Metaphysics Summary — Prima Materia (Self-Contained Brief)¶

What this is: A complete, standalone reference on the metaphysics of the world of Prima Materia (a turn-based tactical RPG). It is written to be read and evaluated on its own, with no access to any other document. Every term, people, place, and entity it names is defined within this file. Where the world has not yet decided something, it is marked [OPEN] — those gaps are genuine and should not be invented around.

Naming note: This setting uses Greek-derived names for its metaphysical concepts. The first time each appears it is glossed; a full glossary sits at the end.

1. One-paragraph orientation¶

A being from a higher reality, named Skyne, came to this empty world, used borrowed god-like power to shape matter, then forged abstract Virtues and put an echo of himself into each so it could act and lead. Unintentionally, defining each Virtue also created its shadow Vice. These Virtue/Vice powers are the Archai (their metaphysical name) or Eidolons (their religious name) — the living gods. Skyne then left this world, returned to his native reality, and died there; only his lingering echo remains, and the gods wrongly believe he is still alive. Each god-power is a kind of throne held by a mortal called a Katochos who has been elevated to godhood, and each is tied to a specific people/bloodline. Crucially, a god's power is literally the accumulated total of its people's lived conduct — not their stated beliefs — and this fact is a jealously guarded secret. The world's central present-day catastrophe, the Disruption, is an engineered, in-progress attempt by a mortal cabal to violently seize one of these god-thrones for itself.

2. The Five Realms¶

Reality is layered into five realms: three core realms and two interstitial realms sitting between them. The three core realms deliberately map onto Plato's three-part soul (reason, spirit, appetite) — the design conceit is "the cosmos above is the same shape as the soul within." Mortals live on a sixth layer, the base/material plane, below all five.

Realm	Type	Symbol	Plato's soul-part	What it is
Light	core	a burning moon	reason	The highest realm. Once Skyne's seat; he abandoned it. The living gods (Katochoi) now dwell here on his empty thrones.
Waves	interstitial	a tempest	—	Churning zone of pure raw force (Exousia, §5) before it takes a god-aligned shape. A god-power crossing from one holder to another passes through here.
Images	core	a river	spirit	Dwelling of the Forms — the perfect abstract patterns of everything (the perfect Circle, the perfect Blade, and the Virtues/Vices themselves). The gods radiate outward from their patterns here even while seated up in Light. This is the Platonic "Realm of Forms."
Echoes	interstitial	concentric circles	—	Threshold where ideals dissolve into raw appetite. Dwelling there overwhelms the mind — some dissolve upward into pure intellect, some are dragged down into pure beast. A crossing, not a home. Can be pulled into the material world via a relic called The Image of Shadow (a smooth black stone with shifting lines).
Shadow	core	a beast	appetite	The deepest realm — the primal foundation, where base drives writhe in darkness.

Key constraint: A living god physically cannot descend to the material plane where mortals live; the "chain of being" forbids it. Gods touch the mortal world only through two indirect channels (see §4).

3. Origin of the world (cosmogony) and Skyne¶

Skyne is not native to this world. He came from the reality above this one — a higher, original world of which this world is a descendant. By means now lost to history, he obtained the power to act as a demiurge (a craftsman of worlds). He made several worlds; this one was his first.
He shaped the material foundation of reality. Then, wanting the world to have moral texture, he forged a set of abstract Virtues and imbued each with an echo of himself, giving each the capacity to act, to inhabit a holder, and to lead.
The flaw he never noticed: defining a pure Virtue automatically instantiates its opposite Vice. Defining Courage created Cowardice; Hope created Despair; Humility created Pride. Because Skyne was himself only a creature of the higher world (and so incomplete), he didn't see this. Every god-power therefore carries a Virtue and its shadow Vice, inseparably. The Vice is the Virtue's own corruption (the virtue turned inward or pushed past its limit) — not a separate enemy. This is a Jungian "shadow" relationship.
Skyne's departure and death: his work done, Skyne returned to his native reality and died there. Only his echo remains in the worlds he made — and that echo is still more potent than any standing god. The gods feel the echo and believe Skyne is merely alive-but-aloof. He let that belief stand by leaving them to run autonomously.
The one mortal who knows: a single person in this world, a reality-hopping wanderer named Euphen (himself originally from that same higher reality, and one of the game's player characters), knows that Skyne is actually dead. He treats it as an open secret he has had no reason and no one to share it with.
Blood memories: all sapient life here descends from life Skyne seeded, so every soul carries faint, usually-unnoticed impressions of the higher world. The gods, closer to the source, feel them more strongly. The god of Humility (female) in particular remembers enough to experience this world as a prison; the pride this breeds drives her to raise her people above all others — the root motive behind the catastrophe in §9.

