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Lore Roadmap

A prioritized, dependency-aware plan for the open worldbuilding threads — distinct from the three sibling docs: this one says what to build next and in what order. (Worldbuilding_TODO.md = conversational state; Open_Questions.md = the canonical question list; IdeaBank.md = set-aside material.)

Built 2026-06-19 from a working queue, triaged against current canon (Codex v0.3). Each item should be run through the worldbuild skill when picked up. Reorder freely — the phase grouping reflects dependencies, not a fixed schedule. A second working-queue batch (#19–#29) was triaged in on 2026-06-19.

Legend: ○ not started · ◑ core canon exists, slice remains · ⚠️ interpretation of the raw queue note — confirm before building.

Resolved — removed from the queue

  • Apotheosis access (Trauma / Water of Life / Consumption-acclimation). Answered by the 2026-06-18 Apotheosis grounding: latent in everyone, unlocked by the Disruption's Exousia-flood, checked by discipline. The three alternative triggers are superseded. Residual: whether an individual still needs a personal trigger on top of the ambient flood — folds into Per-character Apotheosis re-grounding (Phase 3).

Merges

  • Desert people + Wisdom's categorical name → one thread (Wisdom's people are the desert tribes — Cheria Sofias / Yomenites). Phase 2.
  • Toxic Exousia ramifications + Toxic Exousia / Forest / Consumption gameplay → one thread (same subject, lore + mechanics). Phase 1.

Phase 0 — Infrastructure

Not a lore thread — a structural change to where the lore lives. Independent of every item below; do it before the corpus grows further.

  1. ○ Split the lore corpus into its own repository; consume it here as a submodule. The world of Prima Materia is being reused by at least one other game project, and the worldbuilding is currently welded to this game's repo. Extract docs/worldbuilding/ (and the parts of docs/story/ that are world- rather than game-specific) into a standalone lore repository, then add it back to this repo as a git submodule so docs/ keeps resolving. Setting-agnostic lore lives there; game-specific design (docs/design/, docs/canon/) stays here. → tracking issue #98

Why now. Prevents forking the canon across projects, gives the lore its own history and changelog, and makes the worldbuild skill's Recall→Audit passes operate on one authoritative corpus rather than per-repo copies.

Open decisions before starting — what exactly crosses the boundary (the design docs that cite Archai and Forms are the ambiguous middle), whether Changelog.md / Open_Questions.md / IdeaBank.md / this roadmap move with it, how the mkdocs wiki/ build follows, whether the worldbuild skill itself relocates, and how to preserve file history through the extraction (git subtree split / git filter-repo).

Phase 1 — Metaphysics foundations

Build first: later phases (peoples, progression design, character arcs) lean on these.

  1. ✅ Thymos — integrate the concept (done 2026-06-19). Folded in as the soul's drive/striving faculty — the "fire" to Praxis's "hand" — the individual-soul reflection of the thumoeidic Realm of Images; the Courage-Archē option was left open for the Eidolon-roster work (#7). → Cosmology — Thymos, Metaphysics_Summary §5
  2. ○ Waveform-alignment property. Which Exousia waveform property (frequency / amplitude / rotation) encodes Archē-alignment. The literal substrate under progression design (#11) and the Disruption Problem. → Open_Questions — Magic & Exousia
  3. ◑ Toxic Exousia / Forest / Consumption — ramifications + gameplay. Occult = toxic Exousia and casting-vents-Consumption are canon; build out the consequences (what toxic Exousia does to bodies/land/Devices over time) and the mechanics (Forest as resource-and-hazard, Consumption as a creeping combat/exploration pressure). Lore→design. → Exousia Economy, Consumption
  4. ○ Praxis hook / Collective artificial-soul program. The "Praxis is under-utilized" note + artificial Praxis (deferred in IdeaBank). Frame the Collective's research into artificial souls / directed Exousia without a living Will as an active in-world program (villain tech, horror beats). Depends on Thymos (#1). → Open_Questions — Praxis & Husks, IdeaBank — Artificial Praxis
  5. ○ Mysteries (Possession, etc.). ⚠️ A catalog of esoteric/"Mystery" phenomena — Possession first, then others. Decide what Possession is metaphysically (Katochos overreach? a Phantasma riding a host? toxic-Exousia hijack?) and whether "the Mysteries" is an in-world term. → currently only legacy refs
  6. ○ Water's metaphysical significance. Water carries metaphysical weight, and flowing water disturbs Exousia accumulation — a natural check on over-accumulation/Consumption, and a terrain/economy lever. Settle the why (what water is to Exousia), then propagate the consequences: Sophia's signature of drawing water out of bodies then reads as drawing off / disrupting their Exousia, and flowing-water sites become Consumption-safe ground. Lore→design. → Consumption, Exousia Economy, Sophia

