This document serves as a lore primer and an illustrative example of an Incarnation’s Thread within a Tapestry. It details the potential narrative arc of “The Botanist,” a starting scenario designed to organically introduce players to the core mechanics of survival, interpretation, and the interplay of Fact, Fiction, and Faith.

The Incarnation: Kaelen, Survivor

Initial State: You awaken as Kaelen, designated xeno-botanist of the starship Odyssey. The world is a blur of twisted metal and alien flora. Your Subjective Interface is glitching, overlaying memories of the crash with the raw sensory input of this new world. You are a survivor, but you are not a blank slate. Your training has granted you a single, crucial piece of Eidos:

Fact: The ubiquitous “Sun-Kelp” that blankets this coastline contains a potent neurotoxin when raw, but its psychoactive properties are nullified by simple cooking, rendering it a viable food source.

Act I: The Crash & The Seed of Knowledge

The immediate gameplay is a struggle for survival, grounded in your unique Fact. You and a handful of other survivors must find food, water, and shelter.

Gameplay Highlight: Expressive Mechanics & The Subjective Interface

Your Fact about Sun-Kelp shapes your perception.

• Your Subjective Interface: Highlights Sun-Kelp with a calm, green aura. Your internal monologue might note its familiar cellular structure. It is a known quantity, a resource.
• Other Survivors’ Perception: An engineer, Rhys, whose life has been governed by machinery and hard rules, sees the glowing kelp and immediately forms a Fiction: "Anything that glows is radiation-poisoned. Rule one of survival." To him, Sun-Kelp is marked with a red, dangerous aura.

Your first significant choice is not in a dialogue tree, but in action.

1. Hoard the Knowledge: You can quietly gather and cook the kelp for yourself. This ensures your survival but fosters mistrust as Rhys and others watch you eat the “glowing poison” and, impossibly, live.
2. Share the Fact: You attempt to convince the others. This is not a simple “press X to persuade.” You must demonstrate. You cook the kelp, you eat it, you wait. Rhys’s Fiction is powerful, born of a lifetime of experience. Overcoming it requires a demonstration that is more compelling than his ingrained fear. Successfully sharing this Fact weaves the first stitch of community.

Act II: The Budding Community & The Whispers of the Past

Weeks pass. Your small band of survivors has formed a fledgling settlement, built around your botanical expertise. Your ability to distinguish safe flora from dangerous fauna has made you a central figure.

Gameplay Highlight: The Emergence of Faith

Your repeated successes and shared knowledge begin to coalesce into something more than just trust. It becomes a systemic Faith.

• The “Faith of the Seed-Sage”: The community develops a belief system around you. They no longer question your judgment on matters of flora. This has tangible effects:
  • They will automatically follow your lead in gathering new plants.
  • Your Subjective Interface might subtly shift when interacting with them, their dialogue options becoming more deferential. To them, you are no longer just Kaelen the botanist; you are Kaelen, the one who speaks for the land.
  • The Danger: This Faith is a double-edged sword. It grants you authority but also creates dogma. They may become resistant to evidence that contradicts your “wisdom.”

This internal Faith is challenged by external narratives brought by other survivors. Lena, a former corporate officer, clings to a different Faith: “Faith in Procedure.” She interprets the crash not as an accident, but as corporate sabotage by a rival. She produces a data-slate with fragmented logs—a Fiction? A Fact?—that seems to support her theory. Rhys the engineer dismisses it, pointing to a Fact he uncovered in the wreckage: a cracked plasma conduit, evidence of poor maintenance.

The community is now torn between three competing narratives:

1. Sabotage Fiction: We were attacked. We must build defenses and watch for enemies.
2. Negligence Fact: Our ship was a deathtrap. We must focus on salvaging and building a beacon.
3. Seed-Sage Faith: The past doesn’t matter. Only the land provides. We must expand our farms and follow Kaelen.

Your choices—who you support, what you prioritize—will now actively weave the future of this small society. You are no longer just surviving; you are directing a culture.

Act III: The Bloom & The Spore

The settlement is stable. A child has been born. The Faith of the Seed-Sage is dominant. One day, on an exploratory trip, you discover a new species of mushroom in a secluded cave: a beautiful, bioluminescent fungus you name the “Glimmer-spore.”

Gameplay Highlight: The Limits of Fact & Tragic Consequence

Your expertise, the very foundation of your status, becomes your undoing.

• The Misinterpretation: The Glimmer-spore exhibits none of the tell-tale signs of toxicity you know. It doesn’t align with any of your known Facts about danger. The community, steeped in the Faith you helped create, sees it as another blessing from the land. A sign of your wisdom.
• The Choice: Do you bring it back? Cultivate it? Your decision is influenced by the weight of the community’s belief in you. To reject this beautiful fungus might be seen as a lapse in your own Faith.
• The Unraveling: You cultivate the Glimmer-spore. As it reaches maturity, it blooms, releasing a cloud of invisible, odorless spores. It is not poisonous to eat; it is lethal to breathe. The tragedy is swift and silent. Your Subjective Interface flickers as your own lungs fail. The last thing you hear is the strained breathing of your friends, your followers.

Your only consolation is that you do not have to outlive your children.

The Thread of Kaelen is cut. The Tapestry goes dark.

The Harvest: Distilling Eidos

You are no longer Kaelen. You are in the “workshop” between lives. The lived experience, though tragic, was not a failure. It was the raw material for generating a higher-order good. Your pain and your brief joys have been distilled into the currency of understanding.

Eidos Gained from this Thread:

• Fact: Glimmer-spore fungi release lethal airborne toxins during their reproductive bloom cycle. A hard, empirical truth paid for in lives.
• Fiction: The Myth of the Seed-Sage. The story of a wise figure who could interpret the will of the wild. A powerful legend, even if it ended in tragedy.
• Faith: A nascent belief in the inherent benevolence of nature can be a fatal flaw. A philosophical principle learned through catastrophic failure.
• Thread: You have woven the “Botanist’s Gambit”—a narrative archetype of rising to authority through specialized knowledge, only to be undone by a single, catastrophic unknown.

Now, as the Eidolon, you are the artist. The goal of this life was not to “win,” but to learn how to create a more interesting mortality. You can take these fragments of Eidos and weave your next Tapestry:

• You can weave the Fact of the Glimmer-spore into the fundamental laws of the next world, creating a new environmental hazard for a future Incarnation to discover.
• You can seed the Fiction of the Seed-Sage as the core mythology of a new culture, perhaps one that worships or fears botanists.
• You can use the Faith you learned to define the starting ideology of a new faction—perhaps a group of cynical survivalists who trust no one.

The tragic life of Kaelen the botanist has ended, but their legacy gives you, the player, the power to direct a more interesting, more complex, and more meaningful play next time.