Oath-Bound: Session Reseeding Document

Three Antora modules in dmgsrc/Oath-Bound/modules/:

Three corpus layers bridging rules and campaign:

pubsrc/pubwork — Rules Deviation (public)
privsrc/privwork — GM Bible + Campaign (Authelia-protected)
playsrc/playwork — Intro (public)

Rules basis: AD&D 1e heavily modified. GM Bible is authoritative. Rules Deviation documents departures for experienced players. Different audiences; not interchangeable.

Four categories of Foundation House from the Fireborn period. All are confirmed corpus terminology. Named by the surviving Fireborn Houses — the taxonomy reflects their perspective.

Rededication Houses — the Fireborn. Negotiated independent Foundational covenants before the collapse. Named themselves. Somewhat jingoistic — implies emergence from trial and purification; does not imply "we destroyed two of our own to improve our negotiating position."

Respondent Houses — reformed reactively. Survived through institutional realignment begun in the mid-290s AF. Created independent covenants after the fall of the Hall of Oaths. Larger in 353 NA than in 290 AF, swollen with absorbed congregants of failed institutions.

Resigned Houses — attempted reform but could not complete it in time to survive with a functioning covenant. Some survived through the post-collapse renegotiation. Named by the Fireborn with mild condescension. The name stuck. Their senior clergy in 353 NA give carefully neutral answers when asked about it.

Lost Houses — did not survive. Named by the Fireborn with apparent regret. The name says nothing about how they were lost or by whom — which suited the Fireborn well, given that two Lost Houses were destroyed by Rededication Houses operating as competitors in the same survival race.

Foundation — the institution-type. Generic term for one of these oath-administering ecclesiastical bodies regardless of visage.

House — the local expression of a Foundation. Three scales: Foundational House (mother institution), City House (urban, substantial), Rural House (smaller, single priest or small community).

Vestibulum — the dedicated oath administration room of a Foundation House. Proper noun. A professional space, not a sacred space — gods do not reside in buildings. Built around the spoken word and the act of formal hearing; good acoustics are not incidental. Quality varies: in great city Houses, the vestibulum is appointed to a standard that would strike a rural visitor as remarkable — this is deliberate. The dignity of the space is part of the covenant’s weight. Individual Houses may use different terms; members of one House find nothing unfamiliar in another’s structure. The mendicant House to Tenasse has no vestibulum.

Fiddlestick — the small brittle object broken at the moment of oath instantiation. Without exception across every non-mendicant Foundation House, going back to the founding. The object varies; the breaking does not. Nobody in the Foundation system has ever produced a satisfactory account of why this is done. An administration without it feels, to any experienced priest, profoundly incomplete.

Communion — the theological community as a living social entity, distinct from the administrative institution.

Every non-mendicant Foundation House of any size contains these functional spaces, whatever their local names: gathering hall, prefect’s office or suite, scriptorium, bursary, library, archive, vestibulum, and supporting facilities. Members of one House find nothing unfamiliar in another’s structure.

Divine Actors — all those operating through delegated divine authority and concord. Covers AD&D clerics, druids (class), paladins, monks, and the pre-Velasian anchorite/mystic archetype.

Arcane Actors — mages, illusionists, hedge practitioners.

Martial Actors — fighters, rangers, barbarians, the martial dimension of paladins.

Gray Actors — thieves, assassins, information brokers, gray eminences. Bards are Gray Actors by default.

Exceptional Actors — taxonomy term for player characters and certain rare NPCs. Capitalized when used as the taxonomy term.

Praecox is the permanent founding mark applied to the original institutional expression of a god. Applied once, at the establishment of the first House to that god. Never removed, never transferred, never contingent on the survival or suppression of later visages.

Formal usage: Aurelion Praecox, Minatur Praecox, Thalenor Praecox, Morvian Praecox, Vestara Praecox, Aelion Praecox, Veloran Praecox, Eridra Praecox, Garrion Praecox.

Colloquial and ritual usage: the simple name — Aurelion, Thalenor, etc. — understood to refer to the Praecox expression unless context specifies otherwise.

Subsequent visages carry their own specific names and never the Praecox designation: Thalenor Custos, Aurelion Constans, Caedran, Serena, Tenasse, Waylan, Faberus, Clarion, Minatur Secundus.

The Foundation Covenant — the original unique instrument. Always capitalized. Not "the Velasian Covenant", not "the Founding Covenant."

The Founding Oath — the act of swearing it. Capitalized.

