A quest in ATET is a tension seeking resolution.

While quests may take the form of hand-authored content, the vast majority of quests will emerge from systemic circumstances.

A quest, equally, is not necessarily a mission handed down by an external authority; it is usually a narrative structure that emerges from within the world itself. Quests form at the intersection of memory, belief, and desire. They are not imposed; they are encountered, intuited, and interpreted.

This document outlines the role of quests, how they arise, and what makes them fundamentally different from traditional RPG systems.

Systemic Quests

It may manifest as a personal struggle, a cultural contradiction, a symbolic mystery, or a prophetic event. These tensions are systemic, not scripted; they emerge from the conditions of the Tapestry, the beliefs of its inhabitants, and the history of the player’s own past Threads.

The player may not always recognize a quest when they are in it. Not every turning point comes with an announcement. Some Threads only reveal their meaning in hindsight, or through reincarnation.

How Quests Arise

Quests are born from a confluence of generative systems. The following vectors typically seed them:

• Character Tension: An NPC torn between two Faiths may create a storyline of personal betrayal or reconciliation.
• Cultural Instability: When Fictions clash with emerging Facts, quests arise around lost rituals, forbidden knowledge, or ideological schism.
• Symbolic Saturation: Recurring motifs, omens, or dreamlike elements in the world may signal narrative arcs of mythic significance.
• Historical Echo: Actions from past playthroughs; prior Incarnations or unresolved quests may ripple forward, surfacing as distorted versions of themselves.

The world does not announce what matters; it only responds.

Interacting with Quests

The player engages with quests through attention and interpretation. Quest progression is not tracked numerically but experientially. Clues may be:

• Social: Hints in language, behavior, taboo, ritual.
• Environmental: Shifts in geography, flora, or architecture in response to latent narrative pressure.
• Symbolic: Repeated visual motifs, shared dreams, inherited artifacts.
• Mythic: Echoes of prior Threads resurfacing in altered or prophetic form.

Quests reward curiosity, intuition, and reflection. They rarely ask “Did you solve it?” Instead, they ask: “Did you understand what it meant?”

Resolution and Aftermath

Not all quests resolve. Not all should.

Resolution may be narrative, not mechanical; a change in belief, a cultural shift, a personal sacrifice. Others may be aborted, transformed, or hijacked by competing forces. Many remain open-ended, their meaning deferred across lifetimes.

Some consequences include:

• Shifting the balance between Fact, Fiction, and Faith in a Tapestry.
• Creating persistent narrative motifs that reappear in later playthroughs.
• Marking a moment in the player’s accumulated Eidos, potentially shaping future Incarnations.

The completion of a quest may not bring clarity. It may bring myth.

Types of Quests (By Narrative Function)

Without using rigid genre tags, we recognize recurring narrative functions of quests:

• Catalytic: provoke transformation in self, others, or world
• Restorative: attempt to mend broken systems, rituals, or relationships
• Mythogenic: give rise to new stories, symbols, or emergent Faiths
• Contradictory: present unsolvable dilemmas or mutually exclusive truths
• Phantom: appear to be quests, but collapse under scrutiny or memory loss

These types blur. Some quests drift between them, evolving with the Tapestry.

Memory and Forgetting

The player’s engagement with quests is shaped by how they remember.

Some quests are:

• Persistent: Inter-generational, returning in future Tapestries with altered form.
• Personal: Tied to an Incarnation’s beliefs or trauma.
• Forgotten: Lost entirely, or replaced by contradictory narratives.

Reflection is part of the loop. The true shape of a quest may only become visible after death; when the player glimpses the narrative imprint it left behind, and carries it forward as a Thread.

Design Priorities

• Diegetic Discovery: The world teaches the player what matters; no external interface signals it.
• Emergent Structure: Quests arise from simulation, not scripting.
• Symbolic Literacy: Players learn to read a world shaped by meaning, not metadata.
• Narrative Consequence: Choices echo through Eidos, even when resolution is partial or absent.