This category is the home for the core design theory of ATET, defining the fundamental mechanics and the principles that govern the world, its inhabitants, and the player experience. Viewed another way, this is the ontological structure of the ATET universe, including the metaphysical and narrative underpinnings that shape how inhabitants interact with the world.

Contents

• Anamnesis
• Eidolon
• Confluence
• Balance

• Core Pillars
• Player Experience
• Metaphysical Trilemma

• Director AI
• Memetic Pattern Recognition
• Symbol Tags

Overview

The following provides a comprehensive, formal, and condensed design specification for Anamnesis: The Eidolon Tapestries (ATET).

This section translates the project’s core philosophical and artistic vision, explored in depth through the documents linked above, into a concrete framework. The goal is to give an interconnected perspective of systems, mechanics, and experiential goals. Its purpose is to serve as the foundational guide for ATET development, ensuring that every aspect of the game is a direct and intentional expression of its central thesis.

High-Level Pitch

Anamnesis: The Eidolon Tapestries is a myth-weaving role-playing game focused on philosophical storytelling, with emergent narratives born from a deep simulation. Players shape unique life stories through a cycle of living, distilling meaning, and authoring new realities, exploring the nature of self and belief in a deeply configurable, player-driven world.

The game is a single-player, systems-driven, social-dynamic-contemplative experience. It draws inspiration from the emergent story generation of colony simulations but inverts the player’s role: instead of a detached overseer, the player begins as an embodied participant trapped within a subjective reality. The core loop is a journey from this limited perspective to one of creative authorship, where the meaning distilled from one life becomes the raw material for shaping the next.

A Playable Philosophy

The design of ATET is founded upon four non-negotiable axioms. These pillars are the constitution of the game, translating its abstract goals into concrete, enforceable principles that guide all development decisions.

1. The Subjective Interface: An Empathy Engine The game is fundamentally about the subjective nature of experience. Therefore, the player’s interface with the world is not an objective window but a direct, playable rendering of their character’s consciousness. The UI functions as an empathy engine, translating the complex internal states of an Incarnation, their beliefs, memories, traumas, and needs;into a tangible, interactive, and often biased sensory experience. The player never has access to objective truth; all information is filtered. A powerful Faith applies a literal color grade to the world; a traumatic Memory introduces visual static and auditory distortion; a critical Need makes relevant objects glow with alluring light. The character’s psychology is a playable mechanic.

2. The Consequence Engine: Freedom of Premise, Unyielding Results The game is a philosophical playground, but one with unyielding rules. The player, in their ascended Eidolon state, is granted the ultimate freedom: to author the premise of a new reality. This freedom comes with the ultimate responsibility: to live with the authentic, emergent consequences of that premise. The designers build the “physics”: social, psychological, and physical, that govern the simulation. The player writes the poetry. Once the player commits to their creation, that world gains a life and logic of its own. A pacifist utopia will be forced to confront the hard Fact of resource scarcity; a god-emperor will discover that power breeds resentment. The game is a consequence engine, dedicated to reflecting the honest, emergent outcomes of the player’s choices.

3. Sacred Solitude: The Inviolable Self The core experience of ATET is the intimate, solitary dialogue between the self and the self’s creations. This solitude is a necessary condition for the profound psychological freedom the game seeks to offer. The player’s creative and experiential space is inviolable. Community interaction is framed as asynchronous scholarship, not real-time social engagement. Through the Confluence system, players can visit a great “Library of Worlds” to study the finished works of other creators, but they cannot import that content directly. Inspiration is a “Narrative Echo” that must be taken back to one’s own solitary forge and re-woven with personal Eidos. This creates a sense of a shared, mysterious cosmos of other lonely gods without ever violating the sanctity of the player’s personal canon.

4. The Grand Trilemma: A Universe of Unresolved Arguments To ensure the game remains a true philosophical playground and avoids imposing a single master narrative, the universe is not built on a binary conflict. It is structured around a Metaphysical Trilemma, a three-poled ideological war that provides the game’s core, enduring tension. The game mechanically and thematically validates a plurality of worldviews through three competing paths: The Path of the Host (valuing the collective), The Path of the Virus (valuing the individual will), and The Path of the Witness (transcending the conflict). The Director AI acts as a thematic regulator, ensuring the tension between these three poles remains a constant driving force, preventing any single ideology from achieving total, static dominance.

