Fiction is the story-stuff of the universe: what is imagined, narrated, or believed; whether or not it corresponds to observable reality.

Within ATET, Fiction is not deception, but a creative force. It is the medium through which desire, myth, art, fear, and hope propagate through consciousness and culture.

A well-told Fiction can reshape perception, give rise to new Faith, or even manifest physical effects within a Tapestry when the weave becomes sufficiently unstable or receptive.

Nature of Fiction

All Tapestries are suffused with Fiction; some deliberate, some accidental. As players experience and contribute to these worlds, they will encounter, propagate, or subvert countless Fictions:

• Ancient legends and folklore
• Propaganda and rumor
• Artistic works, literature, and ritual performance
• Personal fantasies, fears, or dreams that bleed into shared reality
• Emergent myths created by players themselves through gameplay

Fictions are powerful because they shape how reality is perceived and acted upon. Enough shared belief, narrative momentum, or emotional resonance can cause Fiction to acquire consequences as tangible as those of Fact.

Philosophical Frame

In narrative and gameplay terms, Fiction draws upon:

• From mythology studies: Fiction is not judged by its truth, but by its resonance, transmissibility, and effect on behavior.
• From Jungian psychology: Fiction channels archetypes, collective unconscious patterns, and inner symbolic material into outer action.
• From semiotics: Fiction is an essential layer of meaning-making that mediates all experience, even of the “real.”

Thus: Fiction is not a contaminant of reality, it is a necessary substrate of consciousness and culture.

Gameplay Function

Accumulating Fictions

Players accumulate Fiction Eidos through:

• Engaging with myths, art, and storytelling within a Tapestry
• Witnessing or participating in the creation of new shared narratives
• Manipulating the beliefs or perceptions of others
• Experiencing or surviving events later retold in distorted or symbolic form
• Manifesting personal desires or archetypal patterns that reverberate through the world

Uses of Fictions

Accumulated Fictions enable:

• Weaving more vibrant and strange Tapestries
• Creating Incarnations predisposed toward storytelling, art, propaganda, or belief manipulation
• Unlocking narrative branches that require symbolic insight or mastery of cultural narratives
• Subverting or reinforcing existing Faiths through new narrative frames
• Generating emergent “memetic phenomena”; stories, images, or concepts that may propagate between procedural Tapestries

Narrative Economy

Fiction is the most dynamic form of Eidos:

• It is easier to accumulate than Fact, but more unstable
• It can convert rapidly into new or corrupted Faith
• It may subtly influence the aesthetic, tone, and genre flavor of procedurally generated Tapestries
• NPCs and factions may value, fear, or weaponize the player’s mastery of certain Fictions

Design Intent

Why Fictions exist:

• To emphasize that narrative construction is not secondary to reality, it is constitutive of it
• To allow the player to author, not just explore, the mythic and symbolic layers of the game world
• To support genre plasticity: one player’s Tapestry may feel like epic space opera, another’s like tragic myth, another’s like grim satire; all shaped by which Fictions are woven
• To enable a light emergent “folk culture” among players and their procedural worlds

Key Design Notes

• Fiction should never be a “lie meter”. It is not about falsehood per se, but about narrative agency
• The boundary between Fiction and Faith should be fluid; the same story may act as one or the other depending on cultural adoption
• Fictions that become widely believed acquire gameplay weight beyond their narrative content
• Some unstable Tapestries may tip into “Fiction-dominant” states, producing surreal, allegorical, or dreamlike experiences
• Fiction accumulation should feel like an organic outgrowth of engaging with the world’s culture and symbols, not a forced collectible mechanic