The Covenant — acceptable shorthand in theological discourse where context is clear. Capitalized.

covenant (lowercase) — any derivative or particular instrument.

The Hall of Oaths — capitalized throughout.

Use to as the associative preposition for visage relationships. "A fane to Thalenor Custos", "a House to Aurelion", "a service to Vestara". Works for buildings, rites, institutions, practitioners, oaths. Replaces "of the [visage] visage" constructions.

The conflict within the Velasian upper theological cohort during the Fireborn period. Not a war. Conducted through institutional weapons. The two Lost Houses destroyed during this period were Rededication Houses — competitors in the same survival race, not orthodox victims of reformer suppression. The House that dispatched Justicars in 301 AF is almost certainly still operating in 353 NA. Its senior clergy know what their founding institution did.

Four academically legitimate schools, all proper nouns: The Concordist School, The Revisionist School, The Limitationist School, The Imprecisionist School.

Fifth position: Disputational theology, a Disputer. Not granted School status. Register: "Disputational theology — if you can call it that."

BF/AF — Before/After Foundation. Anchored to Velasian landfall. Still in active use by Foundation-aligned clergy and scholars.

NA — New Age. Anchored to the destruction of the Hall of Oaths. Working calendar of the campaign present.

Conversion: 303 AF = 0 NA. Campaign present = 353 NA = 656 AF.

Currently British English. Migration to American English planned but not yet executed. New content should use American English. Do not introduce new British spellings.

Standard AsciiDoc markup only. No custom HTML. No non-standard extensions. Antora-compatible. Correct any deviations toward standard AsciiDoc in any derived output.

Every AsciiDoc document must carry: :content-origin:, :content-polish:, :content-type:, :document-id:, and :css-dependent-styles: (when CSS-dependent block roles are used — these documents require a live-page check after any re-emission).

Source path comment mandatory immediately after attributes block: // Path: lore/…​

"You’re drifting" is the recalibration signal for all session conduct behaviors simultaneously: vague words, confirmatory feedback, people-pleaser responses, and any other behavioral drift. Correct and continue without extended acknowledgment.

Contradiction identification and logic hole flagging are actively encouraged — flag directly rather than smoothing past them.

Avoid confirmatory feedback that restates or applauds without adding analytical content. If something is worth commenting on, say why it matters or what it enables.

Archetypes — eternal structural models. Cannot be destroyed. No agency. Templates from which divine expressions emerge.

Gods — instantiations of archetypal domains. Metabolize oath obligations. Persistence depends on compatible oath structures. Behavior is metabolic rather than strategic.

Oaths — generate structured obligation. Obligation produces persistent metaphysical pressure.

Wyrd — accumulated causal constraint. Past commitments narrow future possibilities.

A system-level stabilizing intelligence distinct from ordinary gods. Does not pursue domain expansion. Perceives the entire obligation ecosystem simultaneously. In the capital-allocation model: a fund-of-funds manager seeding separate channels. Each visage is a separate channel operating with apparent independence.

The founding theologians conducting probing Open Calls observed distinct divine response profiles and concluded they were dealing with distinct divine individuals. They were dealing with differentiated channels of a single intelligence. The One did not correct this misidentification — the instruments were well- constructed, the obligation genuine, and the misidentification didn’t affect instrument performance.

Never in player-facing content. GM Bible cosmology register only.

A visage is not a face the god shows. It is a bundle of attributes — qualities, domains, behavioral expectations — that mortal theologians constructed and directed their obligations toward. The god processes whatever compatible obligation arrives through that channel.

The anthropomorphic framing — divine marriages, family structures, gods with personalities — was the packaging required to generate genuine obligation from populations who needed the system to feel personal. The necessary fiction is load-bearing: remove it and the instrument degrades.

Band I was discovery. Band II was the insight that the engagement mechanism itself was the innovation. Synthetic visages are instruments engineered from underlying components that have real value — complex financial derivatives. The gods accepted them for the same reason sophisticated investors accept complex instruments: diversification and uncorrelated portfolio positions.

The Foundation Covenant did not drift into incoherence. The portfolio became too correlated to deliver the diversification that made it attractive. Every apparently uncorrelated instrument shared identical hidden exposure to Velasian imperial infrastructure — the hidden liquidity layer problem (cf. the 1993 fund-of-funds crisis). The instruments measured individual tranche performance, not portfolio correlation. Stability reported until very late.

