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Quest Thread - Core and Truth

Identity​

Core and Truth is the saga-spanning Quest Thread that carries the MC's cosmological situation across the campaign. It is the lane through which the truth behind the Nexus / Wardheart, the failing protection structure that encloses the start pocket, and the slow reveal of what the MC actually is surface as playable content. Core and Truth is one of the two campaign-spanning lanes that resolves only when the Saga Arc itself concludes.

Scope​

Core and Truth owns the campaign-spanning identity of the cosmological-reveal lane. It declares which world-state surfaces feed the lane and which act docs provide its per-act mission entry points.

Core and Truth does NOT own:

  • Per-act mission ladders. Mission ladder authoring for this lane is deferred to later per-act content waves.
  • Act 0's grounded survival surface. Survival belongs to the Survival / Settlement lane and to the Act 0 thread owners.
  • Cosmological lore prose. Lore content is governed by the lore-tree rules in examples/valenar/docs/lore/; this lane references lore through the mediation layer rather than citing universe-lore docs directly.

Inputs From World Pressure​

The world-state sources from ../systems/gd-dynamic-quest-pressure-model.md that primarily feed this lane:

  • Feature transitions — Old Stones, Calling Shrine, and Nexus-anchored Feature transitions that surface cosmological clues.
  • Territory knowledge — knowledge-state advances that legible-ify the Wardheart / Nexus chain and the failing protection structure.
  • Site state — Site discovery and securement of cosmological Sites (Wardhearts, gate scars, leyline anchors).
  • World pressure and Nexus state — Ancient Shield decay, Wardheart stabilization windows, leyline-state changes; the lane is one of the primary consumers of these signals.
  • Authored story gates — explicit story beats that gate the reveal of the false-king arc and the cosmological truth.

Coexistence With Act-Scoped Thread Owners​

Core and Truth is a cross-act lane. It coexists with Act-scoped thread owners without subsuming them. Per-act mission entry points are provided by the act docs and by the existing Act-scoped thread owners; the cross-act lane owner declares the campaign-spanning identity of the reveal arc.

The overlapping Act 0 thread owners are:

Those Act 0 threads remain the canonical Act 0 entry points into the Core and Truth lane. They are not retired or rewritten by this cross-act owner.

Cross-References​