4. The gods: Archai / Eidolons¶

Two names, same beings: - Archē (plural Archai) — the metaphysical name, used when treating the power as a substance (how it transfers, is inherited, can shatter). - Eidolon — the religious name, used for the god as a worshipped face. - A god-power with a holder = an Eidolon. A god-power that has lost its holder is no longer an Eidolon — just a scattered, uninhabited power.

The holder — Katochos: A god-power must be held by someone. Its holder is a Katochos (the word carries a double sense: "one who holds" and "one who is held"). The Katochos is a mortal who has been elevated into the god of that Virtue — they wield its authority, are remade by it, and their lifespan stretches to match the seat. Power rarely changes hands. The useful mental model: a god-power is less a person than a throne, and whoever sits it becomes the god for as long as they hold it. Katochoi dwell up in the Realm of Light.

Bound to a people: Every god is tied to a specific people — either a whole race, or a bloodline cluster (see Glyphein, §9). A person's magic type, their soul's "signature," and their spiritual alignment are all inherited together as one inseparable thread. To be born into a lineage is to carry that god's resonance in your blood. (One exception: the scattered Forgotten has no living people, so its gift — Primal / elemental magic — is reached by disposition, not blood; see §5, "the Connected.")

The most important fact — influence runs both ways: - A god leads its people: its Virtue and Vice imprint on their souls and dispositions. - But a god is also a reflection of its people: as more of them give themselves to the Vice, the Vice grows louder in the god; as more hold to the Virtue, the Virtue dominates. The god's resulting state then radiates back down, tilting the next generation — often accelerating the drift. - This pull is slow (a generational weight) and not unilateral: a single extraordinarily strong will — saint or monster — can move the god disproportionately. - Worked example: the Sophronoi people (an elite, prideful ruling caste; see §9) have drifted toward Pride for generations, so their god, Humility, now wears a Pride-dominant face — which leans back on them and accelerates the slide.

How a god touches the mortal world (it cannot do so directly): - Phantasma ("apparition") — a projected image/vision, sent to a mortal who is in a receptive state (dreaming, comatose, fevered, deep in meditation, or deeply devoted). It can be perceived but cannot physically act. Nearly all divine guidance in the world is of this kind, landing on priests and seers. - Pneumatophoros ("spirit-bearer") — a mortal proxy whose body a god temporarily inhabits to act directly in the world. Rare and costly. Requires four things at once: (1) the proxy is already deeply attuned to that god through sustained practice; (2) the proxy willingly consents and can withdraw anytime; (3) an intact Thronos anchor is present (a sacred object holding a fragment of the god's own Will — see §7); (4) an ongoing Will-cost that burns the reservoir (§6) of both god and proxy. Overuse can hollow either one out.

The roster of gods — nine known Virtues, but much is undeveloped. Confirmed facts:

God (Virtue)	Shadow (Vice)	Its people	Its magic form
Hope	Despair	the Elpidi (a sun-worshipping religious order)	Blooming
Temperance	[OPEN]	the Vanarites (a shapeshifting people)	Shaping
Humility	Pride	the Sophronoi (prideful ruling elite)	[OPEN]
Innovation	[OPEN]	a Glyphein bloodline-cluster	Investment / Imbuing
Wisdom	[OPEN]	its own race (undecided)	[OPEN]
Courage	[OPEN]	[OPEN]	[OPEN]
Justice	[OPEN]	[OPEN]	[OPEN]
Truthfulness	[OPEN]	[OPEN]	[OPEN]
Liberation	[OPEN]	[OPEN]	[OPEN]
the Forgotten (in-world nameless)	Reliability / Rigidity (design-bible secret)	none — scattered, extinct	Primal

The Forgotten is a scattered god (in permanent Skorpismos, §8) with no holder and no living people; it is listed only because its scattered substance is the Primal form (§5). Its Virtue/Vice (Reliability / Rigidity) is design-bible-only and never known in-world.