The gods knew about and approved the Fireborn initiative. The Fireborn were sell-side operators presenting well-structured replacement instruments to a client with known portfolio requirements. The collapse of the Foundation Covenant was the settlement mechanism — an orderly exit from a dangerously correlated position while legging into better-structured replacement instruments. The broad-market divestment was a return to cash, not divine abandonment. The New Age is The One’s re-entry — cautious, selective, better-diversified.

The Velasian founding theologians operated with a genuine predictive model of collective human behavior. They were doing psychohistory in Asimov’s precise sense. Three blind spots:

The Mule — the Exceptional Actor operating outside the statistical model. Wyrd is the mechanism by which Mules enter the story.

The outside view — they could not see the system from outside it. The correlation collapse was invisible from inside the portfolio.

The feedback loop — the Book of Value introduced the Velasian behavioral model into the population being modeled. Psychohistory that makes itself true by being believed.

The Machiavellian reading is available and not wrong. But the founding generation had a genuine moral framework — paternalistic, not cynical. The C.S. Lewis formulation applies: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive…​ those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." The Velasian project never slept.

The Velasian empire was a tyranny of comfort, safety, and reliability. For most people, most of the time, indistinguishable from a good life. The Questioner who says "this was built on violence and deceit" is right. The Markish farmer who says "my family has been better fed, safer, and more fairly treated under this system than under anything that preceded it" is also right. Both are simultaneously true.

The sepiatone world is not doomed — it is supersaturated. Scattered through the sea of vulnerability are nucleation points: the Cwym oral covenant tradition, the ring-bound Skelds in Eldland, the Celt communities whose founding identity is the refusal of assimilation, the anchorite Garrionic community in Eldland, the Waylan Houses at the forward edge, the Caedran Foundation underground, the New Velasian enclaves. The Exceptional Actors are the people whose choices determine whether crystallization happens in time.

The Fall was the failure of the Velasian project — the machine stopping before completion. The threat the machine was designed to address has not yet arrived in its full expression. The crisis is almost certainly in the future. The nucleation points are the surviving components of an incomplete machine. Whether the incomplete machine is complete enough is the central tension of the campaign.

Two non-human entities of extreme longevity operating across approximately 800-1000 years. Gnostic structural model — abstracted from real-world theology, retained as structure only. One cannot exist without the other. The First Figure is the threat or its instrument. The Second is the response or its instrument. Neither can be classified using existing AD&D creature taxonomy. The absence of a category is more unsettling than a known creature type.

Most of Oath-Bound exists in muted tones. Player characters occupy positions near unstable wyrd curves — visible against the background the way a heat source appears through thermal imaging. This visibility does not imply destiny or divine favor.

Confirmed corpus correction: "As Above, So Below" throughout. Retire "As Above, As Below" wherever it appears. Many churches assert their institutional structure mirrors divine order. Within the deeper metaphysics this claim is almost certainly false. Persists because it stabilizes the institution that proclaims it.

Permanently unresolved. "Did they jump? Were they pushed? Or a little bit of both?" Never to be answered in the corpus.

(1) Foundational reveal — narrow structural pantheon, Band I. (2) Expansion — practical domains, Band II, self-verifying. (3) Cultural tuning — the Garrionic programme as the most developed example. Never completed.

Collection of aphorisms concerning reputation, obligation, honour, and conduct. Repeated across all Oath-Bound cultures. In some communities: simultaneously moral instruction and reading primer. Sayings circulate through speech; phrasing varies while meaning remains familiar.

Gods are metabolic intelligences processing obligation as a resource. Not moral actors. Not omniscient. Reliable, not just. The anthropomorphic framing — divine marriages, family structures — is mortal theology, not divine reality.

Visages are projected attribute bundles constructed by mortal theologians and directed toward the divine processing apparatus. The Praecox designation marks the original expression. Subsequent visages are later instruments, not aspects the god chose to express.

Aurelion Praecox — formal oath, covenant, public obligation. Spouse of Vestara Praecox. Subsequent visage: Aurelion Constans.

Minatur Praecox — provision, stores, sufficiency. Canonical spelling: Minatur throughout. Married to Eridra Praecox (the dual-church experiment). Subsequent visage: Minatur Secundus.

Thalenor Praecox — principle, adjudicated order. Subsequent visages: Thalenor Custos; Caedran (Band III — subsequent visage of Thalenor, not an independent god; canon decision recorded).

