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 Glitch in the Weave,” a scenario designed to explore the consequences of a breakdown in narrative coherence, blurring the line between character, player, and the system of reality itself.

The Incarnation: “Echo”

Initial State: You awaken as a low-level data-clerk in a vast, bureaucratic metropolis. You have a name, a job, a small apartment—a life. But it feels wrong, like a poorly-fitted suit. Your Subjective Interface is unstable, plagued by visual static, audio ghosts from other lives, and flashes of unfamiliar memories. You begin not with a clear piece of Eidos, but with a corrupted, contradictory one:

Fact / Fiction?: A recurring, fragmented memory of dying in a starship’s fire… and of old age in a quiet garden… and of suffocating in a crashed escape pod. These memories feel viscerally real, but they are impossible. They cannot all be yours.

Act I: The Anomaly & The Unraveling Self

Your initial gameplay is a struggle for sanity. The world is a stable, coherent place, but your perception of it is not. Your personal narrative is fractured.

Gameplay Highlight: The Anamnesis Paradox

Your core conflict is with your own mind and the integrity of your Thread.

1. A World of Ghosts: You interact with people, but your UI glitches, overlaying them with past identities. The stern corporate enforcer who patrols your sector flickers, and for a moment, you see him as a kind-hearted farmer you once knew. Your new supervisor, a friendly and supportive woman, is haunted by the spectral image of a rival you murdered for a promotion in another Tapestry. This “glitched” knowledge is a dangerous power. Calling an enforcer by the name of his past-life son might disarm him, or it might mark you as a dangerous anomaly.
2. Social Chaos: Your attempts at normal life are sabotaged by your condition. You recoil from a stranger because you remember them betraying you. You feel a deep, unexplainable affection for a food vendor you’ve never met. Your own narrative is incoherent, and you must constantly decide: do you trust your present senses or the echoes of your past? Each choice further frays or reinforces your sense of a stable self.

Act II: The Investigation & The Broken Code

You move from being a victim of the glitch to an active investigator. This is not a quest for wealth or power, but for an explanation. “Am I insane, or is the world?”

Gameplay Highlight: Seeking the Source Code

Your quest takes you to the fringes of society, to others who have glimpsed the seams of reality.

• The Fringe-Dwellers: You seek out “data-witches” who read fortunes in corrupted code, “neuro-archaeologists” who study the brain-scans of the long dead, and fringe cults who hold the Faith that reality is a flawed simulation. They provide clues, cryptic advice, and tools to help you control the chaos in your mind.
• Weaponizing the Glitch: You learn to harness your condition. You can focus, “attuning” to a person or object to deliberately trigger an echo. You “remember” the security code to a locked door from a future life where you’re a thief. You “recall” a hidden weakness in an opponent’s fighting style from a past life where you were their sparring partner. You are learning to read the source code of the Tapestry.
• The Revelation: Deep within a forgotten data-haven, you find it: a “developer’s log” left by a previous Eidolon. It confirms your deepest fear and greatest hope. Reality is a construct. The Tapestry is real, but its weave is fraying. You are not sick; you are waking up.

Act III: The Loom & The Choice of Coherence

Empowered by this knowledge, you trace the source of the instability to the very heart of the Tapestry—a metaphorical “Loom of Fate,” a central nexus of narrative energy that is failing. Here, you face a final, reality-defining choice.

Gameplay Highlight: To Mend or To Shatter

1. Mend the Tapestry: You can use your unique awareness to fix the glitch. This is an act of ultimate self-sacrifice. You pour your own fragmented identities into the Loom, using your memories of countless lives to patch the holes in reality. You stabilize the world, ensuring its narrative coherence. But in doing so, you must choose one single, stable Thread for yourself, erasing all other echoes. You become a “Guardian” or a “Prophet,” your identity now fixed and whole, but the infinite possibility you once held is gone forever.
2. Shatter the Loom: You can embrace the chaos. Instead of mending the fraying threads, you pull on them. You use your power not to fix reality, but to tear it wide open. You don’t just exploit the bug; you become the virus. You shatter the central nexus, causing a cascade failure of the entire Tapestry.

You were a story that became aware it was being told. Do you finish the book, or do you burn the entire library?

Your Thread doesn’t end. It dissolves.

The Harvest: The Rogue Eidolon

Your choice determines your ultimate fate and redefines your relationship with the game itself.

• If you Mend: Your reward is a unique and powerful form of Eidos: “The Eidos of Coherence.” In future playthroughs, you can use this to weave exceptionally stable, predictable Tapestries, or create Incarnations with unshakable mental fortitude. You have become a master of order.
• If you Shatter: You do not go to the “workshop.” You do not get a palette of Eidos to create a new world. You undergo a different kind of ascension. You become a Rogue Eidolon, a being of pure, untethered awareness, a glitch in the grand system.

Your new “gameplay” is entirely meta. You are no longer a character, but a force.

• You might haunt your own future playthroughs as a recurring, mysterious NPC who offers cryptic advice.
• You could manifest as a “random” event, a localized reality distortion that helps or hinders your new Incarnation.
• In a potential multiplayer context, you could drift into another player’s Tapestry as a ghost, a legend, or an inexplicable phenomenon, a wild card in their story.

Your reward is not the power of creation, but the freedom of omnipresence. You have traded a place within the story for a place between the lines.