The list of gods is not fixed: new gods can arise (under poorly-understood conditions), and two gods can blend into one if their two peoples fully intermix with that intention — the old powers fade, become human, and are ejected to the material plane, while the mortal who best embodies the new combined Virtue rises as its first holder. (Reversible if the shared intention breaks.) The gods' honorific titles are [OPEN].

The two faces in public life: common people know only each god's benevolent (Virtue) face — temples and prayers honor that. The dark (Vice) face is hidden, known only to scholars, heretics, and a few who've glimpsed forbidden truths.

5. The two magical substances: Exousia and Praxis¶

This is the core "how magic works" model. Two distinct things — keep them separate:

Exousia — the raw vital force. It is the divine residue of Skyne's work plus the ongoing radiation of the gods, and it saturates all matter, souls, and landscape. It is the raw material of magic. (It is not consciousness, but it responds to consciousness.) The world is panpsychic: matter is Exousia at its lowest intensity — "no dead matter, only quiet matter." Land carries an Exousia "signature" summed from everything in it, including soulless fauna and flora, so a region's magic reflects what lives there.
Praxis — the Will: a soul's whetted capacity to commit and act. It is the reservoir that directs Exousia. In game terms, Praxis is the MP (mana) bar.

Casting a spell = spending Praxis to shape Exousia. Consequences: someone with lots of Exousia around but an empty Praxis reservoir can cast nothing; someone with a full Praxis reservoir standing in an Exousia-empty ("inert") zone has nothing to shape.

The shell, and magic across the zones. Ambient Exousia pools around a soul as a shell — a reserve of substance the will draws on. The shell refills only as fast as the surroundings supply it, which makes magic behave very differently by location: in the saturated Forest the shell refills freely (magic costs only will/MP, and carried batteries — ampoules — recharge), while in the inert zone around the city no shell forms at all, so magic is impossible unless the caster brings an external source (an ampoule, a soulshard, or a charged Device). Non-magical, will-based technique (martial skill, positioning) is unaffected by zone. (This is the gameplay "Exousia economy"; see the design doc for the full loop.)

Soul waveforms. Every soul emits Exousia as a unique waveform with measurable properties: - Sex offset — male souls = sine waves, female = cosine. - Amplitude = degree of sapience/intelligence → higher amplitude means greater magical potency. - Frequency = degree of vitality/energy → higher frequency means lower casting cost. - God-alignment = an inherited, bloodline-bound trait. Which waveform property encodes alignment is [OPEN].

Forms of Exousia. Most forms of magic are the gift of one specific god and flow only to that god's people; a soul born to one lineage cannot simply practice another's form (the waveform itself resists). Primal is the exception (see below). - Primal — channeling/controlling elemental forces (fire, ice, lightning, earth, wind, water). Its god, the Forgotten, fell into permanent Skorpismos (§8) in deep prehistory and scattered into the world's substance — so Primal has no living people and is not lineage-locked. It is called from what is already present (fire from heat, earth from stone), is terrain-coupled (blooms in the saturated Forest, starves in the inert city), and is reached not by blood but by disposition — by the Connected (the unmoored/apart, whose steadfastness resonates with the scattered god). Its true Virtue/Shadow is Reliability / Rigidity — design-bible secret, never in-world knowledge. The elemental "schools" (pyromancy, hydromancy, etc.) are specializations of one art, not separate gifts. Primal is called, not bound — it cannot be stored as a working, so an elemental Device is not "bottled Primal" but stored Exousia shaped by an Investment Set. Sustained channeling slowly drifts a Connected soul toward full alignment with the Forgotten (spiritual + physiological), checked by staying split (keeping a living lineage-bond). - Investment (a.k.a. Imbuing) — the gift of the god Innovation; binding god-aligned Will into matter. Fully developed; see §7. - Shaping (also called Vanarism) — reshaping body and matter; with enough biological knowledge could in theory reach immortality; turning flesh to metal is possible but extremely hard. (Deep mechanics [OPEN].) - Blooming — proliferating life itself (making plants grow, muscles develop, cells multiply); the line between healer and creator blurs. (Deep mechanics [OPEN].)

