Canon Decisions

Status: Canon.

Decision: Caedran is not an independent god. He is a subsequent visage of Thalenor Praecox, introduced Band III, designed as an internal instrument for the Velasian administrative class.

What this forecloses: Caedran cannot be treated as a base god with his own Praecox designation. Caedran cannot be presented as an independent divine intelligence. The three Thalenor expressions are the confirmed structure: Thalenor Praecox (principle), Thalenor Custos (enforcement), Caedran (governance).

Downstream implications: Populations receiving Caedran in Band III didn’t necessarily know they were receiving another Thalenor instrument. The consent problem operates at the visage level. A forensic Disputer who has worked out the Thalenor/Caedran relationship has a specific and concrete example of Velasian theological engineering.

Status: Canon.

Decision: Eridra Praecox is the base god of the Eridra family. Eridra Matrona is a retired designation.

What this forecloses: Eridra Matrona cannot appear in new content. References in existing documents should be updated to Eridra Praecox on authoring passes.

Family structure confirmed: - Eridra Praecox — household governance, domestic authority (Band II) - Serena — fertility, crops, seasonal abundance (Band II, first launched 72 AF) - Tenasse — the last chance, final accounting (Band III)

Status: Canon.

Decision: Garrion Praecox was never directly instantiated as a worshipper community. All nine Garrionic implementations are concrete instances derived from the base class with cultural overrides.

What this forecloses: There is no Foundation House to Garrion Praecox in any conventional sense. A referee cannot place a Garrion Praecox Foundation House anywhere in Velland as a functioning institution with worshippers.

Status: Canon.

Decision: Nine implementations were originally founded. Seven survive in recognizable form in 353 NA.

The seven survivors: - Two Markish marcher — running, mutated, functionally identical - Two Bryt — running, thoroughly Bryt, resilient - One Bryt — declining under Celt demographic pressure - One Celt — surviving tenuously, small, culturally compromised - One Skeld anchorite community in Eldland — most faithful preservation, unknown to Foundation system

The two non-survivors: - One Celt — destroyed by rebellion - One Cwym — failed almost immediately; rejected as inappropriate and sacrilegious within months of introduction

The Cwym failure — confirmed detail:

The Cwym implementation was the second launched chronologically. It failed almost immediately because the Velasian designers fundamentally misjudged the Cwym theological landscape.

The instrument was designed around a domain parallel between the Morrigan (Celt) and Arianrhod (Cwym) — a structurally real parallel at the domain level that was false at the relational level. The Cwym relationship with Arianrhod is not devotional. The Cwym recognize her. They do not revere her. They do not offer her oaths. She is not the kind of entity that receives covenants — she is the kind of entity that notices you, or doesn’t, and what she does with that attention is not governed by what you have sworn.

The Velasian designers built a technically competent instrument for the wrong target. The Cwym rejected it as not merely foreign but categorically wrong — a violation of something structurally important about how certain divine presences should be approached. The rejection was immediate, total, and theological rather than political.

The residue that persists in the Cwym sphere — the ember described elsewhere — is not a surviving implementation. It is the fragment that clung on through some mechanism of persistence in a community at the margins of Cwym culture. It does not count among the seven survivors.

The Cwym failure illustrates the Band III programme’s second failure mode alongside the Celt rebellion. The Celt failure was dramatic — outright rebellion, expulsion, a founding narrative of resistance. The Cwym failure was quiet — an instrument that didn’t take hold because the designers misunderstood what they were working with. Both failure modes are instructive about the limits of the psychohistorian model: the Velasians could read domain parallels with precision and still fail to understand how a specific culture related to entities within that domain.

Status: Canon.

Decision: Morvian Praecox has no subsequent visages and none are anticipated. The universality is the instrument. He comes for everyone, king and beggar alike, with the same patient acknowledgment and the same reliable passage. You cannot improve a universal guide by differentiating him.

Primary symbol confirmed: Broken circle with twin upward parallel lines at the point of passage. The gap deliberately raises the reincarnation question without resolving it, consistent with Morvian’s refusal to specify the destination.

Status: Canon.

Decision: Vestara Praecox has no subsequent visages and none are anticipated. The absolute standard does not differentiate. A subsequent visage would undermine the absolutism that makes the instrument valuable — you cannot engineer a variation on an absolute without destroying it.

