diff --git a/LORE-BIBLE.md b/LORE-BIBLE.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..09a90ec --- /dev/null +++ b/LORE-BIBLE.md @@ -0,0 +1,239 @@ +# Djupet — Lore Bible + +No such document existed before this one — everything below is reconstructed +from what's actually in `src/events.ts`, `src/upgrades.ts`, `src/characters.ts`, +and `src/map.ts`, plus a few threads that were seeded in event text and never +paid off. This file is the canon going forward: new events, upgrades, +characters, and endings should agree with it rather than contradict it. Where +something below is marked **(open thread)**, it's a hook that exists in +shipped content but hasn't been resolved yet — a deliberate invitation, not +an oversight. + +## Premise, one line + +A Malmö cult meets in a Rosengård basement under cover of a Nordic +crime-fiction reading circle, working toward completing a ritual tied to +something asleep beneath Öresund — and the game is about managing how much +of that anyone else gets to notice. + +## Tone + +Three registers, deliberately blended, and every new piece of content should +know which one (or which mix) it's writing in: + +- **Anders Fager** — vardagssvenska possession-by-mundane-detail. Skatteverket, + ICA, SJ, Pressbyrån, Systembolaget. The horror arrives disguised as a + Tuesday. +- **Kult** — reality-as-prison, the flesh under the surface of things. Rooms + that aren't on the blueprints, walls that are warm, doors that stop + existing. +- **Call of Cthulhu** — investigators, sanity, the Mythos with a Skåne accent. + Things half-glimpsed, things half-translated, things that are worse once + understood than before. + +The house style is **deadpan understatement**. Nobody screams. Things are +noted, dryly, and then the cult moves on. A sentence structure that recurs +constantly in existing text: state something uncanny in one short sentence, +then immediately undercut or normalize it in the next ("X. Ingen pratar om +det." / "X. Det är Malmö."). New content should reach for that rhythm before +reaching for anything more explicit. + +## The entity: Den Sovande + +**Never given a proper name beyond the epithet** ("The Sleeping One") — this +is deliberate and should stay deliberate. It sleeps in or beneath Öresund. +The ritual's endpoint is not clearly "waking" it so much as *completing* it — +event and upgrade text consistently frames the goal as finishing something +unfinished, not rousing something dormant. "Ofärdig" (unfinished) is the word +used in the abandon-game log line, and it's the right word to keep reaching +for. + +Established physical/architectural connections: +- **Turning Torso** is not a metaphor for a twisting spine — per + `torso_beacon`'s upgrade text, that's literal: "Det är korrekt. Det är inte + en metafor." The building has always been listening. The architect is + fictionalized as **Calatrava-Santiago**. +- **Värnhemstorget** — a chalk circle that regrows overnight no matter how + often the city washes it off. Doesn't advance the ritual as directly as + Torso, but every visit and every varnhem-gated event ties dread/ritual + together here. +- **Öresund itself** — water level anomalies, a "sunken city" glimpsed on the + bottom in the deepest kaos-tier event (`k_oresund_rises`) that is + explicitly **not** an old city — the buildings are modern, one has + lighting. This is the single most unresolved, most promising lore thread + in the game **(open thread)**: what is the sunken city, and is it Den + Sovande's, a reflection of Malmö itself, or something arriving rather than + waking? + +## The artifact: Skriften (The Scripture) + +Found immured behind 1923 tile in a wall on Davidshallsgatan. Properties +established across several events and the `the_manuscript` upgrade: +- Self-writing — new lines appear overnight, "inte på något känt språk... + inte på något okänt språk heller egentligen." +- Moves if you look away (`torso_windows`' cousin-text; also implied by the + manuscript upgrade's "Texten rör sig om man tittar bort"). +- Was translated by a linguistics grad student who wasn't trying to (she was + chasing "ett ovanligt baltiskt dialektdrag" for unrelated academic work) — + she later asks to join the cult (`k_researcher_joins`) specifically because + she "just wants to see how it ends." She is the **Doktoranden** character. +- The last page wrote itself the night the grand ritual prep upgrade + triggers, and per that upgrade's text, it's "ett recept" — a recipe. This + is worth remembering: the endgame isn't