Narrative and Missions

Status: design-lineage mission specification. This note owns the passage from an offered obligation through local occurrence and evidence to separately committed consequences. It requires neither procedural placement nor a particular narrative runtime.

A mission makes an institution, person, or condition legible through work the player can accept, refuse, reinterpret, or fail. Authored and generated material may use the same contract; neither method grants content authority over the setting or durable state.

Mission Contract

Every mission should identify:

• issuer: who presents the work or creates the obligation;
• authority: what the issuer can request, promise, recognize, or enforce;
• source: where the offer and its claims came from, with time and confidence;
• admission conditions: which scenario, location, actors, prior facts, and player state permit the mission to appear;
• offered terms: objective, payment, deadlines, permissions, restrictions, known risks, and declared consequences;
• unknowns and adverse claims: what the issuer does not know, conceals, disputes, or lacks authority to settle;
• local owner: the scenario that owns occurrence, immediate state, and evidence during play;
• receiving owners: the durable authorities asked to accept later changes.

Admission is not truth. A mission may appear because a faction claims control, a report alleges danger, or a market records scarcity. The scenario validates that those claims are admissible inputs without converting them into canon or omniscient fact.

Local Occurrence And Evidence

During play, the scenario owns local occurrences: arrivals, actions, observations, accepted commands, damage, transfers, and the fact that testimony or records were produced. Witnesses and provider systems retain authorship. Evidence preserves stable references, source or author, time, authentication or confidence, gaps, and disagreement.

Objectives should describe requested outcomes rather than overwrite the world when a flag changes. “Recover the cargo” may produce possession, preserved evidence, an asserted claim, and a delivery attempt. It does not automatically establish title, lawful seizure, payment, or faction approval.

Failure remains an outcome with evidence. Refusal, delay, partial rescue, lost cargo, exposed misconduct, damaged trust, or an issuer exceeding its authority may create stronger narrative consequence than simple completion.

Consequence Handoff

The local scenario exports proposed outcomes. Named durable owners separately decide market changes, inventory possession, payment, claims, access, reputation, faction response, injuries, relationships, and persistent records. One accepted consequence does not imply the others.

The result must preserve which authority accepted or rejected each effect. A client can pay while a port disputes the cargo. A faction can approve while a witness refuses cooperation. A scenario cannot launder these disagreements into one success state.

Voice And Setting Authority

Faction missions consume faction canon; they do not create it by imitation. Objective, payment, euphemism, risk transfer, failure language, and available authority should follow the relevant owner notes. New local characters and events remain bounded to the scenario until a shared owner adopts their wider claims.

The joke still needs an issuer, a cost, and somebody who gets billed for it.

Smallest Coherent Proof

A minimum proof needs one issuer with bounded authority, one offer with a material unknown, one local scenario, two possible approaches, one piece of disputed evidence, and at least two receiving owners. The player can accept or refuse, act, preserve or lose evidence, and reach an outcome that the receivers interpret differently.

The proof succeeds when the player can explain who asked, what they could promise, what actually happened, what evidence survived, and who committed each consequence. It fails when placement reveals canon knowledge, completion manufactures title or reputation, faction voice floats free of its owner, or a runtime becomes the authority merely because it rendered the story.