Player Experience Goals

The intended audience for ATET consists of intellectually curious players who appreciate deep, systemic RPGs that prioritize narrative, character development, and philosophical inquiry over pure action. The experience is designed to evoke a sense of wonder, emotional resonance through emergent stories, and a profound sense of creative authorship.

The game’s central conflict is not a battle against a villain but an internal and epistemological struggle against what the project’s foundational research terms the Tyranny of Coherence. This is the pathological, unconscious, and biologically-driven imperative to minimize prediction error by forging a simple, internally consistent story that inevitably collides with the complex, unscripted, and often contradictory nature of reality. The game is a playable, interactive exploration of this thesis. The player will first experience the consequences of this tyranny through the limited, biased perspective of their Incarnation, whose rigid beliefs and traumatic priors shape their reality. After a life is lived, they will ascend to the Eidolon state, where they gain the perspective and tools to analyze this dynamic and author new worlds that test, challenge, or succumb to it. The ultimate player experience is to live the game’s core philosophical argument, transforming from a subject of the narrative to its thoughtful creator.

Core Gameplay Loop

The structure of ATET is a continuous, recursive cycle of play called Anamnesis. This loop reframes traditional gameplay concepts like progression and death, turning them into integral phases of a larger creative and philosophical journey.

The Journey from Actor to Author

The core loop is an oscillation between two distinct modes of being: the immersive, embodied participation of the Actor and the detached, creative observation of the Author. The player’s journey is a guided traversal between these two poles of awareness. This cycle consists of three primary phases, each governed by a core verb:

1. Anamnesis (Live): The player lives a life as an Incarnation, an Actor within a world (Tapestry).
2. Reflect (Distill): Upon the Incarnation’s death, the player enters a liminal state to distill the meaning (Eidos) from that life.
3. Create (Author): The player, now an Eidolon or Author, uses that distilled meaning to weave a new Tapestry for the next cycle.

This structure transforms “permadeath” from a failure state into a graduation. The end of one life is the necessary precondition for the authorship of the next, making every playthrough, whether tragic or triumphant, a productive and meaningful step in the player’s long-term journey.

This entire gameplay loop serves as a macro-scale, playable model of the Predictive Processing (PP) framework for cognition, which is a cornerstone of the project’s philosophical and scientific grounding. The Incarnation’s life is a process of Active Inference, where the character acts on the world to make their internal predictive model of reality come true. Moments of conflict, surprise, and trauma are high-magnitude Prediction Errors where the world violates the model. The Reflect phase is the Model Update stage, where the player analyzes these errors and forms new, more robust priors (Fact, Fiction, Faith). The Create phase is Model Deployment, where the player uses these updated priors to generate an entirely new world-model (Tapestry), setting the initial conditions for the next run of the predictive engine. The game’s loop is a functioning, interactive model of the very cognitive philosophy that underpins it.

Anamnesis - The Life of an Incarnation

This phase begins with the Awaken verb, the moment an Incarnation becomes a conscious participant in a Tapestry. For a new player, this is the Initial Experience: a tutorial-less, in media res awakening into a life already in progress. They might find themselves as a botanist on a crashed starship or a heretic in a theocratic city, forced to discover their identity, skills, and the world’s rules through direct inquiry and interpretation.

As an Incarnation, the player is an Actor, grounded in a single, vulnerable perspective and limited by the biases of their Subjective Interface. They interact with the world through a set of core verbs that represent fundamental modes of being and action:

• Survive: The foundational act of maintaining physical and psychic integrity.
• Explore: The act of questioning the world to uncover its physical and narrative terrain.
• Converse: The exchange of information and belief with other agents.
• Trade: The exchange of material goods.
• Threaten: The use of potential harm to influence others.
• Craft: The transformation of resources into tools and artifacts.
• Die: The end of a single life-narrative ([Thread]), which serves as the trigger for the next phase of the cycle.