What this forecloses: No "Vestara Clemens" or similar restorative visage. The household that has lapsed from Vestara’s standard has no intermediate instrument. The path back runs through Vestara Praecox directly, without softening.

Status: Canon.

Decision: The House to Tenasse is mendicant. No fixed property, no accumulated wealth, no institutional hierarchy dependent on material resources. Priests almost exclusively women, moving through frontier communities, prisons, and condemned cells.

What this forecloses: No vestibulum for Tenasse. No gathering hall, no scriptorium, no bursary. The standard Foundation House structure does not apply.

Status: Canon.

Decision: The dual-church experiment combining Eridra Praecox and Minatur Praecox under a single covenant instrument was launched approximately 72 AF and dissolved approximately 80 years later (~152 AF).

Cause of dissolution: Singleton House yields demonstrably outperformed the blended instrument. The structural flaw was a single covenant covering two visages — a foundational vulnerability that made the instrument incoherent at the divine processing level.

The transition: The oathbound — almost exclusively women — were given newly designed ceremonies during a transitional generation and reswore individual covenants.

Survival: In some remote corner of Velland, a paired-church may still operate under the original blended covenant.

Status: Canon.

Decision: The Codex of Grumio and Clemens was compiled at 86 NA (389 AF). Not 113 AF as previously recorded in the reseed — that date placed it during the imperial period, before the collapse even occurred, which is impossible for a document reconstructing the Fireborn period.

Character: Approximately three generations after the collapse. Written by a historian with a bardic co-author, both operating within the institutional culture of the surviving Foundations. Chronologically reliable. Narratively shaped by institutional interests. The authoritative account within which every subsequent school of Foundation theology argues.

Status: Canon.

Decision: 328 NA is confirmed as the point at which the transition period is complete. Not a formal event — the moment at which surviving Houses have finished renegotiations, absorbed congregants, settled internal theological arguments, and turned attention from survival to building.

What it marks: The wounds are still there. They are no longer bleeding. The institutional landscape of 353 NA is the landscape that 328 NA produced.

Status: Canon as permanently unresolved.

Decision: The founding motivation — whether the Velasians fled a genuine existential threat, chose to leave as Crimson Permanent Assurance operators, or some combination — is permanently unresolved. Never to be answered in the corpus. Permanently available as a horizon.

The anticipated crisis: Almost certainly in the future. The Fall of the Hall of Oaths was the failure of the machine, not the arrival of the threat. The machine may be complete enough to fend off the threat. Whether it is is the central tension of the campaign.

Status: Speculative, uncanonized. Recorded here because significant.

The model: Two non-human entities of extreme longevity, operating across approximately 800-1000 years. Structurally Gnostic — one cannot exist without the other — abstracted from real-world Gnostic theology, retained only as a structural principle. The First Figure is the threat or its instrument. The Second is the response or its instrument. Both are waiting on the same question the Exceptional Actors will answer.

Classification: Neither figure may be identified using existing AD&D creature taxonomy.

Status note: This is the most speculative entry in the canon decisions document. It is recorded here because it is too significant to leave only in the Deep Cosmology workbook, not because it has been formally canonized. Promote to canon only with explicit decision.

Status: Canon.

Decision: Velasian institutional buildings are not holy. The gods do not reside in them. They are named for function, not for the divine beings whose covenant work is administered within them. They are, however, sanctified through formal ceremony as designated covenant administration spaces. The theological status of that sanctification — whether it does anything beyond marking the space as appropriate, or whether it establishes a recognized channel in the divine processing apparatus — is an open question the corpus does not resolve.

Status: Canon.

Decision: The feeling that arrives at the moment of a successful binding is divine satisfaction. It arrives on the same channel as the priest’s perception of their own covenant status — the same faculty, the same wavelength. It is the one non-transactional divine response — unrequested, unearned in the transactional sense, arriving simply because the work was done correctly. Everything else in the divine actor’s relationship with their god is exchange. This is not exchange.

Vocational implication: A divine actor who cannot feel a binding in their proximity is unfit for oath administration and almost certainly unfit for the administrative hierarchy of any Foundation. The ride-along system exists to identify this incapacity before formation is complete.