The harmony of the Concord is not a treasure to be hoarded, but a gift to be shared with a broken universe.

Core Concept

The Sylvan Crusade are the expansionist, missionary, and often radical expression of the Arborian will. They are the gardeners who look upon the chaotic, suffering worlds of other Tapestries and see not a foreign land to be feared, but a fallow field waiting for the Concord’s seeds. They believe the World-Soul’s harmony is not a state to be preserved, but a solution to be exported. Their mission is to spread the “gift” of their living reality, a crusade of terraforming that is, to them, an act of supreme benevolence, and to others, an act of terrifying ecological imperialism.

Species

• Primary: Arborians (exclusively evangelists).

Ideology (Faith / Fiction)

• Core Faith: “The Universe is a Garden to be Tended.” Their worldview is one of proactive, interventionist compassion. They believe it is their sacred duty to bring the harmony of the World-Soul to lesser, chaotic worlds. They do not see this as conquest, but as healing. They are the doctors who believe the only cure for the universe’s sickness is a total biological and philosophical transformation.

• Core Fiction: “The Parable of the Lone Seed.” Their founding myth is a direct rebuttal to the Heartwood Circle’s conservatism. It tells of a single, wind-blown seed from a World-Tree that, through a cosmic accident, landed on a barren, mechanical world. Over uncounted ages, that single seed’s descendants slowly, patiently, and heroically transformed the dead world of steel into a new, living garden. This story justifies their belief that even the most hostile environment can be saved, and that inaction in the face of suffering is the only true sin.

Goals & Motivations

• To find new, “broken” or “incomplete” Tapestries to terraform.
• To develop and deploy powerful, aggressive, and fast-growing “Genesis Seeds” and other bio-forms that can rapidly convert a planet’s ecosystem into a new province of the Concord.
• To convert or, if necessary, displace native life forms that resist the “harmonization” process.

Player Interaction

• The Path of the Missionary: Joining the Sylvan Crusade is to become an agent of profound and often unsolicited change. Your quests are proactive and aggressive: scouting new worlds for terraforming potential, defending nascent “Genesis Groves” from hostile natives or rival factions, and wielding terrifyingly powerful bio-weapons that can turn a desert into a jungle, or an army into fertilizer. They are a faction of immense creative power, but their absolute certainty in their own righteousness makes them capable of monstrous acts in the name of a greater good.

Shared Historical Context with The Unbroken

The Arborians’ deep-seated technophobia, shared by both factions, is not an abstract philosophy. It is a species-wide trauma. Their “Metal Plague” myth is a distorted, mythologized memory of a real historical event: a devastating ancient war against the early, expansionist Unbroken Empire. The Unbroken, in their zealous youth, saw the Sylvan Concord’s “inefficient” biological chaos as a system to be “corrected” and “optimized.” The resulting conflict was a near-apocalypse for the Arborians, and it is the foundational Fact that hardened their rejection of all things mechanical into an unshakeable, religious dogma. This shared history makes any modern encounter between an Arborian and an Unbroken an event charged with millennia of inherited hatred and fear.