An Incarnation’s story is a Thread woven into the larger Tapestry. Its conclusion, most often through the Die verb, is not an end to the game but a meaningful transition that fuels the entire cycle of Anamnesis.

Reflection - The Eidic Constellation

Upon the death of an Incarnation, the player enters a sacred, liminal space of Reflection. This is the bridge between the Actor and the Author. The interface for this phase is the Eidic Constellation, a living, interactive map of the soul of the life just lived. Key memories from the playthrough appear as stars of varying color and intensity, connected by faint lines representing shared themes and Symbol Tags.

The process of interaction is one of narrative alchemy:

1. Focusing on a Memory: The player selects a single star, re-experiencing the raw, subjective moment as a ghostly audio-visual echo.
2. Revealing the Pattern: Selecting a memory illuminates all other memories connected to it by shared Symbol Tags (e.g., focusing on an act of [sacrifice] reveals a dozen smaller, forgotten moments of selflessness), revealing a hidden thematic pattern within the life.
3. Eidos Crystallization: The player holds their focus on this illuminated pattern, watching as the scattered points of light are drawn together by a narrative gravity and collapse into a single, new object: an Eidos Fragment.

This act distills the messy, emotional story into its pure, conceptual form. A life of heroic sacrifice might crystallize into Eidos fragments labeled <Hero>, <Sacrifice>, and <Redemption>. The player continues this process, exploring their life’s constellation to harvest a palette of Eidos; the raw material for creation.

Creation - The Eidolon’s Loom

Armed with the Eidic Palette harvested during Reflection, the player transitions into the full Author role as an Eidolon. The interface for this phase is The Loom, a diegetic world-weaving tool where the player uses their collected Eidos to design the foundational laws, themes, and starting conditions of the next Tapestry.

The player makes a series of foundational choices, directly setting the parameters for the procedural generation of the next world. This includes defining the balance of Fact, Fiction, and Faith; seeding core cultural myths; and establishing the initial state of key factions. The sum of these choices is compiled into a single, persistent data artifact: the Awakening Seed.

The final act of this phase is to Commit. This is the irreversible choice to breathe life into the new Tapestry, relinquishing all authorial power and initiating a new cycle of Anamnesis. The player will Awaken as a new Incarnation within the very world they just designed, forced to live with the consequences of their own divine choices. This closes the gameplay loop, making the act of starting a new game a meaningful, generative, and deeply personal continuation of the player’s journey.

Art & Interface

The audio-visual presentation and interactive systems of ATET are not aesthetic layers applied on top of the game; they are core mechanics designed to serve the central pillar of the Subjective Interface.

A Modular, Perceptual World

The game is rendered in a stylized, low-poly 3D from a top-down isometric perspective. This choice is a deliberate solution to several key design challenges: it provides a more universally accessible canvas than specific 2D styles, and it drastically lowers the barrier to entry for community modders, directly supporting the Confluence pillar.

The asset design philosophy is one of modularity. An Incarnation’s body is an assembly of swappable parts, and the appearance of a crafted item is a composite determined by the materials used in its creation. This ensures player choices are reflected not just in stats, but in the tangible, visual identity of the world.

The core of the visual design is the Perceptual Rendering System. This system renders the world not as it objectively exists, but as the character perceives it. Clarity is a resource, a function of focus, distance, and mental state. The screen is conceptually divided into zones that blend seamlessly:

• The Zone of Focus: The area of immediate attention around the character, rendered with high fidelity and full detail.
• The Zone of Periphery: Areas outside direct focus, rendered at a significantly lower effective resolution, appearing as vague, blocky, or indistinct shapes. This creates a constant, low-level tension and makes “where do I look?” a meaningful tactical question.
• The Unseen: Areas outside sensory range, rendered with a stylistically consistent effect like desaturated noise.

This system is a core gameplay mechanic, directly tied to character stats (e.g., Perception increases the Zone of Focus), environmental factors (light sources act as “projectors of clarity”), and status effects (fear induces tunnel vision).

