Narrative and Missions

Status: design-lineage mission specification. This note owns the passage from world conditions through narrative admission, local occurrence, evidence, and separately committed consequences. Ink is the inherited authoring substrate, but the contract does not depend on one 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.

Authored Narrative In A Generated History

Writers author characters, scenes, dialogue, and hard dramatic invariants. They should not have to proceduralize a story into interchangeable content paste. The surrounding system gives the authored graph typed semantic dependencies—such as an authority with a named capability, a trusted relationship, a reachable medical facility, a faction condition, or an acceptable substitute—and resolves them against the current history.

The shared path is:

simulated world state → semantic resolver → authored Ink scene graph → local occurrence and evidence → durable owners commit consequences

The simulation owns what currently exists. The resolver may bind existing actors, places, institutions, and conditions only to roles the story explicitly declares substitutable; it cannot recast a fixed authored identity because another actor satisfies the same type. A fixed authored character enters a history through a simulation-owned admission contract that establishes the person, their starting material state, and the conditions under which they can exist there. The scene can then consume that admitted actor without manufacturing them locally.

The resolver cannot spawn a missing political reality, reveal hidden canon, or commit an outcome merely because a binding was valid. The authored graph owns the scene and its invariants. If a required fixed actor was not admitted, or no admissible binding exists for a substitutable role, that story does not occur in this history.

This preserves one-off characters and carefully written arcs while allowing location, access route, substitutable supporting roles, institutional opposition, and viable branches to change with the galaxy. Authoring tools must let writers inspect candidate bindings across generated histories and reject substitutions that satisfy a type while destroying the drama.

Singular History And Access

The unit of exclusivity is a historical consequence, not a quest journal slot. A consequential situation separates:

• participation: who can investigate, assist, witness, supply, obstruct, or oppose;
• decision authority: who can take actions that materially constrain the outcome;
• canonical resolution: what the branch records after the relevant owners accept consequences.

Repeat enthusiasts must not become narrative landlords by beelining to the same beloved story every iteration. Changed admission conditions, diegetic selection, multiple entry roles, witnessable proceedings and aftermath, and varying geography or timing can make prior knowledge useful without reserving protagonism. History happens once; structurally related situations recur.

Acceptance does not freeze the world. Evidence decays, people act, contracts expire, conditions worsen, and rivals intervene. Refusal, delay, and inaction follow the same consequence path as overt action. Deliberate suppression can be a powerful political act, but the simulation must represent it as suppression rather than an abandoned quest silently holding history open.

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.

Aetheria: Terminus can prove this architecture at smaller scale: one player, one generated galaxy, and a world that is generated once and then changed by narrative events. The full persistent world changes concurrency and consequence radius, not the ownership seam.