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Objectives, Clues, Missions, and Activities

This page owns Valenar's planning vocabulary above the raw queue. Current Plan sits above this stack as the synthesis layer, while the Queue sits below it as atomic execution.

This page does not own concrete Quest Thread or gameplay-branch docs. It owns the live planning vocabulary those owner pages use when objectives, clues, missions, and activities surface to the player.

Canonical wording here defers to ../gd-canon.md and ../gd-glossary.md. Character skill and assignment context live in gd-character-skills.md, gd-characters-and-retinue.md, and ../ux/gd-character-screen.md.

Core Terms​

  • An objective is a high-level goal or arc that explains why a thread matters.
  • A clue, sometimes surfaced informally as a lead, is uncertain evidence that points toward a place, threat, opportunity, unresolved chain, or future Site.
  • A mission is a planned operation with a concrete purpose and expected outcome.
  • A technique is a learned method that a mission or activity can call for, but it remains below the planning layer and feeds the resolved channels that activities use.
  • A routine activity is a planning-layer sub-form of activity: a composed, reusable approach the player repeats across similar situations (such as an overnight camp sequence). It groups likely activities for a recurring pattern. It is not a SECS keyword and does not introduce a runtime noun above activities.
  • A composite activity is a planning-layer sub-form of activity: a composed approach that bundles several likely activities for a single mission or complex operation. It is not a SECS keyword and does not introduce a runtime noun above activities.
  • An activity is runnable queue work and the atomic executable step.
  • A policy is higher-level automatic choice among activities.

Relationship Between The Layers​

The player should be able to move down the stack cleanly:

  1. An objective states the high-level goal or arc the player is pursuing.
  2. Clues create, update, or redirect that objective while uncertainty remains visible.
  3. A mission packages a concrete operation that can advance the objective.
  4. Routine or composite activities describe the composed approach the player expects to use for that mission or recurring pattern when several activities and techniques belong together.
  5. Activities are the queueable steps that actually execute the work, with skill-driven channels and techniques shaping the result.

Early play often moves straight from a mission to a few short atomic activities. Composite or routine activity shapes surface later once repeated patterns become legible enough to deserve a planning label.

Story-Scale Mapping​

Act Arc, Quest Thread, and Local Quest are content-shaping layers from gd-quest-and-lore-design.md. They do not replace the live planning stack, which stays objective -> clue or lead -> mission -> activity.

  • Act 0's first visible multi-part thread is Survive.
  • Its grounded early mission groups are waking, water and shelter, food and fire, lost hours, and the first night.
  • Later names can escalate into observation-earned leads such as The Old Stones and The Ruin Beneath once the player has actually learned enough to support them.
  • Journal owns the durable readback for these shifts; Objectives and Missions own the actionable planning consequences.

Design Rules​

  • Do not collapse objectives, clues, missions, and activities into one generic task list.
  • Do not collapse Act Arc, Quest Thread, or Local Quest into a generic runtime subquest noun.
  • Keep uncertainty visible. A clue should not pretend to be certain settlement truth.
  • A clue can point toward a future dungeon, ruin interior, or productive Site without pretending the place is already fully known.
  • Keep mission output causal. The mission exists because of a site, threat, route, faction, or need the world generated.
  • Do not pretend the player "uses a skill" directly. Missions and composite or routine activities ask for techniques, assignments, and activities whose outcomes are informed by skills.
  • Composite and routine activity shapes should explain a composed approach without pretending they are a new runtime noun below activities.
  • Do not invent a formal composite-activity runtime or a large named composite-activity catalog from this layer.
  • Let the objective layer summarize pressure and opportunity without hiding the concrete mission and activity structure underneath.

Ownership​