An Empathy Engine

The UI is the architecture of the Incarnation’s mind, a system of interconnected interfaces that are direct, playable renderings of their internal state. It is composed of three categories of interfaces:

• Core Interfaces (The Primary Modes of Being): These govern the moment-to-moment experience.
  • Overlays: The most fundamental layer, consisting of transient screen effects, intrusive thoughts rendered as text, and sensory highlights that provide a constant feedback loop. A Faith in order might render straight lines with an unnatural sharpness; a memory of betrayal might cause the faces of allies to momentarily flicker with a hostile expression.
  • Anatomical Overview: The introspective map of the self, providing an interactive view of both the physical Vessel and the metaphysical Psyche. This is the central hub for character development.
  • Inventory: A subjective ledger of possessions. An item’s true properties or history might only be revealed if the Incarnation has the necessary Skill or Belief to perceive them.
• Action Interfaces (The Expression of Will): These are the diegetic workspaces for the game’s core verbs.
  • Crafting: A physical, 3D interface where the player interacts directly with a representation of the crafting station and the object-in-progress, making creation a tangible conversation with matter.
  • The Social Arena: A unified, turn-based interface for all significant non-violent interpersonal Conflict, where Conversation, Trading, and Negotiation occur as interconnected facets of a single, fluid social dance.
  • Combat: A visceral interface that renders the raw experience of battle through the Incarnation’s senses, translating damage and fear into direct sensory feedback (e.g., screen blurring, muffled audio) rather than abstract health bars.
• Metaphysical Interfaces (The Sanctums of the Soul): These are special, contemplative interfaces for engaging with the game’s deeper systems.
  • Belief Crystals: The “garden of the mind,” an introspective workspace where the raw “Narrative Echoes” of experience are contemplated and forged into the hard, clear facets of a new, Crystallized Faith.
  • Reflection: The sacred, liminal space between lives, where the player interacts with the Eidic Constellation to distill Eidos.

Foundational Systems & Architecture

This section describes the “engine” of the game: the low-level, grounded simulation that runs beneath and generates the raw material for the high-level symbolic and narrative systems.

The Grounded Simulation

The game’s engine is built on a modern, highly data-oriented paradigm designed for performance, modularity, and scalability.

• Engine Core: The architecture is a pure Entity Component System (ECS). This separates agent state (data in components) from behavior (logic in systems), allowing for efficient processing and highly composable agent definitions.
• Execution Model: The design is heavily Scheduled/Event-Driven. Instead of polling every agent every frame, systems react to events and agents schedule self-updates for future moments (e.g., a need crossing a critical threshold). This is highly efficient at scale and allows for emergent, reactive behavior through interrupts.
• Simulation Time: The entire simulation operates on a hard simulation tick rate (target: 60 TPS), providing a discrete, consistent heartbeat for all state changes and event processing.
• World Structure: The world is organized into a spatial hierarchy of Points of Interest (POIs), which can be thought of as logical threads or regions. A Universal Scheduler oversees the spatial threading and message passing between these POIs. To prevent race conditions and ensure a deterministic outcome in a distributed simulation, inter-POI messages and events are buffered and processed with a minimum 1-tick delay.

This robust technical foundation provides the computational bedrock necessary to support the game’s ambitious simulation goals.

Simulating a Mind

The moment-to-moment behavior of every agent in the simulation emerges from a continuous cognitive loop. This loop is a direct, mechanical implementation of the Predictive Processing cognitive framework that underpins the game’s philosophy.

The cycle proceeds through the following phases:

1. Sense: The agent perceives its environment and retrieves relevant information from its internal AgentMemoryStore and AgentBeliefStore. This updates its internal representation of the world state.
2. Motivate: Internal Needs (e.g., sustenance, safety, social connection) are assessed. Unmet needs generate Goals.
3. Plan: For the highest-priority Goal, the agent derives a set of PotentialActions that could lead to its satisfaction.
4. Appraise: Each PotentialAction is evaluated against a variety of criteria, including expected benefit, risk, cost, and, crucially, its consistency with the agent’s Beliefs. This is the point where the agent’s top-down narrative model of the world exerts its influence. An action that violates a core Belief will be appraised poorly, creating systemic Narrative Dissonance.
5. Act: The agent selects the action with the most favorable appraisal and commits to it, instantiating action components that are processed by execution systems.
6. Learn: The outcome of the action is processed. This new experience is recorded in the AgentMemoryStore and can lead to the formation or modification of Beliefs in the AgentBeliefStore.