Toxic Exousia. Exousia that is extracted by force from an unwilling source, or consumed from a tainted source, becomes toxic. It is cheaper to obtain, but: - Used directly by a person, it contaminates them — it drains their Praxis, degrades their god-alignment over time, and produces visible decay: erratic magic, physical deterioration, spiritual instability. It is a reliable path to becoming a Husk (§6). - Used indirectly through an automated Device, it is safe — a Device has no Will of its own to corrupt, so a well-built automaton can channel toxic Exousia for practical work. This loophole is the basis of the mortal cabal's industrial and military power (§8). - Critically: whether Exousia is clean or toxic depends only on the Will (consent) behind its source, not on the substance. The same person channeling willingly produces clean Exousia; coerced (by torture or compulsion) produces toxic output. Same stuff; only the consent differs, and only the consent matters.

6. Praxis (the Will) in depth, and how mortals are hollowed out¶

Reservoir. Every person has a finite Praxis capacity. It grows over a lifetime through disciplined alignment with one's god (athletes, monks, craftspeople, soldiers who truly live their gift build deep reservoirs) and atrophies from disuse.

What drains Praxis: using toxic Exousia directly; acting against your god's pattern; permanent Investment (binding a piece of your soul permanently into an object — §7); hosting a Pneumatophoros (§4); and high-intensity moral struggle to resist your god's pull.

What restores/grows Praxis: using your own clean Exousia (a positive feedback loop — embracing your gift makes you stronger); acting in alignment with your god (notably, acts toward either the Virtue or the Vice face both feed it); ritual and devotional practice; and recovering in a sacred place or near a god-aligned Thronos. Ordinary rest/sleep restores transient depletion.

Ekkenōsis and Husks (the failure mode): - Ekkenōsis ("emptying-out") is the process of Praxis depletion. For most people it is transient — the fatigue at the end of a hard day, restored by rest. - A person whose Praxis hits zero and stays there — through catastrophic overspending (e.g., reckless permanent Investment in quick succession) or relentless toxic-Exousia use — becomes Kenos ("empty"), commonly called a Husk. - A Husk is not evil — there is nothing left in them to choose evil with. The body persists; the self is gone. All that remains is hunger: an insatiable craving for raw Exousia, the only thing that briefly fills the void. Husks cannot hold a god-power, cannot be a Pneumatophoros, cannot bind objects, cannot do real magic — they can only consume. They haunt Exousia-rich places and attack Exousia-bearing beings.

Praxis feeds the gods. Every voluntary aligned act sends a trickle of power up to the actor's god. A god's raw power equals the sum total of its people's lifetime Praxis, across millions of small acts and many generations, weighted by which face (Virtue or Vice) those acts lean toward. This is the engine behind the two-way influence in §4 — the god grows exactly as large as its people's commitment sustains.

Doxa vs. Praxis — the guarded secret. The public belief about how one pleases a god is Doxa ("belief/opinion"): make the right sacrifices, say the right prayers, obey the right laws, hold the right beliefs. Ordinary priests teach this sincerely and it isn't false — but it is not the actual mechanism. The real mechanism is Praxis — what people actually do. The gods perceive only Praxis, never belief or liturgy. A quietly humble peasant who never prays feeds Humility far more than a scholar who recites the liturgy flawlessly and manipulates everyone in the next breath. Praxis supersedes Doxa. This is esoteric, actively suppressed knowledge: if the populace understood that divine power is literally the sum of their own conduct, they could bargain with or strike against their gods — so the holders keep it hidden, and those who preach it openly are silenced. Only a few scholars, heretics, initiates, and the ruling cabal's inner circle understand it.

7. Object-magic: Hypodochē, Thronos, Soulshards¶

This is the developed system behind Investment/Imbuing (Innovation's gift), and behind nearly every magical made object in the world.

