Eldritch story design

Architecture, and the voice of the frame. Full manual: reference/story-manual.md — go to the section you need.

What this skill owns: overall arcs, Age structure, the escalation, the cosmic tier, and the prose of the frame, interludes, prologue, Ledger clauses, nested tales and Age blurbs — all of which are written in Dunsanian register.

What it does not own: individual event bodies, outcome text and character blurbs. Those are pure Rothfuss — use rothfuss-prose. Do not apply elevated diction to them.

Three traditions, three jobs

Rothfuss builds the house, Dunsany decides what the light is like in it, Lovecraft decides what is underneath it.

Tradition	Owns
Rothfuss	The three layers, Ages-as-episodes, the three debts, cast slots, tension engines, ledger discipline, human-scale stakes, the legend/truth gap
Dunsany	Register of the frame and myth layer. Beauty before dread. Melancholy. Mythic distance. Motif
Lovecraft	The cosmic tier, epistemic escalation, knowledge-as-danger, what is never explained

Four points where they genuinely conflict, resolved in §1. Do not re-open these mid-design.

The two sentences everything hangs off

Structural — write this first, and make it a sentence rather than a theme:

This is the true story of how the house became the thing people sing about — told by the last of the line, on the last night, to the creditor sitting across the table.

Tonal:

A beautiful myth, told by someone who has glimpsed something behind the myth.

If a feature does not touch blood, the ledger, or the record, it is not in this game. If a scene has dread but no beauty, it is half-built.

Three layers, and do not let them blur

Layer	What	Volume	Tempo	Register
The Frame	1542. Two at a table, and the chronicle between them	~5%	Slower than everything around it	Dunsanian
The Tale	1042–1542. The run itself, in the chronicler's voice	~90%	A generation is a chapter	Rothfuss — carries the warmth
Nested tales	What the world says about the family	~5%	Interruptions	Dunsanian

The frame is the promise: every generation is played against how does this become that? It reacts to the record and never dispenses systems information.

The register split is a feature. When the prose goes ornate, the player has left the ledger and entered the myth — and the myth is the layer that lies.

Designing a phase

An Age is a phase, and a phase that shares all its content with every other phase is a modifier wearing a name. Every Age pays three debts before it is authored:

1. One Ledger clause — a hard fact about the contract, not a hint. What kind of fact is set by the Age's escalation stage.
2. One standing change — the family ends materially richer, poorer, more feared or more exposed.
3. One Rumour — a story about the family entering the world distorted.

An Age delivering none of these is a beautiful two hundred years in which nothing happened, and that is precisely the drift long games die of.

Three scheduling rules: name Ages late, alternate the register (warm/prosperous → cold/lethal → institutional/political), and never pay the same kind of clause twice running.

The escalation — one stage per Age

Seven stages across nine Ages. The stage governs the Age's intensity and what its clause is allowed to say.

Age	Stage	The clause
1	Wonder	A contract exists, and has terms. Favourable-seeming
2	Mystery	The family's account of the signing is incomplete
3–4	Wrongness	A term that does not behave like a term; then a second, related to the first
5	Revelation	The other party predates the family, the house, the contract's language
6–7	Incomprehension	A reading held for centuries is invalidated; then the correction is
8	Cosmic implication	This contract is one of many, or was never the point
9	Silence	No clause. Permitted only if the other eight paid

Incomprehension is the hardest stage and the one that justifies the structure — it requires the player to have been confidently wrong for two hundred years, which requires a genuinely good wrong answer (manual §11).

Two tiers of antagonist

Tier A — the proximate mythic. Tragic, knowable in principle, appears once catastrophically, denied by educated society, known by displacement and omen — iron rusting overnight, dogs that will not enter a room they have slept in for years. The early game is not about beating it; it is about establishing that it exists, against an institution that would ruin you for saying so.

Tier B — the cosmic. The other party. Indifferent, no stated motive, never explained. Design it by answering six questions in your notes (manual §7), of which what remains impossible to understand must be the largest.

The seam is where the horror is. The ancestor who signed believed he was bargaining with someone. Everything the family has done since rests on the assumption that the other party has interests that can be satisfied. Nothing ever confirms it.

Never give Tier B a line like "I shall have what I am owed." Prefer: The seal on the box had not been broken, and the box was open.

Cast slots, not characters

Write to roles that get refilled — the Mentor Taken Away, the Institutional Rival, the Fragile One, the Unattainable — so five centuries rhyme without an author wiring it. A recurring role whose occupant dies and is not recast silently removes every scene that referenced it.

Nested tales

No nested tale is neutral. Every one is told by someone with a stake, and the teller is always named and always biased. Any event of consequence has at least two surviving accounts that disagree, and the game never adjudicates in its own voice. Two accounts that agree are one account written twice.

Beauty before dread

The world must possess beauty before it possesses dread, and the beautiful should be temporary — a hall only ever full once in a generation, a garden that blooms in a year nobody can afford to enjoy it, a great house being slowly forgotten by the country around it.

Beauty is not a break from the horror. It is what gives the horror somewhere to land, and the reason the player minds. Every Age needs one thing the player would mind losing.

The two-class ledger

Every question is classified the day it opens, and the classification is permanent.

Class M — mundane. Written answer, partial payoff within an Age, hard expiry, closed on schedule and the player is told. At least one closes per Age, including Age 9. Cap six live.

Class C — cosmic. Written answer before the vertical slice, and never shipped. Payoffs eliminate rather than confirm — each clause removes readings, never states what the thing is. Never closed, ever. Cap two live.

Expiry works differently for Class C: a cosmic question dies not from being unanswered but from going un-narrowed. Two consecutive Ages with no eliminating clause and the player has stopped believing in it.

Reclassification is forbidden. A cosmic question cannot be demoted late because the ending needs tidying.

Before calling a design finished

Run the full checklist (manual §22). The ones this project has actually hit:

• Spine stall — chart clause recovery per 200 years. A flat stretch is a redesign, not a tuning pass.
• Formidability spam — count the scenes whose real job is the family is impressive. More than one per Age is too many.
• A frame with no function — does it complicate the record, or just look mysterious?
• Unwritten ending — Tier B's true nature must exist in full before the vertical slice.
• The explained god — does the entity anywhere have a motive, a plan, or a grievance?
• No good wrong answer — if truth Layer 2 is a strawman, the Incomprehension stage has nothing to break.
• Nihilism — no cosmic revelation may make an earlier human loss trivial in the game's own voice.
• Register bleed — Dunsanian diction in event bodies, or plain reportage in the frame.

Where to look in the manual

Need	Section
The two thesis sentences	§0
The three traditions and the four resolved conflicts	§1
Three-layer architecture and register assignment	§2
The frame's own arc — and how to write it	§3
Prologue as thesis statement	§4
The line as protagonist	§5
Supporting cast architecture	§6
Two-tier antagonism, and the seam	§7
Two-tier magic, and the knowledge-costs law	§8
Worldbuilding, and beauty before dread	§9
Nested tales	§10
Hidden truth architecture — the three layers	§11
Episodic body, mythic spine, the three debts	§12
The escalation: seven stages across nine Ages	§13
Tension engines, and the anti-nihilism rule	§14
Theme, darkening motifs, the tone budget	§15
Scene and chapter shape	§16
Pacing and proportion	§17
Endings and the five afterimages	§18
The two-class mystery ledger	§19
What not to copy, and on imitation	§20
Porting the architecture to other media	§21
Failure-mode checklist	§22
Procedure for designing a new story	§23
Quick reference card	§24