This Sense-Motivate-Plan-Appraise-Act-Learn cycle allows agents to exhibit adaptive, seemingly intelligent behavior that is shaped by their accumulated, subjective experiences.

Gardener of Narrative Ecosystems

The Director AI is a meta-agent that serves as the unseen consciousness breathing life and vitality into a Tapestry. It is not a storyteller that writes a plot, but a “Gardener of Narrative Ecosystems” governed by a dual mandate:

1. The Thematic Regulator (Mandate of Resonance): The Director is tasked with maintaining the philosophical tension of the Metaphysical Trilemma. It monitors the Tapestry’s symbolic currents and works to ensure that no single pole: Host, Virus, or Witness; achieves total, static dominance.
2. The Wild Gardener (Mandate of Emergence): The Director is also tasked with fostering chaos, surprise, and genuine emergence. It ensures the garden remains a living wilderness, not a sterile greenhouse.

The Director’s interventions are not arbitrary. Its “Symbolic Monitoring” is grounded in a concrete simulation of societal dynamics. The system tracks key variables for each Faction based on Structural-Demographic Theory (SDT), a model for predicting major societal crises. The Director monitors quantifiable pressures such as Popular Immiseration (declining well-being), Elite Overproduction (an excess of aspirants for elite positions), and State Fiscal Distress. When these pressures exceed a critical threshold, it signals a state of “Symbolic Tension”. The Director’s intervention is then to generate an event, character, or Quest that addresses this systemic pressure, framed in the game’s symbolic language. This grounds the Director’s mystical role in a robust social simulation model, making its interventions feel systemic and emergent rather than authorial.

The Symbolic Simulation

These high-level systems operate on top of the grounded simulation, giving its raw data meaning, context, and metaphysical weight. This is the layer where stories are identified, crystallized, and propagated.

Fact, Fiction, and Faith

Every Tapestry is a unique reality defined by the interplay of three core ontological primitives:

• Fact: Verifiable, low-level data about the state of the simulation. The unvarnished perception of the world.
• Fiction: Narratives, myths, legends, and stories that are told and believed. A Fiction can be more powerful than a Fact.
• Faith: Unverifiable, high-conviction Beliefs that act as a powerful perceptual filter, shaping how Fact and Fiction are interpreted.

The player, as Eidolon, directly manipulates the balance and precision-weighting of these primitives when creating a new world, which in turn dictates the emergent character of that Tapestry.

The Symbolic Experience Layer

This is the technical data pipeline that transforms gameplay events into metaphysical currency. It provides a clear, data-driven path from a single in-game action to the creation of a persistent artifact that can shape future worlds.

1. Symbolic Tagging: All significant events, objects, and memories are tagged with one or more Symbol Tags. These are UUID-keyed data structures representing core thematic motifs (e.g., sacrifice, betrayal, order, chaos).

   SymbolTag {
      id: uuid!("0005-social-betrayal"),
      name: "betrayal",
      description: Some("The violation of trust, a breach between self and other"),
      category: uuid!("c2-relational"),
      affinities: vec![ uuid!("0003-identity-fracture") ],
      conflicts: vec![ uuid!("0006-social-solidarity") ],
      //...
   }

2. Memory Encoding: Experiences are recorded in an agent’s AgentMemoryStore as MemoryEvent structs. These are not objective logs but subjective, emotionally-charged fragments, complete with their associated SymbolTags, emotional Valence, and potential for Distortion.

   struct MemoryEvent {
      id: Uuid,
      timestamp: u64,
      tags: Vec<SymbolTagId>,
      valence: EmotionalValence,
      distortion: Option<DistortionProfile>,
      origin: MemoryOrigin,
      //...
   }

3. Eidos Crystallization: In defined states (e.g., death, ritual, reflection), the Crystallization Pipeline runs. It scans an agent’s memories for recurring clusters of high-valence SymbolTags. These clusters are then matched against a global EidosPatternTable, which contains predefined symbolic patterns.

