The Eidic Palette is not an inventory; it is a soul’s cartography. It is the personal, persistent collection of crystallized meaning that a player accumulates across all their Threads. It is here that the raw, chaotic, and subjective experiences of a life are distilled into their essential forms—Fact, Fiction, and Faith—becoming the fundamental building blocks for all future creation.

If the Eidolon is the artist, the Eidic Palette is their collection of paints, pigments, and clay. It is a testament to their entire journey, where every triumph, tragedy, and choice is preserved not as a simple memory, but as a usable, conceptual tool.

The Philosophy of Distilled Meaning

The Eidic Palette represents the culmination of the Anamnesis cycle. A life is lived, a story is told, and upon its conclusion, the Reflect verb allows the player to witness this narrative being distilled into its core symbolic components. The Palette is where these components are stored, examined, and prepared for use in the Loom.

This system is designed to make meta-progression a deeply personal and creative act. The “power” a player gains is not measured in levels or stats, but in the richness, diversity, and complexity of their available palette. A player who has only lived lives of violence will have a very different set of creative tools from one who has explored paths of sacrifice, diplomacy, or esoteric discovery. The Palette is a mirror, reflecting the kind of god the player is becoming.

The Constellarium: The Interface of the Palette

When the player enters the creative phase as an Eidolon, they interact with their Palette through an interface known as the Constellarium. This is a quiet, contemplative space—a personal star-chart or an orrery of meaning.

• The View: The player sees their accumulated Eidos fragments as glowing stars, motes of light, or crystalline structures, which can be organized and filtered.
• The Workspace: The Constellarium provides a conceptual workspace where fragments can be examined, interpreted, and even combined to form new, more complex narrative seeds.

The Three Forms of Eidos

The fragments on the Palette are categorized into the three primary forms of Eidos, each with a distinct function in the Create process.

1. Fact: The Clay of Reality

• What it is: A Fact is a piece of crystallized, verifiable knowledge. It is the distilled essence of an empirical discovery, a historical event, or a fundamental law of a Tapestry. It is what remains when belief and story are stripped away.
• How it’s Used: Facts are the primary tool for weaving the rules and constraints of a new world. They are used to establish the hard physics, the historical bedrock, and the objective conditions of the next Tapestry.
• Example Fragments:
  • From the Botanist’s tragic end: [Fact: Glimmer-spore fungus releases lethal airborne toxins during its reproductive bloom cycle.]
  • From the Benevolent Leader’s investigation: [Fact: The Mark II atmospheric recycler possesses a fatal, cascading design flaw in its primary coolant loop.]
  • From The House of Whispering Steel: [Fact: A specific metallurgical process allows for the binding of Eidic resonance to a physical matrix.]
• Creative Consequence: A Tapestry woven with a high density of Facts will be stable, predictable, and often grounded in a “hard sci-fi” or realistic tone. Its challenges will be puzzles of logic and physics.

2. Fiction: The Pigment of Narrative

• What it is: A Fiction is a story, a myth, a legend, or a powerful piece of art. It is a narrative that has demonstrated the power to shape perception and inspire action, regardless of its objective truth.
• How it’s Used: Fictions are the primary tool for shaping a Tapestry’s culture, genre, and aesthetic. They are used to seed a world with its founding myths, its potential for heroic or tragic quests, and its unique symbolic language.
• Example Fragments:
  • From the Mythic Figure’s accidental heroism: [Fiction: The Legend of Zane, the Rogue with a Heart of Gold.]
  • From the Cultist’s journey: [Fiction: The city of Chronos is a living, dreaming god that responds to song.]
  • From MEMETIC-COGNITO-HAZARD: [Fiction: The universe is a garden, cultivated by a hungry, unseen Gardener.]
• Creative Consequence: A Tapestry woven with powerful Fictions will be vibrant, mythic, and often surreal. It’s a world where prophecies can come true and legends can walk the earth. Its challenges are those of epic poetry and grand drama.

3. Faith: The Gravity of Belief

• What it is: A Faith is a crystallized ideology, a core conviction, or a fundamental worldview. It is a Fiction that has become so deeply internalized by a person or a culture that it now functions as an interpretive lens for all of reality.
• How it’s Used: Faiths are the primary tool for creating social and political dynamics. They are used to define the core tenets of a Tapestry’s factions, religions, and social structures, creating narrative gravity and inherent potential for conflict or harmony.
• Example Fragments:
  • From the Benevolent Leader’s sacrifice: [Faith: True leadership is measured by sacrifice, not by power.]
  • From the Rotten Thread’s nihilism: [Faith: Meaning is a resource, and being is the process of its extraction.]
  • From Homestead’s communal struggle: [Faith: A neighbor's burden is your own; we survive together or die alone.]
• Creative Consequence: A Tapestry woven with strong, competing Faiths will be rife with political intrigue, ideological warfare, and social drama. Its challenges are about navigating complex and often irrational belief systems.

The Dynamics of the Palette

The Eidic Palette is a living toolkit, not a static collection. The player can interact with their harvested Eidos in complex ways.

• Synthesis & Interpretation: The most advanced creative act is to combine fragments in the Constellarium’s workspace to form new, Synthetic Seeds.

  • Example: A player combines the [Fact: The recycler has a fatal flaw] with the [Faith: The Hegemony is infallible and its systems are perfect]. This act of interpretation creates a new, complex seed tagged [The Inconvenient Truth]. A Tapestry created with this seed is highly likely to generate a narrative about a whistleblower trying to expose a fatal error that a dogmatic, authoritarian regime refuses to acknowledge.

• Resonance and Dissonance: The player can choose to build a Tapestry from thematically resonant fragments (e.g., all related to [sacrifice] and [duty]) to create a very focused, coherent world. Conversely, they can deliberately weave a world from dissonant, contradictory fragments (e.g., [Faith: All life is sacred] and [Fact: Survival requires killing]). This creates a Tapestry with high Narrative Tension, which the Director AI will use as fuel to generate more conflict, moral dilemmas, and emergent stories.

• Potency and Fading: Eidos fragments are not all equal. A fragment harvested from a recent, intensely emotional Thread will be Potent, glowing brightly on the Palette. Its influence when used in creation will be strong and direct. Fragments from long-ago lives that have been left unused may become Faded Echoes. They are still part of the player’s legacy and can be used, but their influence is more subtle, like a half-remembered dream influencing the mood of a new world rather than defining its core rules. This encourages players to continually engage with their history, re-interpreting and re-weaving their past into their future.

Design Intent

Why the Eidic Palette exists:

• To provide a tangible, interactive, and creative interface for the game’s meta-progression.
• To give clear, authorial purpose to the different forms of Eidos, allowing the player to act as a world-designer with a rich and varied toolkit.
• To make the player’s personal history the direct source of their creative power, ensuring that every journey is unique and every new world is a reflection of a life once lived.
• To be the ultimate expression of the game’s core loop, transforming the act of “starting a new game” into a profound and personal act of creation.