djupet/LORE-BIBLE.md

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.