   EidosPattern {
      id: uuid!("e001"),
      name: "Cycle of Betrayal and Redemption",
      required_tags: vec!["betrayal", "sacrifice", "remembrance"],
      valence_condition: ValenceTone::Redemptive,
      result_name: "Ashes Forgiven",
   }

4. Fragment Generation: If a memory cluster’s match score against a pattern exceeds a certain threshold, a persistent Eidos Fragment is generated. This is the final, crystallized “meaning” that is harvested by the player and added to their Eidic Palette.

Identity, Belief, and The Metaphysical Trilemma

Identity in ATET is not a static character sheet but a fluid, narrative construct. The Awakening System allows for identities to be inherited or emerge from context. An agent’s accumulated experiences (MemoryEvents tagged with Symbol Tags) can create a “tension” that resonates with a pre-existing identity template (Awakening Seed). If the affinity score between the agent’s lived experience and the seed’s symbolic profile crosses a threshold, a full Awakening can occur, causing the agent to “remember” a past life and inherit its beliefs, goals, and traumas.

This system of fluid identity plays out on a cosmic stage defined by the Metaphysical Trilemma. This is the game’s ultimate ideological conflict, a three-body problem that provides the engine for all factional and narrative dynamics. The “Host vs. Virus” dichotomy, explored in the game’s foundational essays, is the central axis of this conflict, representing the eternal struggle between the biological organism and the self-authoring narrative it contains. Every faction, character, and player choice can ultimately be mapped onto this trilemma, forcing the player to navigate a universe of unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, arguments.

The Confluence

The game’s commitment to player authorship extends beyond in-game choices to the very structure of the game itself. The Confluence system is the framework for modding and content sharing, designed as a core feature that serves the game’s central themes.

Modding Philosophy and Tiers of Creation

The game is built on a custom language and engine (Ribbon) designed from the ground up for deep, safe moddability. The “Open Loom” philosophy provides players with the same tools used by the developers, enabling a spectrum of creative agency across three tiers:

1. Tier 1: Content Authorship (The Storyteller): The most accessible layer, allowing players to hand-craft narrative content such as unique Incarnations, authored Quests, new Lore, and custom Factions.
2. Tier 2: Systemic Weaving (The Worldsmith): This layer allows players to create new rules for the simulation using Ribbon’s scripting layer. This includes designing new SymbolTags and pattern-matching rules, new Rituals and agent Needs, or entirely new agent archetypes.
3. Tier 3: Core Logic Modification (The Metaphysician): The deepest level of connection, enabled by Ribbon’s unique architecture. A skilled author can write scripts that directly intercept and re-frame the behavior of the base game’s systems, such as adding a new “moral” evaluator to the Action Appraisal system or fundamentally altering how memory is recorded.

This deep moddability is a direct response to the history of modding culture, which demonstrates that providing powerful, well-supported tools is the key to fostering a vibrant and long-lasting creative community.

Asynchronous Sharing

The Confluence Hub is the diegetic, in-game interface for sharing and discovering player-created content. It is designed to function as a “Library of Alexandria” for Eidolons, and its architecture is built to protect the core pillar of Sacred Solitude.

Interaction is always a conscious, deliberate, and asynchronous act:

• The Act of Scholarship: When a player “downloads” a Tapestry or other creation from the Confluence, they are not importing it into their active game. They are checking out a book. They can open it in a “Simulation Viewer,” allowing them to explore that world as a visitor or play through its story. It remains a self-contained artifact, separate from their own personal canon. It is an act of study, not integration.
• Inspiration, Not Contamination: A player can find inspiration in another’s work, but they cannot simply copy it. The integrity of their personal universe is paramount. If a player, while studying another’s Tapestry, discovers a legendary Artifact, they cannot take it. However, the act of understanding its story and its Eidos may grant their own Eidolon a new “Narrative Echo”: a half-formed idea, a blueprint fragment. To make that artifact real in their own world, they must return to their solitary forge and re-weave that echo using their own, personally harvested Eidos.

