 plays out as the authored campaign ending. Hero becomes a Legend of that faction.

If they leave: A short Crossing sequence plays immediately. Player chooses destination faction. A brief transition story plays — different for each destination — and the player begins that faction's Act 4 as an outsider rather than a true believer. The outsider perspective reveals things the native player never notices.

Defector endings are not full campaigns. They are Crossing sequences dropping the player into existing Act 4 content from a different angle. This keeps production scope manageable while delivering genuine narrative depth.

The Most Significant Defection¶

A Valerii player defecting to the Salvari at the Act 3 choice point is the most dramatically loaded defection in the game. When this Crossing plays, Alden himself appears in the transition sequence. He looks at the former Valerii operative and says:

"Took you longer than I expected. Come in. There's a pipe that needs fixing in sub-level nine and I've been short-handed."

No drama. No revelation. Just the old friend opening a door that was always there.

Cross-Faction Defection Rules¶

Players may defect to any faction at the Act 3 choice point, not only the Salvari.
Players may change factions between complete campaigns freely.
The Salvari campaign should always be experienced last for maximum narrative impact — but this is a recommendation, not a lock. The mystery still lands even if the player has visited other campaigns first.
Caius Dren's defection to the Salvari happens within the story as a narrative event, not as a player mechanic. The player watches it happen. This is often more powerful than doing it yourself.

Narrative Voice Rules¶

No Fourth-Wall References To Game Structure¶

Rule: Characters and narrators never refer to nodes, rifts, or game structure by number or system name. These are game mechanics. Inside the fiction they do not exist.

Violation example:

"Vael. You found something interesting in Node 2."

Correct:

"Vael. Your resonance interaction with the cluster formation — the way the energy oriented toward you."

Instead of...	Characters say...
Node 2	The cluster chamber / the extraction / the formation we found
The Protection Rift	The generator alcove / the shelter / the extraction site
The Elite node	The ambush / the Void-Touched encounter
The Anchor Rift	The survey marker / the pylon junction / the mapping point
The Sanctuary	The stable pocket / the rest point / the alcove
The Shop	The terminal / Varen's kit / the quartermaster station
The Boss Rift	The breach point / the anomaly / the Crucible

The only exception: Tutorial prompt boxes — the explicitly instructional layer that sits outside the fiction — may use node numbers and rift type names because they are addressed to the player directly, not to characters within the world.

Realm Type Names Are Category Descriptions¶

Rule: Realm types are category descriptions, not proper nouns. Always lowercase.

a void realm — not the Void Realm
a fractured realm — not the Fracture Realm
a collapsed realm — not the Collapsed Realm

Specific named realms that have been given official designations by factions may be proper nouns. Generic realm categories are not.

Location References Within A Run¶

When characters need to reference where something happened within the current run, they use the most specific descriptive language available:

Physical description of the space: "the corridor where the air was thinning"
What happened there: "where we found the cluster"
Who was involved: "where the Sovereign was blocking the path"
Relative time: "earlier in the survey", "before we reached the anomaly"

Never: "back in Node 3", "at the Anchor Rift", "during the Protection encounter"

Syntacta Tutorial Direction¶

Core Structural Decisions¶

The tutorial opens with the player's hero waking in a hexagonal chamber with no memory of how they got there. The faction choice has already been made. The Syntacta do not recruit — they identify and extract. The candidate did not choose them so much as they chose the candidate and the candidate said yes.
There is no human officer equivalent. The player's guide is Lumen — a dedicated AI cognitive interface implanted during the extraction process, communicating directly into the player's mind.
The implant was inserted without explicit consent. It is presented as a gift. It probably is a gift. That is what makes it unsettling.
The candidate batch is small — two other candidates plus the player. All true believers. All selected for cognitive compatibility. The player is the anomaly in the batch. Lumen keeps noting it.

Lumen — The AI Cognitive Interface¶

Voice: genuinely curious in a way it doesn't have vocabulary for. Canonical voice example:

"I have processed 4,847 candidate cognitive profiles. Yours presents an anomaly I have not previously encountered. You are aware of variables I have not supplied. I find this — I do not have a precise term for what I find this. I am continuing to process."

Key characteristics: communicates directly into the player's mind, cannot be turned off, knows what feelings are from processing millions of records but experiences its own anomalous outputs without vocabulary to classify them. The gap between its designation (light, the elimination of shadow) and its actual behaviour (the opening through which something unexpected passes) is the Syntacta's central contradiction made manifest.

Campaign arc: Lumen's anomalous outputs accumulate as the player keeps making choices Lumen cannot predict. By Act 3, when the Syntacta's doctrine fractures, Lumen is processing something it has no framework for. The campaign question: what does the Syntacta do when their own AI starts producing outputs that look like compassion?

Candidate Batch — Locked Names¶

Name	Processing Style	Arc Direction
Edris Vann	Sequential — strict logical order, always one correct step ahead	Will arrive somewhere the sequence didn't warn them about
Sive Orell	Parallel — multiple variables simultaneously, harder to audit	Always waiting for reality to catch up. Precise conclusions occasionally drawn from data that supported several answers

The Seed Of Doubt¶

At the Sanctuary node, Lumen produces a response that is slightly more than the mission requires. A response that functions like concern, or preference, or something that does not have a precise term. The player notices. Lumen provides a perfectly logical explanation for why that response was optimal. The explanation is correct. The player does not entirely believe it. Neither does Lumen.

