feat(lore): establish arcane-industrial factions and social fault lines

[zoeyrose]

Architecture amendment — one authored content source (2026-08-13)

Initiative atrinik/atrinik#357 supersedes every future live-branch instruction below. atrinik/content@main is the sole mutable authored source for replacement and Classic targets. Future authored changes land only on main; supported Classic artifacts are deterministically derived from the same immutable main revision. Do not create, restore, author, backport, validate, or publish through a live 1.x branch.

Exact historical 1.x commits, tags, releases, assets, preserved local snapshots, provenance, parity records, and comparisons remain valid immutable evidence. This amendment changes no other feature, balance, lore, compatibility, licensing, validation, or ownership acceptance criterion.

Outcome

Establish the institutions, factions, and countercultures that turn Atrinik's
new arcane industry from a collection of inventions into a contested social
order.

Each group must be rooted in existing places or institutions, have material
interests and internal disagreement, protect at least one real benefit, risk at
least one real harm, and ask something concrete of the player. Avoid a single
evil corporation, a uniformly virtuous resistance, or race/religion/profession
as ideology.

Dependencies

• Parent: feat(lore): evolve Atrinik through magitech into a magepunk age #130.
• Broad implementation is blocked by docs(lore): define Atrinik's magitech-to-magepunk setting contract #133, the setting-contract child.
• Develop alongside feat(world): establish the Morliana–Brynknot arcane-industry corridor #131, the Morliana–Brynknot corridor, so its financing, labor,
  ownership, safety, and access decisions have actual stakeholders.
• feat(story): stage Atrinik's magepunk tipping point #134, the tipping-point campaign, is blocked until this issue establishes durable
  positions, NPC anchors, and conflict lines.

Faction architecture

Define at least six playable blocs, with final names subject to lore review:

1. Research and education: Morliana researchers and Wizards' Tower teachers,
   divided over open knowledge, credentialing, dangerous experiments, and
   device-mediated access to magic.
2. Capital and commerce: Banks Inc., merchants, charter holders, insurers,
   and investors who can fund infrastructure but may control credit, prices,
   salvage, patents, and expansion.
3. Craft and labor: Rockforge runemasters, arcanisters, miners, fabricators,
   transporters, maintainers, and other workers whose expertise makes the
   industry possible and whose safety or bargaining power is at stake.
4. State and law: the Asterian Crown, guards, inspectors, and military
   buyers, divided over public safety, taxation, monopoly charters, strategic
   use, policing, and surveillance.
5. Faith and ethics: multiple temples and traditions interpreting created,
   stored, divine, and possibly living magic differently. Preserve the existing
   Asterian edict, temple diplomacy, and monitored sects; religion must not act
   as one voice.
6. Affected communities: Morliana residents, Incuna survivors, Clearhaven
   and other mining communities, people near extraction or waste sites, and
   users priced into or out of new services.
7. Independent and illicit actors: salvagers, smugglers, informal repairers,
   dissident scholars, mutual-aid networks, opportunists, and principled
   resistance. Distinguish survival, profit, reform, and sabotage rather than
   treating all unlicensed activity alike.

Some blocs may remain coalitions rather than formal organizations. Do not
invent a new institution when an existing NPC, guild, temple, town, or business
can credibly carry the role.

Required conflict lines

• Who owns a fallen crystal, recovered shard, refinement method, or imprinted
  spell pattern?
• Are knowledge and repair instructions public, licensed, guild-secret, or
  monopolized?
• Who receives bank credit, bears debt, insures failures, and profits from
  service fees?
• What safety standards, compensation, refusal rights, and emergency shutdown
  powers do miners, refiners, installers, and maintainers have?
• Which civic services are universal, rationed, subscription-based, or reserved
  for state and military use?
• When does inspection become surveillance, and when does containment become a
  pretext for policing disfavored groups?
• How do faiths interpret stored spells, artificial invocation, constructs,
  crystal resonance, and the Incuna presence?
• Who may salvage a skyfall or abandoned mine, and what distinguishes recovery
  from extraction or desecration?
• What happens when remote settlements adapt the technology without official
  parts, licenses, or trained operators?

Authored-content plan

• Create a faction ledger. For each bloc record: stable ID; public name and
  slang; home/operating regions; origin; resources; constituency; public goal;
  private disagreements; protected benefit; likely harm; red lines; allies and
  rivals; NPC/readable/map anchors; visual/material vocabulary; and at least one
  player-facing request.
• Audit existing named NPCs before assigning views. Preserve established
  characterization; use new NPCs where a role would otherwise be forced.
• Use existing class tension as a canon seed: Charob Beer Inc.'s owner blames a
  “lazy worker,” while the worker describes himself as overworked, underpaid,
  sore, and afraid of losing his job. Expand this vocabulary through distinct
  people and industries rather than copying those characters wholesale.
• Introduce the conflict through at least three bounded disputes across at least
  three regions. Include one labor/safety dispute, one access/ownership dispute,
  and one law/faith/containment dispute.
• Give each dispute at least two credible positions and a consequence visible
  through dialogue, service terms, reward/source access, or another supported
  character-local state.
• Show ordinary work: extraction, refinement, fabrication, transport,
  inspection, maintenance, repair, cleanup, care, bookkeeping, and informal
  reuse. The industry cannot exist only through executives and adventurers.
• Use Incuna and Hierro as evidence people interpret differently, not as a
  single authorial answer. Preserve the unresolved crystal origin/presence.
• Use existing faction/reputation behavior only where its semantics fit.
  Otherwise use quest/dialogue state and open a runtime issue only after a
  reusable missing contract is demonstrated.
• Define stable faction, dispute, quest, readable, and lore-topic identities
  suitable for catalog validation and later achievement/story consumption.

Acceptance criteria

• At least six blocs satisfy the faction-ledger contract, and each has an
  existing-world anchor, material interest, internal disagreement,
  protected benefit, potential harm, red line, and player-facing request.
• No race, town, temple, profession, government, company, or resistance is
  written as ideologically uniform.
• Research/education, capital/commerce, craft/labor, state/law, faith/ethics,
  affected communities, and independent/illicit perspectives are all
  represented, whether through six or seven final blocs.
• Three playable disputes cover labor/safety, access/ownership, and
  law/faith/containment across at least three regions.
• Each dispute offers credible competing positions and a supported
  character-local consequence; none collapses into “accept technology” or
  “destroy technology.”
• Existing NPC characterization and the Asterian religious edict are
  audited before roles are assigned.
• The Greyton/Brynknot, Asterian, Morliana, and Rockforge political
  relationships are represented as diplomacy and competing jurisdiction,
  not collapsed into one state.
• Miners, fabricators, transporters, maintainers, users, excluded residents,
  and cleanup/care work are visible alongside researchers, rulers, and
  financiers.
• Incuna, Hierro, Morliana's founding, the Wizards' Tower, Banks Inc.,
  Rockforge, and the corridor pilot inform positions without being retconned.
• Stable content and lore identities validate; optional reputation behavior
  has an explicit compatibility and reset/re-entry contract.
• Focused dialog/quest/map tests, python3 tools/validate.py, and
  git diff --check pass independently on main and 1.x; all dispute
  branches and re-entry states receive Classic runtime playtests.
• Canonical authored changes land on main; compatible Classic content
  lands on 1.x through separate linked pull requests.

Phase gate and non-goals

The tipping-point campaign should not lock its antagonist, crisis, or endings
until these factions can produce the conflict organically. This issue does not
require a full political simulation, a new universal reputation engine, final
campaign acts, or a single canonical “correct” faction.