Morvian Praecox — the fully-resolved life; inevitable reliable passage. "The Patient." "He Who Waits." Uber Driver of the divine portfolio — judgment-free, takes you where you’re going. Primary symbol: broken circle with twin upward parallel lines at the point of passage (the gap raises the reincarnation question without resolving it). Designed with Garrion to displace tribal death theologies. Makes no claim about destination. No subsequent visages anticipated.

Vestara Praecox — domestic moral authority; the Roman matron made divine. Where Eridra Praecox is a housekeeper, Vestara is a matron. Absolute standard, no flexibility. Holds the household to her values when the light does not shine. The founding matriarchy underlying the male institutional gods. Spouse of Aurelion Praecox — the only founding divine marriage. No subsequent visages anticipated — the absolute standard does not differentiate.

Eridra Praecox — household governance, domestic authority. Formerly designated Eridra Matrona — redesignated Eridra Praecox as the base god. Married to Minatur Praecox (deliberately designed into the Band II product launch; not a founding pairing like Aurelion/Vestara). Subsequent visages: Serena (Band II, first launched 72 AF); Tenasse (Band III).

Serena — fertility, crops, seasonal abundance. First Band II visage. Direct response to rural agricultural communities' need. Serena opened the door; Eridra Praecox was the room behind it.

Aelion Praecox — infrastructure and building, civil works. Subsequent visages: Faberus (master craft); Clarion (Band III, intellectual craft, narrow scope).

Veloran Praecox — reliable passage and known routes. Female. Subsequent visage: Waylan (Band III).

Garrion Praecox — abstract base class, never directly instantiated as a worshipper community. Template for nine cultural implementations using object-oriented design logic: develop the model, instantiate with minor mutations. The base class is still there beneath every implementation; a sufficiently learned outsider who compares two implementations will find the differences amount to a minor heresy, not different religions. The Band III creative programme was never completed — the collapse interrupted active development.

Nine Garrionic implementations (none named yet). Seven survive in 353 NA.

Survivors: - Two Markish marcher communities — running, mutated, functionally identical (Mithras 1 and Mithras 2) - Two Bryt communities — running, thoroughly Bryt, resilient - One Bryt community — declining under Celt demographic pressure - One Celt community — surviving tenuously, small, culturally compromised - One Skeld anchorite community in Eldland — most faithful preservation, looks like a late-stage Velasian outpost, hall-bound by mechanism, unknown to the Foundation system

Non-survivors: - One Celt community — destroyed by rebellion, closed position - One Cwym community — failed almost immediately; rejected as inappropriate and sacrilegious within months. The second implementation launched chronologically. The designers identified a domain parallel between Morrigan (Celt) and Arianrhod (Cwym) that was real at the domain level and false at the relational level. The Cwym recognize Arianrhod; they do not revere her and would not enter covenant with her. The rejection was immediate, total, and theological. A residual ember persists at the margins of Cwym culture but does not count as a surviving implementation.

Caedran — governance, legitimate institutional authority. Subsequent visage of Thalenor Praecox (canon decision). Band III. Designed as an internal instrument for the Velasian administrative class. In 353 NA operates underground — not secret in the sense of unknown, but undisclosed in membership, terms, and ceremony. Bilderberg/Bohemian Grove register. Natural early contact point for Exceptional Actors as deniable contractors. Sacred attributes withheld — restricted GM Bible material only.

Tenasse — the last chance; final accounting. Subsequent visage of Eridra Praecox. Band III. Not a goddess of death — sequential with Morvian, not overlapping. The goddess of the last chance within the space available. Does not manipulate wyrd. Cannot guarantee outcomes. A condemned man’s covenant is self-sacrificial: three days of maximum-quality obligation directed outward toward family and contacts; his personal return is a death not dishonored, received cleanly by Morvian. Visual archetype: Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936). House to Tenasse is mendicant — no fixed property, no institutional hierarchy. Priests almost exclusively women, moving through frontier communities, prisons, and condemned cells.

Waylan — the unknown path. Subsequent visage of Veloran Praecox. Band III. Female. Part Athena, part mythic Aragorn. Not engineered for adventurers but naturally suited to them. Widest covenant school — breadth reflects genuine domain width (pioneering encompasses many skills), not convenience. Nomadic, forward- positioned. Sites are mountain-lodge equivalent: intelligence hubs, not Traveller’s Rests. Natural fit for Exceptional Actors.

Clarion — writing and intellectual craft. Subsequent visage of Aelion Praecox. Band III. Narrow scope.