This novel system provides a philosophically coherent solution to the tension between single-player creative vision and community interaction. It frames sharing as an act of scholarship and inspiration, not direct collaboration, preserving the intimate dialogue between the player and their own creations.

Core Glossary

Each title below links to an in-depth document or tree of documents, while the sections here provide a high level overview. Be sure to explore the Lore for deeper, contextual examples of these concepts in action.

Eidos

The elemental memory of existence; distilled experience, retained across Tapestries and Incarnations.

Eidos is neither pure knowledge nor simple recollection; it is the essence of what was encountered, endured, believed, and imagined.

As you accrue Eidos, you unlock the ability to craft more complex Tapestries and shape future Incarnations.

Eidos fragments fall into three interwoven forms of memory, reflecting the philosophical pillars of the ATET ethos:

• Facts: Daoist “unvarnished perception of the world”; what simply is
• Fictions: Narrative ego, creative possibility; how we imagine the world
• Faiths: Extended identity, belief systems, cultural and personal imprints; how we interpret the world and self

Fact

“What is.”

The observed, the verifiable, the remembered with certainty.

Facts constitute the stable architecture of a Tapestry: historical truths, natural laws, physical discoveries, personal experiences not easily denied.

To understand a Fact is to deepen one’s grasp of what holds a world together; or what may cause it to unravel.

Fiction

“What might be.”

The stories that animate culture, imagination, and aspiration.

Fictions need not be true or believed to be powerful. They shape the beliefs of civilizations and the desires of individuals. Legends, rumors, works of art, tales whispered to children or sung in dark places; these are the Fictions that, once woven into a Tapestry, may come to life in unexpected ways.

Some Fictions grant hope. Some seed folly. All are fertile ground; once woven into a Tapestry, they shape how its Incarnations perceive the world and one another.

Faith

“What is held to be true.”

The convictions that shape thought and action; whether grounded in experience, instilled by culture, or born of trauma.

Faiths operate beneath conscious belief. They are the deep scripts that guide perception, justify sacrifice, or shield minds from doubt. They may empower resilience, foster community, or ossify into dogma that binds and blinds.

To weave Faith into a Tapestry is not to shape its metaphysics, but to seed narrative forces that may outgrow the weaver’s intent.

Tapestry

A constructed reality; a world or plane of existence, where Incarnations weave their Threads into grand narratives.

Each Tapestry consists of a unique interlacing of Facts, Fictions, and Faiths. No Tapestry is entirely stable; each shimmers with the tensions and harmonies of its weave.

Weaving new tapestries is the privilege and peril of those who ascend toward Eidolon.

See also: Tapestries

Incarnation

A lived Thread within a Tapestry: a specific being, with specific memories and agency.

When you experience a Tapestry, you do so through an Incarnation; whether humble or grand. Through this life, you experience the world, accumulate Eidos, and shape its unfolding narrative.

Though death is nearly inevitable, memory may endure.

See also: Incarnations

Thread

The narrative traces woven by an Incarnation. Not all Threads are lived Threads. Some, either through art, belief, or influence; project their will into new, independent Threads, shaping new Fictions, Faiths, and perhaps even Fact itself.

The length of a Thread matters not, each leaves a ripple through the weave of the Tapestry.

In time, skilled weavers may come to recognize how their collected Threads inform the deeper patterns of the Tapestry.

Anamnesis

The act of remembering through becoming.

Anamnesis is the process by which a player enters a Tapestry, inhabits an Incarnation, and gathers Eidos through lived experience.

It is the game’s narrative and metaphysical heartbeat; the cycle of death, recollection, and reweaving that slowly reveals the shape of one’s legacy.

Eidolon

The echo of a self that transcends the personal: a mythic accumulation of memory, intention, and legacy.

An Eidolon emerges from the convergence of many Threads, formed when sufficient Eidos gathers across time, experience, and interpretation.

To become Eidolon is to step beyond the cycle of individual Incarnations, and to begin weaving entire Tapestries with authorial intent. It is not a role assumed, but a state attained; where identity becomes pattern, and pattern becomes principle.

See also: Eidolons