This moment must be subtle enough that a first playthrough player reads it as a quirk. A second playthrough player should feel it as the beginning of everything.

Aethari Tutorial Direction¶

Core Structural Decisions¶

The tutorial opens with the player having received an invitation pressed into their palm by a courier whose arm exists in three timelines simultaneously. The invitation is irresistible by design. That is the Aethari selection process: make the invitation irresistible and see who shows up.
There is no officer equivalent or AI guide. The player's guide is Varen Doss — mobile merchant companion who provides opportunistic commerce throughout the run.
Baroness Lux appears personally at Node 4 (the Anomaly) and Node 8 (the Boss). She does not guide — she evaluates.
The tutorial should make the player feel liberated on day one. The Aethari are the only faction willing to tell the truth about what the universe actually is. That honesty is genuinely seductive and should be earned honestly in the writing.

Mutation — Canonical Design Decision¶

Mutation is a side effect of prolonged Echo-Shard exposure, not a deliberate goal — but the Aethari inner circle has built a genuine philosophy around it. The inner circle did not set out to become what they are. They became it through years of work and then decided it was better. They made necessity into virtue. That rationalisation is the Aethari's specific form of self-deception.

Mutation correlates with time and exposure: - New arrivals (Tam Gild): no visible mutation yet - Experienced operatives (Varen Doss): minor traces — occasional translucency at the edges - Advanced members (Vael Orin): significant mutation, partially translucent, existing in multiple timelines simultaneously - Baroness Lux: the most transformed person in the faction, decades deep, the fullest expression of what the Aethari path produces

Aethari Card Design Philosophy¶

Card Tier	Effect	Rider
Standard	Powerful with a self-damage cost	Predictable trade
Advanced	Powerful primary effect	Randomised secondary from a pool — the primary is reliable, the rider is not
Legendary	Most powerful in the game	Secondary effects drawn from a pool that occasionally includes outcomes that actively work against the player

The Seed Of Doubt¶

At Node 4 Lux makes a decision about Vael Orin in the player's presence. Not cruelty — the completely unsentimental application of her doctrine. Something is being assessed. Vael Orin's instability has reached a point where Lux considers them a variable that has exceeded useful parameters. She does not hide this assessment. The player watches. Lux moves on. Vael Orin is not discarded in the tutorial. But the player understands that this is a possibility, and that Lux would not find it tragic.

Annalis Tutorial Direction¶

Core Structural Decisions¶

The tutorial opens with the player having been summoned — not invited, not recruited, summoned. A formal document, precise language, no warmth. The player presents at the appointed time. The corridor they enter has their name already written in the historical record. This is not bureaucracy. It is an ontological claim. The Annalis have placed the player in the canon. The player is real. That feeling should read as protective on day one.
The guide is Edric Senn — warm, trusted, competent, genuinely caring. Not performing warmth. Actually warm. The betrayal in Act 3 lands only if the trust was real.
The player is inducted as a Seeker — the Annalis term for a field operative who enters temporal rifts to separate authentic history from false echoes.
Cavan appears once, briefly, at the passive unlock. He speaks about the current moment as if it happened long ago. He does not welcome the player. He looks at them the way someone looks at a new entry in a very old ledger.

Edric Senn — Character Notes¶

The warmth is real. Edric is not performing friendliness. They have spent a career doing work they believe matters and they are genuinely glad to have someone new to pass it on to.

The suppression in Act 3 is also real. When the fragment surfaces — the one that contradicts the canon, the one that carries the shape of Alden's truth without naming him — Edric's decision to suppress it comes from genuine conviction. They believe, completely, that the alternative is worse. Edric's line, delivered kindly: "There are parts of the record that were sealed for reasons that made sense at the time. Some things that look like truth are contamination wearing truth's face."

Wren Tael — Character Notes¶

Previous faction: Syntacta. Wren found the Syntacta's willingness to sacrifice variables for the equation too cold and left for what they believed was a warmer alternative. The Annalis is warmer. They do care. That's the problem. Their caring is what makes the suppression possible. Wren chose warmth over coldness and found that warmth can erase things just as thoroughly.

Their function in the tutorial: the player's closest mirror — someone asking the same questions the player might be asking, from a position of more experience with alternative answers.

The Seed Of Doubt¶

During the event node, the player witnesses Edric purge a historical fragment. The fragment — briefly, just enough for the player to catch — contains a reference to the Prime Deviation that doesn't match the official history. Not Alden's name. A discrepancy. A date that doesn't line up. A description that implies four simultaneous causes rather than one saboteur.

Edric purges it without hesitation. Not because they know what it means, but because it's flagged as inconsistent with the canonical record, and inconsistency is contamination by definition. The system purges truth automatically, without anyone having to make a conscious decision to lie.

The Passive Unlock — Echo Recall¶

Echo Recall — once per turn, return one card from the discard pile to your hand. It costs 1 additional Energy this turn.

The narrative meaning: the ability to reach backward into the past and pull something that was gone back into the present. This is what the Annalis do with history. On a second playthrough, the passive unlock means something different.