Phase 2 — Peoples, gods & factions

  1. ◑ Desert people + Wisdom's race name. Settle the name (Cheria Sofias / Yomenites), confirm alignment (Wisdom), define their ability/magic, and fix their relationship to the Vanarites. Likely interacts with Thymos (#1). → Open_Questions — Races & Peoples
  2. ○ Haidt & the Ascension Ceremony (backbone item). Jonathan Haidt's moral-foundations as the organizing logic for the virtue-Eidolons — and what the Ascension Ceremony morally violates (which foundation the Collective transgresses). Reaches across systems: the same moral-foundations axis is meant to inform the dialog system (choices framed/scored along the foundations) and ending consequences (outcomes judged by which foundations the player upheld or betrayed). Touches lore, the Eidolon roster, dialog, and endings at once. → Eidolons
  3. ○ Codify the Henoa Secundi. Resolve the open question: Elder, Collective puppet, or genuine claimant — and which Elder. "Returned ~60 years ago." → Open_Questions — Religion/Gov/Society
  4. ○ Kuklos demographics & scale (quick win). Fix the canon numbers: ~100,000 souls in Kuklos all told; ~1,000 in the Collective. Cheap to set, and it sizes the rest of society. → Society — Social structure
  5. ○ The religion's soft order (backbone). Henosis rules by soft power, not enforcement — no coercive apparatus, only pervasive influence — over a society anxiously concerned with social cohesion. Build the spine and its sub-threads: violence is low-status (the faith codes it as base), yet the military is religiously sanctioned (the blessed exception — reconcile the two), and the cohesion-vs-class axis lives in #22. → Society, Factions — Henosis, Open_Questions — Religion/Gov/Society
  6. ⚠️ Henosis & class — the "Absolute Terror Field." ⚠️ Reading the raw note: the cohesion-bound majority experiences individualism as an AT-Field — a wall of self that the upper class and Adventurers are licensed (or cursed) to raise, while everyone else is held to the collective. Pin the metaphysics (literal Exousia/Henosis effect, or social metaphor?) and which classes get to be individuals. Pairs with #21 and the Adventurer thread (#23). → Society — Social structure
  7. ◑ Adventurers, the rebellion & Dervishhood. Adventurers are a low-status, down-on-their-luck underclass who rebelled once; the order now relieves that pressure through an unlikely redemption path — Dervishhood. Build the history (what the rebellion was), the mechanism (how Dervishhood redeems and why it stays rare), and tie it to the Vanarite enclave (#24) and the guild. → Factions — The Adventurer's Guild, Open_Questions — Religion/Gov/Society
  8. ◑ Vanarite enclave at the city's edge. A small group of Vanarites lives just outside Kuklos — locate it, define its standing with the city, and fix the relationship to the desert people / Wisdom's race (folds into #6) and to the Adventurer underclass (#23). → Open_Questions — Races & Peoples
  9. ◑ Kuklos coin as an Exousia conduit. The city's money is also a near-flawless Exousia conduit, so nobles stock up on wealth and power at once — currency concentrates Exousia the way flowing water (#19) disperses it. Settle the mechanism and its consequences for class, the Collective, and over-accumulation/Consumption. Lore→design. → Society — Economy & currency, Exousia Economy

Phase 3 — Characters & arcs

  1. ○ Add Adam to development. The optional 9th member is thin: 7 of 8 party relationships blank, Apotheosis register ("Magnum Opus") loose, arc unwritten. Full pass. → Worldbuilding_TODO — Adam, Party_Relationships — Adam
  2. ◑ Euphen's brother Alaris as a secret boss. Identity resolved (= Master of Those Who Know). Build the boss encounter + settle motive, whereabouts, and what Euphen knows/feels (slow reveal). Lore→design. → Open_Questions — Story, euphen-extended-origin
  3. ◑ Phaidros → the Forgotten's drift. His Connected→Reliability/Rigidity drift ("becoming like Reliability's old people") is canon as a mechanism (the "Phaidros whisper" / Synagōgē far-extreme); write his personal arc against it. → The Connected
  4. ◑ Per-character Apotheosis re-grounding. Fix each form's lineage register + personal shape on the character pages (Vaughn's and Adam's registers still loose); absorb the Apotheosis-access residual. → Open_Questions — Apotheosis
  5. ◑ Paidi as a positioning-first character. Lean Paidi's kit hard into positioning — board control as her primary verb, not a by-product of healing. Reconcile with her canonical Harmonic Monk identity (resource-stance healer / party rhythm): the Miens/stances should move and arrange the party as much as mend it. Lore↔design. → Party_Combat, Paidi archetype
  6. ⚠️ Euphen's relationship with magic. ⚠️ Identity/naming seeds to pin down: "Fate's Accomplice" (his stance toward magic and fate) and "Chromatic Aberration / Afterimage" as his signature register — phase / light-split imagery suiting his marks, traps, and stealth. Decide what these are (flavor, ability names, or a paradigm) and dovetail with the brother/Alaris reveal (#10). → Euphen archetype, euphen

Phase 4 — Systems & progression design

Lore→mechanics; these benefit most from Phases 1–2 (esp. Waveform #2 and the Eidolon roster).