a spell in the abstract, it's + *instructions*, plural steps, something with a procedure. Good hook for + more mid-ritual content (see Depth ideas below). + +## Place index + +Real Malmö geography throughout — never invent a fictional location when a +real one will do; that's load-bearing for the tone. + +**Core ritual sites** (area-gated, upgrade-unlocked): +- **Rosengård** — the founding basement. Nominal cover: "en läsecirkel för + nordisk kriminallitteratur." Nine chairs; one is always a little too warm. +- **Värnhemstorget** — the chalk circle. +- **Turning Torso** — the beacon/altar. + +**Free-roam locations** (visitable from turn one, currently flavor-only, no +upgrade or event-chain ties of their own — see Depth ideas): +- **Öresundsbron** — the bridge to Denmark; the Danes conspicuously don't + notice anything, which several events flag as more unsettling than if they + did. +- **Ribersborgsstranden** — kallbadhus, and ducks that face Turning Torso in + an "almost worshipful" state. Recurring motif, used at least three times + across events/kaos (`ducks_torso`, `k_duck_army`, location flavor text). + The ducks know more than the cult does — never contradict that. + **(open thread — the ducks have never been explained even in-joke terms)** +- **Davidshallsgatan** — where Skriften was found. A neighbor sings something + "almost, but not quite, a psalm" through the wall. +- **Stortorget** — the old town square; clocks around it rarely agree. +- **Möllevångstorget ("Möllan")** — market, fifty kitchens' worth of smell at + once, three speakers never playing quite the same song. Added later + (v0.6.0) alongside Universitet and still has no upgrade/NPC tie of its own. +- **Malmö universitet (Niagara building)** — library, lecture halls, a room + for rarely-requested collections that always has whatever the cult's code + needs. This is where the Doktoranden's translation happened. + +**Flavor-only mentions** (referenced in event text, never visitable, don't +need to become visitable — they're texture, not real estate): Malmö C, +Kockumskranen, Folkets Park, Triangeln, Limhamns kalkbrott, Hyllie, +Augustenborg, Lund Observatory/university, Västra Hamnen, S:t Johannes +kyrka, Gustav Adolfs Torg. + +## Character index + +**Founders** (always known): +- **Broder Lindqvist** — found the basement. Dreams of the sea every night, + increasingly literally as the ritual progresses. Draws the same map, + always the same angle toward Öresund. Sleeping less and less; says he no + longer needs to. His 3-step event chain (`choice_lindqvist_dream` → + `lindqvist_chain_2a/2b` → `lindqvist_chain_3`) ends with him walking into + Öresund at night and coming back changed, dry, no longer talking about + dreams — regardless of which branch (listened/silenced) the player took to + get there. **The two branches currently only reroute flavor text on the + way to the same outcome — see branching-endings work below.** +- **Syster Hassan** — handles paperwork, writes 47-page replies to + Skatteverket and wins. Practical and unshakeable until she starts + proposing changes to the ritual's order with a confidence nobody recalls + her having before. Her 3-step chain (`hassan_ambition` → `hassan_chain_2a/2b` + → `hassan_chain_3`) ends with her either performing a solo ritual at + Turning Torso (empowered branch) or being told no (sidelined branch) — same + structural shape as Lindqvist's arc, same current problem: doesn't touch + the ending. + +**Met along the way** (unlocked by specific events, portraits exist for all): +- **Göran** — added to the cult's Discord by mistake, mistook the chat for a + board game about the sea, gave "constructive" feedback anyway. Later + promoted to "Väktare av det Tredje Sigillet" (Guardian of the Third Seal), + which he interprets as treasurer. Roughly correct. +- **Bengt-Åke från Husie** — buys a nameless newspaper from Pressbyrån daily. + Turns out to already belong to a rival sect (active since 1987), whose own + lineage goes back to the 1840s. The coordination meeting between the two + groups "went well" — **(open thread — this rival-but-friendly lineage has + never been used again; ripe for a recurring faction rather than a one-off + joke)**. +- **Rolf från Limhamn** — attended for three weeks, then stopped. Shoes found + outside, neatly placed, toes toward the sea. A non-smoker's tobacco left + beside them. Never resolved, never explained, never brought back — this + reads as intentionally left open rather than abandoned; treat him as + "taken," not "written out." +- **Systern Anneli-Karin** — talks in her sleep in an unrecognized language; + played backward, still incomprehensible, "just differently incomprehensible." +- **Den gamle sjömannen** — retired sailor, unidentifiable tattoos, locked + himself in the Turning Torso tower and sang; rescue services couldn't get + in; the singing genuinely helped the ritual. +- **Doktoranden** — the linguistics grad student who unwittingly translated + Skriften, later asked to join specifically to see how it ends. +- **Journalisten från Sydsvenskan** — wrote an award-winning puff piece about + "Malmö's growing alternative spirituality" (the jury can't recall why they + gave it the prize); came back later for a follow-up, found more than she + was looking for; the follow-up was never published; her notes were kept by + the cult instead. + +**Named but never made full characters** — usable as-is for new event text, +or promotable to full characters if a future content pass wants them: +**Kommissarie Annika Fors** (a Grova Brott detective who dream-attends +meetings — the cult has set out a chair for her that she sits in without +knowing it; this is the single clearest seeded-antagonist thread in the game +and currently dead-ends after one event, `coc_investigator_dream` +**(open thread)**), the unnamed **Hässleholm rival cult** (tried to summon a +different entity, summoned IKEA customer service instead — currently played +as a pure joke in `k_rival_cult`, but Bengt-Åke's backstory proves the game +already has appetite for rival-sect lore played straight). + +## Recurring motifs — reuse these before inventing new ones + +- **Ducks at Ribersborg**, facing Turning Torso. +- **The number 13** — 13-minute intervals, 13-meter circles, 13 chimes at + midnight, a train departing every 13 minutes forever. +- **Circles and rings** — the Värnhemstorget chalk circle, fish swimming in + a shrinking circle, pigeons flying an unclosing circle. +- **Doubling / mirroring** — a second illusory Turning Torso, a mirror + reflecting a different-era version of the same room, two sets of measurements + that never quite agree with each other. +- **A chorus/choir**, heard underground or underwater, never seen. +- **Time glitches** — missing hours nobody misses (which is what's + unsettling about it, not the hour itself), trains stopped in tunnels that + aren't on any map, clocks agreeing with each other but not with reality. +- **Bureaucracy as a delivery mechanism for dread** — Skatteverket, + Länsstyrelsen, a rådman, a fastighetsmäklare, the Statistiska centralbyrån + survey call that gets uncomfortably specific. The mundane administrative + state is *already* a little bit compromised, and needs surprisingly little + push to become an active participant. `inflytande`'s whole design premise + hangs off this — favors flow both ways. + +## The number nine + +Nine chairs from the very first log line ("Nio stolar. En av dem är alltid +lite för varm."). The mechanical troende cap was removed in v0.3.0, but the +*flavor* still treats nine as symbolically complete +(`nine_chairs_full`, `troende_schism`'s "Nio troende är fler än vi någonsin +haft"). Do not resolve this tension by explaining it away — the correct move +is to keep nine as the meaningful, "designed" number, and treat anything +past it as the cult outgrowing its own architecture. The warm chair is +occupied only once flavor-confirmed (`nine_chairs_full`: "Ingen pratar om vem +som sitter i den"), and nobody has ever been told who's in it. **Keep it +that way.** + +## What is deliberately never explained + +A short list, because knowing what to leave alone matters as much as knowing +what to build out: +- Who or what sits in the ninth (warm) chair. +- What happened to Rolf. +- What the sunken city at the bottom of Öresund actually is. +- Why the ducks know. +- Den Sovande's actual name, shape, or intentions beyond "unfinished." + +## Using this document + +New events, upgrades, and characters should: +1. Pick one of the three registers (or a blend) deliberately, the way the + existing source comments already tag event blocks by register. +2. Reuse a real Malmö place before inventing a new one, and reuse a + recurring motif before inventing a new image. +3. Prefer resolving or advancing an **(open thread)** listed above over + starting an entirely new dangling one — the game already has more setup + than payoff. +4. Keep the deadpan two-sentence rhythm: state the uncanny thing, undercut + or normalize it immediately after.