Hypodochē (plural Hypodochai; the word means "receptacle") — an object into which god-aligned Praxis (Will) has been bound. It then carries a fragment of the maker's Will and can express it through fixed behaviors. This is the mechanism behind enchanted weapons, wards, animated constructs, automated Devices (machines that channel Exousia to do work), and the divine-tier anchors below. Two modes:
Temporary — the Will is lent, not given up; it returns to the maker on a schedule (typically at the next rest or via ritual). Low risk. Used for minor devices and short workings.
Permanent — the Will is surrendered into the object's matter and becomes part of it; the maker's reservoir ceiling is permanently lowered by that amount. It recovers very slowly and never fully while the object exists. This is how durable machinery and great artifacts are made.
Tension: since the reservoir can also grow with devotion, a disciplined maker can offset permanent losses and keep building. Reckless makers who skip devotion — especially heavy permanent Investment in quick succession, which leaves no time to regenerate — cross the Ekkenōsis threshold and Husk out. Some legendary artifacts are rumored to "stand on the bones of their makers."
Thronos ("throne") — a divine-tier Hypodochē: an object permanently holding a fragment of a god's own Praxis. It anchors the connection that lets a god inhabit a Pneumatophoros proxy (§4). Destroy the Thronos and the proxy is thrown loose. Only a god (Katochos) can make one; their locations and guardians are closely-held secrets.
Soulshard — a Hypodochē made from a living person's Praxis, extracted without killing them — a crystallized fragment of their soul carrying their god-signature. It comes from willing partial surrender (a friend, ally, or fellow initiate), and that consent is what keeps the resulting magic clean. A maker carrying another lineage's soulshard can weave that foreign god-signature into their own work, producing hybrid effects no single tradition could achieve. Whether soulshards can be forcibly extracted against a donor's will is [OPEN] — if possible, the result would be toxic (parallel to toxic Exousia).

8. How a god-throne changes hands (three mechanisms)¶

Framing — the Eternal Spiral. The gods turn through a continual cosmic cycle of Emergence (a god arises or two blend into one), Manifestation (a holder reigns, fed by Praxis), and Transformation (the seat turns over). The three mechanisms below are the three modes of the Transformation phase. It is a spiral, not a circle — each turning returns the god changed.

A god-power's seat changes holders rarely, and only one of three ways:

Succession (voluntary). A sitting god offers the seat to a worthy mortal, who may accept or refuse. On acceptance, the old holder becomes mortal again and is ejected to the material plane, while the new holder rises to the Realm of Light (the power crosses through the Realm of Waves in transit). This is the sanctioned, peaceful method, possible at any time.
The Ascension Ceremony (forced). A mortal engineers the conditions to seize a throne by force. Three conditions must all be met:
Erase the land's Exousia — the existing god-aligned Exousia imbuing a region must be stripped out and replaced. (This is why a region undergoing the ceremony is radically transformed.)
Consensus of the bloodline — the living members of the targeted god's people must yield their collective spiritual claim — their Praxis withdrawn from the old god — whether willingly or through coercion.
The Celestial Eclipse — a rare astronomical alignment (every several hundred years) during which the barriers between realms thin enough for a mortal soul to pass up and seize the throne.
Skorpismos & Synagōgē (pathological / catastrophic). If a god is directly attacked — e.g., a mortal trespassing into the Realm of Light with a potent enough object, or a god committing suicide — the power does not vanish; it seeks the nearest suitable host and overtakes them, consent or not. If that host is blocked, the power destabilizes and enters Skorpismos ("scattering"): it diffuses across the universe as a faint field that lightly attracts aligned conduct, touching everything and nothing. It is later resolved by Synagōgē ("gathering"): whoever (usually unknowingly) accumulates a majority of the scattered power through sustained extraordinary aligned conduct draws the rest to themselves and becomes the new holder. This has never happened in recorded history — save the one prehistoric exception, the Forgotten (§4–5), which scattered before any record and was never re-gathered; whether it could be re-gathered is an open long-horizon thread. A direct attack on a god is treated as mutually-assured destruction, so the gods keep a fragile mutual pact and never attempt it — which is also why the upper realms are kept inaccessible (anyone who could breach them could shatter a god).

9. The Disruption (the world's present-day catastrophe)¶

Outsiders call it the "World Wound" — a vast, expanding zone of transformed reality spreading from the site of a cataclysm. It is not a natural wound. It is an engineered, in-progress Ascension Ceremony (§8, mechanism 2): a deliberate attempt by a mortal cabal to replace a god and become a deity. The cabal is the Collective — an inner ring of "Seven Elders" drawn from the prideful Sophronoi elite, preserved (see below) for their eventual ascension.

