This document serves as a lore primer and an illustrative example of an Incarnation’s Thread within a Tapestry. It details the potential narrative arc of “The Benevolent Leader,” a scenario designed to explore themes of altruism, sacrifice, and a different form of post-death legacy.
The Incarnation: Anya, Unifier
Initial State: You awaken as Anya, an administrator in a failing deep-space colony on a barren moon. The Tapestry is one of quiet desperation. Your Subjective Interface is flooded with resource alerts and declining morale reports. You are not a warrior or a scientist, but you possess a powerful piece of Eidos:
Faith: “A community’s strength lies in its shared burdens and collective hope, not in the walls individuals build around their own meager hoardings.”
Act I: The Crisis & The Spark of Hope
The colony is on the brink of collapse. A critical system failure has crippled food production, and the ruling council has imposed strict, unequal rationing. A cynical survivalism has taken root.
Gameplay Highlight: Weaving a Thread of Trust
Your initial Faith puts you in direct opposition to the colony’s de facto leader, Joric, the head of the rationing committee. He operates on a cold, hard Fact: "Resources are finite. Hoarding is the only rational path to individual survival." His followers are guarded and suspicious.
Your struggle is not one of force, but of influence.
- Challenge the Fact with Faith: You can’t argue with Joric’s numbers, but you can challenge the despair they create. You organize work parties to repair secondary systems, publicly share your own rations with the sick, and begin conversations that focus on solutions, not blame.
- Create a Counter-Fiction: Joric’s narrative is “Every person for themselves.” You create and live a competing story: “We survive together, or we die alone.” Each selfless act you perform is a choice that weaves your Thread into the lives of others, slowly building a coalition of hope against Joric’s pragmatism.
Act II: The Commonwealth & The Hidden Flaw
Months pass. Your influence has grown. The colony has rallied around your leadership, deposing Joric peacefully and establishing a new system of shared resources. A fragile prosperity takes hold, built on your founding Faith. The community now holds a new Fiction dear: “The Myth of the Unbroken Chain,” a belief that their newfound unity makes them invincible.
Gameplay Highlight: The Burden of Leadership
Joric, now a grudging but loyal advisor, discovers a terrifying Fact buried in old maintenance logs: the colony’s atmospheric recycler has a fatal, cascading design flaw. It is not a question of if it will fail, but when. It’s a slow-moving catastrophe.
This Fact directly threatens the colony’s cherished Fiction of invincibility.
- The Choice: Do you reveal the truth, risking mass panic and shattering the very hope that holds the colony together? Or do you carry the secret, working to find a solution while maintaining the facade of stability?
- The Burden: You choose to shoulder the burden alone. You begin secretly diverting resources to a contingency plan, a decision that forces you to make difficult, seemingly unfair choices that test the trust the colonists have placed in you. They see you taking resources for a “vanity project,” unaware you are trying to save them.
Act III: The Sacrifice & The Enduring Legacy
The recycler begins its final, critical failure. Alarms blare. Your secret is out, but it’s too late for conventional repairs. There is only one way to prevent total atmospheric collapse: a manual override from within the reactor’s core, an area that will be flooded with lethal radiation. A suicide mission.
Gameplay Highlight: The Culmination of a Faith
Joric volunteers, arguing that he is more expendable. But your Faith demands the ultimate act of shared burden. You, the leader, must take the greatest risk. Your final act is to walk into the core.
- The Unraveling: Your Subjective Interface shows your life-signs failing, the world dissolving into static. But it is not a view of terror. It is overlaid with images of the colonists—the children you saved, the community you built. Your Thread is not cut in failure, but woven into a final, perfect act of sacrifice.
- The Aftermath: The colony is saved. Your name becomes a legend, your story the founding myth of their civilization.
Your sacrifice becomes their strength. The memory of your leadership becomes their law.
The Thread of Anya has ended, but the Tapestry remains, now indelibly marked by your life.
The Harvest: Guiding the Tapestry
You are no longer Anya. You have ascended to a state of pure Eidos, an Eidolon who can observe the world you saved. But instead of the option to “Unravel the Tapestry,” you are given a new choice: “Bestow Legacy.” The value of your life was not merely to be distilled as raw material for the next world, but to be reinvested as a guiding force for the current one.
Eidos Gained from this Thread:
- Fact:
The specific cascading failure point of the Mark II atmospheric recycler. - Fiction:
The Legend of Anya, the Martyr-Savior who walked into the light. - Faith:
The core tenet that true leadership is measured by sacrifice, not power. - Thread: You have woven the “Shepherd’s Choice”—a narrative of protecting one’s flock at the cost of oneself.
As a guardian Eidolon, you can now spend this accumulated Eidos to subtly influence the colony’s future:
- You can spend the Fact to seed an epiphany in a young engineer’s mind, allowing them to “discover” the blueprints for a stable, advanced recycler, preventing a future catastrophe.
- You can spend the Fiction to reinforce the colony’s resolve during a new crisis, causing a child to “remember” your legend at a key moment, inspiring the adults to hold fast to your ideals.
- You can spend the Faith to protect the colony from an exploitative ideology, making them culturally and spiritually resistant to charismatic outsiders who preach selfishness.
The life of Anya the leader was not a resource to be spent, but an ideal to be invested, ensuring the story she started could continue long after her own chapter had closed.