The Unnatural Journey

Trans-Tapestry Travel is the rare and dangerous art of moving between the self-contained realities of the cosmos. It is a violation of the natural order, an act that requires either supreme knowledge, profound faith, a deep understanding of the universe’s hidden flaws, a symbiotic bond with a creature of the void, or a will that has transcended the need for a home.

Guiding Principle: Travel is a Transgression

The foundational principle of this system is that crossing the boundary between Tapestries is an unnatural, difficult, and dangerous act. A Tapestry is a coherent weave. To move between them is to punch a hole in the fabric. Therefore, it must always have a cost, a risk, and a consequence.

The Primal Method: The Scar of the Fallow

The first and most fundamental method of trans-tapestry travel is not a technology to be mastered, but a wound to be exploited. An Incarnation’s first escape from Fallow is a desperate, traumatic act of tearing a hole in a broken reality. This act leaves a permanent mark on the player’s very being.

Legacy Unlocked: The Unraveled Path Upon successfully escaping The Fallow, the player unlocks a permanent Legacy. Their future Incarnations will now always carry a latent metaphysical scar, a memory of the glitch.

New Innate Ability: [Tear the Seam] (The Glitch-Walk)

• Nature: This is the baseline, chaotic travel ability. It is not reliable, elegant, or safe. It is a desperate lunge into the unknown.
• Activation: This is a Quest, not a button press. The player must first discover a [Weak Point] in their current Tapestry’s weave—sites of great narrative tension, metaphysical paradoxes, or areas scarred by cosmic events.
• The Cost & Cooldown: Activating [Tear the Seam] requires a significant expenditure of Willpower and inflicts a temporary but severe [Narrative Dissonance] debuff. After a jump, the “scar” must heal, imposing a narrative cooldown: the player cannot attempt another jump until they have lived a significant portion of their new life, re-anchoring their Thread.
• The Smuggler’s Burden: The player can bring physical objects (Artifacts, key items) with them. However, each object is Narrative Contraband. The more you bring, the more “noise” your transition makes, increasing the risk of a chaotic landing or attracting hostile, trans-dimensional entities.

The Guided Fall (The First Escape) To ensure a coherent player progression, the very first use of [Tear the Seam] to escape Fallow is a Guided Fall. The player is always deposited into Gilded Cage. This creates a powerful narrative arc: from the cosmic horror of a broken system to the social horror of a totalitarian one. Subsequent uses of the ability, however, are a gamble, with the destination being unpredictable.

The Paths of Mastery

The chaotic [Tear the Seam] is a desperate tool. The game’s long-term meta-quest becomes the search for better, safer, and more reliable methods of travel. These advanced methods must be unlocked through significant, end-game achievements.

1. The Orrery’s Path (The Way of Fact)

• Philosophy: The space between worlds is a higher-dimensional manifold with its own physics. Travel is an act of supreme, predictive calculation.
• Mechanism: Requires the construction of a Navigational Engine like the Ancestor’s Orrery. The player must find forbidden blueprints, reverse-engineer precursor artifacts, and gather unique materials that resonate with the fundamental forces of reality.
• Cost/Risk: An immense cost in resources and a lifetime of research. The risk is miscalculation, which could strand the player in the void or deposit them in a hostile, unsurvivable reality.
• Associated Factions: Phileas, the Artificer, The Hegemony’s science divisions, The Unbroken.

2. Tearing the Weave (The Way of Faith & Fiction)

• Philosophy: The boundaries between worlds are not physical, but narrative. Travel is about convincing the universe that your story belongs somewhere else.
• Mechanism: Requires the performance of a World-Altering Ritual. The player must learn a forbidden rite, gather symbolic components (the sword of a betrayed king, a tear from a stone golem), and find a Symbolic Locus of immense power to perform it.
• Cost/Risk: The ritual might consume powerful Artifacts or require the sacrifice of cherished Memories as fuel. A poorly performed ritual could summon a hostile entity from the Fiction used in the rite.
• Associated Factions: Lexia, the Weaver of Tales, The Choral, The Oneiroi.

3. The Vessel’s Journey (The Way of the Body)

• Philosophy: Some beings are not of a Tapestry, but are born to navigate the space between them. Their bodies are the key.
• Mechanism: The player must find, tame, or become a Tapestry-Walker, a legendary creature with the innate ability to cross realities. This is a quest to form a symbiotic bond with a being like a “Void-Whale” or “Phase-Spider.” Travel is a cooperative act.
• Cost/Risk: The cost is one of relationship and compromise. The transport is a living being with its own will and Needs. The risk is the bond breaking at a critical moment, leaving you stranded.
• Associated Factions: Arborians, Kith.

4. The Path of No-Path (The Way of the Psyche)

• Philosophy: The ultimate expression of the Eidolon’s power. The boundaries between worlds are a limitation of a constrained consciousness. A mind that has achieved perfect narrative coherence can simply choose to leave.
• Mechanism: The final, perfected form of the Transcend verb. The player must achieve a specific, incredibly difficult state of being through an arduous internal quest. This grants the permanent ability: [Step Sideways].
• Cost/Risk: The cost is attachment. To achieve this state requires a profound detachment from the people and goals of your current life. The risk is a loss of self, a dissolution into the cosmic static between worlds without a Tapestry to provide an anchor.
• Associated Factions: This is the true path of the Eidolon.

The Unlocking Progression: From Glitch to Mastery

These advanced methods must be unlocked.

• The Encounter: The player must first discover and achieve the method within a Tapestry.
• The Eidolon’s Reward: Successfully using an advanced method adds its Metaphysical Schematic to the player’s Eidolon workshop.
• A New Beginning: When weaving their next Tapestry, the player can now choose to start with an Unlocked Legacy, creating a new Incarnation whose entire life is built around this method of travel.

The Director’s Gaze: The Interloper’s Burden

An Incarnation who has traveled from another reality is an anomaly. The Director AI of the host Tapestry recognizes this Eidic Dissonance and reacts, inflicting a dynamic, context-sensitive debuff: Tapestry Rejection.

Acclimatization (Overcoming the Burden): The Tapestry Rejection debuff is not permanent. It can be overcome through Acclimatization. By living within a Tapestry, participating in its rituals, and allowing its dominant Eidos to influence your own, you can slowly “overwrite” your foreign signature and become a naturalized thread in the new weave.