The target is the god Innovation (§4) — the Glyphein bloodline's god and patron of the Investment art. With grim symmetry, the Collective harvests Innovation using Innovation's own gift, the Devices. The surviving city populace are the descendant Glyphein — Innovation's living bloodline — and therefore the very people whose consensus the ceremony must break (condition #2).

It was triggered by a series of purpose-built Devices engineered to manufacture the three Ascension conditions. Three engineered components:

The Domain overwrite (condition #1) — Devices strip out the land's old Innovation-aligned Exousia and impose the aspirant's. Because Exousia cannot be destroyed, the displaced power is shoved outward and compounds in concentric rings — this is what the layered zones are: the old "Domain" peeled off the land in waves and piled up around it, growing more saturated and alien with depth (a former desert reworked into chaotic forest).
Temporal preservation — a Device at the center of the old city (named Kyanos) froze time there, preserving the Collective's members — and, incidentally, the player character Cyrus and a few others — until the moment of ascension.
An Exousia-inert protective zone around the city, maintained by the Collective. It is shelter from the flood (see the Consumption). When the outer overwrite finishes, the Elders intend to disable it and trigger the final stage.

The Consumption (condition #2's engine). The compounded Exousia in the outer rings floods all life — plants and beasts mutate and turn hostile (the forest's fauna), and souls whose resonance no longer matches their surroundings can't metabolize the flood, so it erupts as insanity + uncontrolled cellular growth (madness and cancer). In-world this is "the Consumption" (clinically, Exousia sickness). It is the exact opposite of Husking (§6): a Husk is emptied of Praxis; the Consumed are flooded with Exousia they cannot use. Condition #2 is satisfied by two routes at once: spiritual death of the Glyphein who wander out (the Consumption), and engineered despair of those kept trapped within the walls (Praxis withdrawn by design). Exemptions: old-resonance survivors (who use the flood as raw power — in the party, Cyrus & Sophia, the time-preserved); the Vanarites (Shaping lets them reshape the overgrowth away); the Elpidi (shielded by a treasured Device). Of the modern natives, Vaughn alone remains fully susceptible (he has no magic, so he cannot vent); Phaidros is now resistant as one of the Connected — a native Primal channeler who vents by casting (§5). A soul can also be artificially re-tuned to use Exousia in the new Domain again — the license for the Collective's augmented operatives (and what amplifies Sophia's partial Connection). Because the Consumption is unspent accumulation, actively casting vents it (a caster sheds the surplus and sickens slower than a passive lingerer — never a cure).

The hands behind it. The primary actor is the god Humility herself (the Sophronoi's god; the Collective is her arm). Her real aim is narrow — to have her people subsume other peoples and enlarge her domain — not to unseat a god. The god-supplanting knowledge came from a secondary actor: a wanderer from the higher reality, an unnamed brother of Euphen (the player character of §3), almost certainly the figure remembered as "the Master of Those Who Know." His knowledge was only ever partial, which is why the Collective works a ceremony it does not fully understand — the compounding layers, the depth of the Consumption, and a faint tearing at the targeted Archē all run ahead of their grasp. The result may escape even Humility: her instrument now holds god-killing knowledge turnable, in principle, against any throne — hers included.

Wisdom's countermove. The god Wisdom (Kyanos's founding patron) — fearing Innovation is only the first throne the Collective means to take, with her own next — secretly empowers Cyrus as her instrument of interference, which is why he can act where the Consumption fells others. Cyrus is himself of Innovation (Glyphein, through his mother — i.e. of the harvested bloodline) yet also of Wisdom's founding desert stock (through his father), the thread by which Wisdom reaches him; the throne he could seize at the climax is Innovation's own.

The ceremony has not reached its climax — the moment its outcome is decided is the story's climax.