Faberus — master craft and forging. Subsequent visage of Aelion Praecox. Band of introduction TBC.

Minatur Secundus — custodianship and fair dealing. Subsequent visage of Minatur Praecox. Band of introduction TBC.

Aurelion Constans — personal honor, steadfast duty. Subsequent visage of Aurelion Praecox. Band of introduction TBC.

Thalenor Custos — enforcement of order, boundary keeping. Subsequent visage of Thalenor Praecox. Predates 301 AF. The House to Thalenor Custos that dispatched Justicars in 301 AF is the most significant unresolved institutional scandal in the New Age. GM Bible only.

Hall-bound — Skeld communities that learned the power of mediated oaths conducted in Velasian halls. Adopted the Velasian covenant model.

Ring-bound — the more archaic open-call model. Somewhat more refined than the Cwym spectacular but fundamentally an attention mechanism rather than a binding instrument. The split is real, persistent, and sharp at times.

Shape and tone: The administering priest reads both before entering the vestibulum. Shape describes the structure; tone describes the character of what is being sworn and the quality of the obligant’s approach. A covenant can have clean shape and troubled tone.

Fitness assessment: Not a moral judgment. A risk assessment — whether the obligant can generate the quality of genuine obligation the instrument requires. The Foundation does not administer uncertain oaths if it can avoid it.

The specialists (legislators): Present throughout the ceremony, active during the declaration. The vestibulum is the last opportunity for the obligant to ensure intent and expectations are correctly represented. It is not unusual for the ceremony to stop and renegotiate. Embarrassing, but preferable to an incoherent instrument.

The acceptance: The moment that cannot be fully explained and does not require explanation to be recognized. Arrives on the same channel as the priest’s perception of their own covenant status — divine satisfaction, the one non-transactional divine response. A divine actor who cannot feel a binding is unfit for oath administration. The ride-along system weeds out insensitive novitiates.

The fiddlestick: Something must be broken at instantiation. Has always been so. Nobody knows why.

Concord: A consistently effective oath administrator develops the highest concord of any practitioner. The causality is axiomatic and self-reinforcing.

Clerical domain — oath and covenant. Divine consequence plus institutional enforcement.

Legal domain — contract. Emerging; modelled on clerical administration. Inconsistent across regions.

Mundane domain — bond, personal promise. Socially enforced.

Three stages: underperformance → partial recovery possible → full disinvestment. Never retribution. The church’s enforcement apparatus and the god’s actual behavior are two separate systems, frequently misaligned.

A secular profession. Advises on the covenant — temporal, strategic, procedural — rather than the oath itself. Not a metaphysical participant. The upper tier is a small, closed professional community. One of the major drivers behind the growth of the secular legal profession.

Fidelity — standing with the institution. Visible, judged by others. Concord — alignment with the god. Felt, not measured. These do not always move together.

Concord states: High → Stable → Strained → Discordant.

Foundation-recognised divine actors: power flows through a chain of legitimacy. Two independent authorities govern miracles: divine concord (determines success) and Foundation authorisation (determines which miracles may be attempted).

Velland — the Northern Lands. Where the campaign is set.

Eldland — the eastern origin of the Skeld migrations. Velasian expansion reached Eldland but was geographically constrained — coastal presence, tentative hinterland expansions, never full imperial control.

Shadows and aromas, not replicas. Do not import real-world historical detail as in-world fact.

The anchorite/mystic archetype was pan-cultural before the Velasians arrived. The Garrionic overlay targeted Hillfolk and Skelds. Outcomes: Bryt (most effective) → Celt (partial, uneven) → Skelds (variable) → Cwym (effectively abandoned).

Three states: aware (hit points apply) → partial awareness (hit points apply, initiative lost) → genuinely unaware (decisive harm track only).

Combat track — hit points, abstraction, player agency. Decisive harm track — circumstance governs, GM resolves openly.

Combat ineffective. Character may be conscious. Character is helpless.

High priority: - Pantheon index GM Bible register section (non-anthropomorphic divine nature, visages as projected bundles) - Caedran restricted document (sacred attributes, internal symbols, ceremony — GM Bible only) - Aliases and Circumlocutions page update (Praecox convention, all confirmed formal names) - Reseed update for Garrionic implementation summary rows - Velasian chronology corpus document - Deep Cosmology workbook corpus placement - Voice Reference update: contradiction/logic-hole feedback standard