  1. ○ Canonize the Decagram as the central shape. Make the Decagram the central holy form, with a stated theological reason: it is still a polygon yet approaches the circle — and the circle is the perfect/holy shape (ties to Henosis = unity, the Daire/Circle practices). Then apply it as the radial/circular progression grid — ten spokes = the ten Eidolons — pairing with Haidt (#7). Two halves: the canonization is a religion/metaphysics decision (pull forward — it's effectively a Phase-2 item); the progression mapping is the Phase-4 design application. Lore↔design. → Decagram
  2. ○ Waveform progression design. The progression system built on the waveform-alignment property (#2) — tuning a character's waveform toward Archē-alignments as the growth axis. Depends on #2 and likely #13.
  3. ○ Consolidate & build out Devices — adopt a Golden-Sun "Djinn" system. Model Devices/Glyphions on Golden Sun's Djinn: collectible, equippable elemental units that reshape a character's stats/class and can be Unleashed in battle, cycling through set / standby / recovery states. Informs Device design + concepts and gives a frame for the many name-only entries in Devices.md. → Devices, Open_Questions — Naming
  4. ◑ Elpidi Ward — nature + acquisition. Name + form + mechanism (likely a Hope/Innovation soulshard-hybrid) for the Elpidi's Consumption-warding Device, and how the party acquires it. → Open_Questions — Naming
  5. ◑ Sophronoi ability. The Form (Koinōsis) is canon; design the combat ability/role that expresses Humility/Koinōsis (second-order: acts on others' workings). → Koinōsis
  6. ○ Clarify augmentations. Pin down what Nacrine/Collective augmentations are (Sophia, Lione carry them as "internal Exousia sources"), their mechanism, and the "hollow research" link to the Nacreous Matrix. → Open_Questions — Religion/Gov/Society
  7. ○ Special Resources for every party member. Give each party member a signature combat resource — the way Phaidros banks Pressure and Vaughn spends Marks — a per-character economy that defines their texture. Scope the full roster and make sure the resources read distinctly and don't collide. → Party_Combat, Exousia Economy
  8. ○ Per-character progression places + the Waveform/Spiritweb rhythm. Two linked seeds: (a) each character grows in their own place/way — tune-ups, sword training, a spa — diegetic progression sites, not a shared menu; and (b) the axis underneath is a Waveform / Spiritweb — an "Exousia Processing Rhythm," the literal thing being tuned. Feeds and likely merges into Waveform progression design (#14); depends on the waveform property (#2). → Open_Questions — Magic & Exousia

Quick dependency notes

  • Waveform property (#2) is the main blocker — it unblocks both progression-design items (#13 mapping, #14) and sharpens the Disruption Problem.
  • Haidt (#7) is a backbone that radiates into three systems — the Eidolon roster, the dialog system, and ending consequences — so building it early pays off downstream; it also gives Decagram (#13) its ten labelled spokes.
  • Decagram (#13) splits: its canonization as the central holy shape is an early religion/metaphysics decision (treat as Phase 2); its progression-grid application is Phase-4 design.
  • Thymos (#1) is a quick, non-blocking integration — good warm-up.
  • The four ◑ lore→design items (#10, #16, #17 + the toxic-Exousia gameplay in #3), plus Haidt's dialog/ending reach (#7) and the Devices/Djinn + progression work (#13–#15), each cross into docs/design/ — run them through the worldbuild skill so lore and mechanics land together.
  • Water (#19) and Kuklos coin as conduit (#25) are two faces of the Exousia-economy / Consumption thread (#3) — water disperses accumulation, money concentrates it; build them alongside #3.
  • The society cluster (#20–#24) hangs off the religion's soft order (#21) as its spine and, like Haidt (#7), reaches into dialog and endings via the cohesion-vs-individualism axis (#22); the Vanarite enclave (#24) also feeds the desert-people thread (#6).
  • Special Resources (#28) and per-character progression (#29) are the character-facing side of Waveform progression (#14) — keep them in sync; both wait on the waveform property (#2).