Unresolved Disruption questions — do not resolve these by invention: - The Cosmic Wound. That faint tearing at the targeted Archē hints at a deeper, primordial fracture beneath reality (possibly Skyne's own absence/death-echo). This is a deliberate deep reveal held for far beyond this story (multi-game horizon) — do not resolve it on-page. - The Disruption Problem (Device revival). Pre-Disruption Devices fail because their runic Set is tuned to the old Domain's signature. Two layers: supply (ampoules patch it crudely → Devices run unreliably) and signature (the deep fault — the runes call for a resonance the land no longer speaks). The cure is a single discovered correction (a re-tuned Set / converter), Elantris-style — it is an in-world mystery, and Cyrus (last of the Runic Builders) is positioned to crack it. (Settled in concept; exact rune-mechanics [OPEN].) - Innate vs. Device-driven power, per character [OPEN]. Which of each playable character's abilities are will-based technique (work in the inert city) vs. magic/Device-driven (need an external source there). Load-bearing for how each plays. - The Elpidi's protective Device needs a name and settled mechanism [OPEN].

10. Greek-term glossary (concepts)¶

Term	Rough meaning	In this world
Archē / Archai	"first principle, origin"	A god-power as metaphysical substance
Eidolon	"image / phantom"	A god-power as a worshipped face (Archē + holder)
Katochos	"one who holds / is held"	The mortal elevated to be a god by holding an Archē
Exousia	"power, authority"	Raw vital force; the substance of magic
Praxis	"action, conduct"	The Will; the reservoir that directs Exousia (the MP bar)
Doxa	"belief, opinion"	Public religious belief — not the real divine mechanism
Phantasma	"apparition"	A god's projected vision (perceive-only)
Pneumatophoros	"spirit-bearer"	A mortal proxy a god temporarily inhabits
Hypodochē / -ai	"receptacle"	An object with bound Will (enchanted/animated things)
Thronos	"throne"	A divine-tier Hypodochē anchoring a Pneumatophoros
Ekkenōsis	"emptying-out"	The process of Praxis depletion
Kenos ("Husk")	"empty"	A person whose Praxis is permanently at zero
Skorpismos	"scattering"	A directly-attacked god diffusing across reality
Synagōgē	"gathering"	Re-coalescence of a scattered god into a new holder

11. Peoples, places & figures named above (quick reference)¶

Name	What it is
Skyne	The higher-world demiurge who made this world; now dead, only his echo remains
Euphen	A reality-hopping player character; the only mortal who knows Skyne is dead
Euphen's brother	(unnamed) Another wanderer from the higher reality; gave the Collective partial god-supplanting knowledge — the Disruption's secondary actor; likely "the Master of Those Who Know"
Katochoi	(plural of Katochos) the living gods — mortals who hold god-powers
The Collective	The mortal cabal (inner ring: "Seven Elders"), the arm of the god Humility, engineering the Disruption to seize the throne of Innovation
Sophronoi	A prideful ruling elite; people of the god Humility; the Collective draws from them
Elpidi	A sun-worshipping religious order; people of the god Hope
Vanarites	A shapeshifting people; people of the god Temperance
Glyphein	A bloodline-cluster (rather than a single race) associated with the god Innovation
the Forgotten	A god scattered in prehistory (Skorpismos); its diffuse substance is ambient elemental Exousia and the source of Primal magic. In-world nameless; secret Virtue/Vice = Reliability/Rigidity
the Connected	Those able to channel Primal — reached by disposition (apartness + steadfastness), not bloodline; in the party, Phaidros (strongly) and Sophia (partially)
Kyanos	The old city at the center of the Disruption, where time was frozen
The Unknown / World Wound	The expanding zone of transformed, layered, alien reality created by the Disruption
Devices	Automated machines that channel Exousia (incl. toxic Exousia) to do work
The Image of Shadow	A relic black stone that can pull the Realm of Echoes into the material world

12. Design lineage (context, not in-world canon)¶

The system deliberately recombines three real intellectual traditions: Plato's Realm of Forms (the Realm of Images), Lurianic Kabbalah (the vessel/spark imagery behind Skorpismos — shattering and gathering), and process theology (divinity as an ongoing relational process rather than a static substance — the Praxis mechanic). The surface resemblance to popular "god-shards that change hands, split, and merge" fantasy is intentional but superficial: this system is fundamentally commitment-based (a god's power is the living sum of its people's conduct), not investiture-based, and that is where the setting is most original.