Skip to main content

Quest Thread - Rune, Crafting, and True Harm

Identity​

Rune, Crafting, and True Harm is the cross-act Quest Thread that carries rune research, crafting recipe discovery, ward-craft progression, and the slow acquisition of True Harm materials across Acts 1 through 7. The lane begins in Act 1 with the first named people enabling crafting work and continues through Act 7, when Crown-scale ward and True Harm capacity feeds the late reclamation Operations. This lane is the primary source of new player capability content in the rune / crafting system.

Scope​

Rune, Crafting, and True Harm owns the campaign-spanning identity of the rune / crafting / True Harm acquisition lane. It declares which world-state surfaces feed the lane and which act docs provide its per-act mission entry points.

Rune, Crafting, and True Harm does NOT own:

  • Per-act mission ladders. Mission ladder authoring for this lane is deferred to later per-act content waves.
  • The crafting and resource systems themselves. Those remain owned by ../systems/gd-resources-items-crafting.md.
  • The cosmological framing of True Harm. Lore content is governed by the lore-tree rules; this lane carries the player-facing acquisition arc, not the cosmological mechanism.

Inputs From World Pressure​

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

  • Feature transitions — rune-bearing, lore-bearing, and rare-material Feature transitions that surface recipe / material clues.
  • Site state — Site discovery and securement of rune Sites, ward Sites, craft shrines, and True Harm material caches.
  • Operation outcomes — Operations whose outcomes yield craft / ward / True Harm progress (e.g. cleansing Operations that recover ward materials).
  • Settlement shortages and labor pressure — craft labor capacity, workshop and forge availability, raw-material supply.
  • Authored story gates — explicit recipe-unlock and capability-unlock gates.

Coexistence With Act-Scoped Thread Owners​

Rune, Crafting, and True Harm 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 any future Act-scoped thread owners that the per-act content waves promote; the cross-act lane owner declares the campaign-spanning identity of the rune / crafting / True Harm arc.

No current Act-scoped thread owner sits inside this lane. When later content waves promote Act 1 + craft-centric thread owners, they will sit beside this cross-act owner without retiring it.

Cross-References​