feat(story): stage Atrinik's magepunk tipping point

[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

Deliver the campaign that moves Atrinik across its magepunk tipping point:
magitech becomes important enough to shape daily life and political power, a
systemic fracture exposes who benefits and who pays, and the player helps choose
how the new arcane industry is governed.

The campaign is the culmination of the parent roadmap, not the first step. It
must build on proven Crystalcraft, one working public-infrastructure pilot, and
established factions. “Magepunk” should be evident in play even if the word is
never spoken by an NPC.

Dependencies and entry gate

• Parent: feat(lore): evolve Atrinik through magitech into a magepunk age #130.
• Blocked by docs(lore): define Atrinik's magitech-to-magepunk setting contract #133, the setting-contract child.
• Blocked by feat(lore): develop Great Blue Crystal shards into arcane technology #110's bounded Crystalcraft foundation.
• Blocked by feat(world): establish the Morliana–Brynknot arcane-industry corridor #131's successful economy, safety, and runtime proof and feat(lore): establish arcane-industrial factions and social fault lines #132's
  stable stakeholders and conflicts.
• Use feat(crystalcraft): add repeatable telescope-guided crystalfall expeditions #128's crystalfall expeditions, feat(server): add one-time capped Crystalcraft equipment treatment classic#145's bounded equipment
  treatment, and adjacent economy/encounter work only where their completed
  behavior serves the story. Do not design the campaign around unresolved
  mechanics.

Before implementation, split this issue into act- or region-level native
sub-issues using the approved setting and verified content/runtime contracts.
Do not pre-create those implementation children while the possible stories are
still speculative.

Campaign shape

Act I — Promise

• The corridor's service proves useful and demand spreads beyond its pilot.
• Let the player help choose at least one expansion priority: a public need,
  commercial route, protective use, educational/repair access, or another
  reviewed benefit.
• Show adoption in representative nodes rather than silently replacing every
  town. Morliana and Brynknot remain the center; Asteria, Rockforge, the
  Wizards' Tower, a mining community, and a more remote or informal adopter
  should respond differently.
• Establish why ordinary people support the system and what new work,
  opportunity, dependency, or inequality it creates.

Act II — Fracture

• Trigger a systemic crisis that follows from established rules rather than a
  random villain: supply shock, unsafe scaling, resonance cascade, coordinated
  sabotage, labor action, monopoly/rationing, state seizure, contaminated
  material, or a reviewed combination.
• The crisis must connect at least three systems—such as energy/service access,
  transport/commerce, public safety, spell-device availability, or political
  control—so it demonstrates infrastructure dependence.
• Use Incuna's disaster, Hierro's dispossession, and the unresolved presence as
  warnings or evidence without repeating them mechanically or revealing more
  cosmic truth than the setting contract permits.
• Let factions respond according to their interests and internal splits.
  Include rescue, diagnosis, repair, negotiation, investigation, and allocation
  decisions; combat can support the story but cannot be its only verb.

Act III — Settlement

• Offer at least three materially distinct governance settlements, for example
  a tightly regulated public charter, guild/community stewardship, a market
  concession with enforceable limits, distributed/open repair, or another
  combination derived from the faction work.
• Every option must preserve a genuine benefit, accept a real cost, constrain a
  form of abuse, and leave a plausible future conflict. No option is a perfect
  utopia or a disguised game-over.
• Record supported character-local consequences in dialogue, services,
  suppliers/rewards, faction relationships, readables, and follow-up hooks while
  keeping the shared map and common historical facts coherent.
• End with magitech established as contested infrastructure and with clear
  follow-on hooks for regional diffusion, illicit alternatives, religious
  movements, new professions, and the deeper skyfall mystery.

World-diffusion requirements

• Morliana/Brynknot: visibly mature from research/pilot centers into a
  connected corridor with competing users and operators.
• Rockforge/Asteria/Wizards' Tower: each exercises a distinct kind of power:
  fabrication and craft, state/legal authority, and knowledge/credentialing.
• Incuna or another scarred extraction site: gives affected communities
  agency and institutional memory rather than serving only as a spooky ruin.
• Clearhaven or another active/abandoned mine: makes supply, safety,
  insurance, salvage, and labor concrete.
• One temple/cultural center and one remote/informal adopter: show that
  theology, custom, repair, access, and adaptation vary outside elite hubs.
• Use focused changed nodes, NPC schedules/dialogue, fixtures, readables,
  services, and quests. Do not require a simultaneous art/map rewrite of the
  entire world.

Mechanics and consequence contract

• Use deterministic prerequisites and make the campaign discoverable after its
  completed foundations.
• Define every branch, convergence, irreversible choice, reward/source change,
  failure, abandonment, reset, death, disconnect, and re-entry state.
• Prefer existing quest flags, dialogue, maps, items, services, and faction
  behavior. Open linked runtime issues only for reusable, proven gaps.
• Keep rewards useful but non-dominant; campaign choices must not force players
  to select ideology by hiding a uniquely best combat item behind one ending.
• Track gold/material sources and sinks, service prices, acquisition rates, and
  repeatability across all acts.
• Give important infrastructure state and hazards clear visual, textual, and
  gameplay cues that do not depend on color alone.
• Add stable campaign, act, quest, choice, faction, service, location,
  consequence, and lore-topic identities. Coordinate relevant fixed
  discoveries with Implement data-driven per-character achievements server#31.

Acceptance criteria

• Approved act/region sub-issues trace every implementation slice back to
  the setting contract, corridor proof, and faction ledger.
• Act I makes at least one broad public benefit and one new dependency
  visible through play before the crisis begins.
• Act II's crisis follows established technology/economy/political rules,
  affects at least three connected systems, and supports meaningful
  non-combat actions alongside combat.
• Incuna, Hierro, and the unresolved presence inform the crisis without
  being retconned or fully explained.
• Act III offers at least three materially distinct, credible settlements;
  each preserves a benefit, accepts a cost, constrains an abuse, and leaves
  a future tension.
• Consequences are visible through supported character-local state while
  shared maps and common history remain coherent for players on different
  branches.
• At least the seven regional/institutional roles under world diffusion are
  represented through focused playable nodes, not lore exposition alone.
• Ordinary users, workers, maintainers, excluded communities, financiers,
  officials, scholars, clergy, and independent actors all have agency.
• No branch is a simple technology yes/no choice, no faction is uniformly
  right or evil, and no uniquely dominant reward makes the moral choice
  mechanical coercion.
• Economy, acquisition, repeatability, failure, loss, reset, disconnect,
  death, completion, and re-entry states are documented and tested.
• Stable identities and references validate; focused catalog/world/map and
  script checks, python3 tools/validate.py, and git diff --check pass on
  both delivery lines.
• Classic runtime playtests cover prerequisites, each act, every settlement,
  branch convergence, services/rewards, failure recovery, and representative
  multiplayer/re-entry behavior.
• Canonical content lands on main; compatible Classic content lands on
  1.x through separate linked pull requests. Reusable runtime changes are
  delivered and tested in their owning repositories before dependent
  content closes.

Coordination and non-goals

Coordinate rewards with #3, repeatable enemies/materials with #22, rare
encounters with #23, pricing with #106, crafting/commerce gaps with
atrinik/server#35 and atrinik/server#52, and fixed discoveries with
atrinik/server#31.

Do not require a real-time global economy, universal dynamic world state, total
map modernization, cybernetic implants, firearms, neon-city aesthetics, or a
final answer to the crystals' cosmic origin. The campaign establishes an
Atrinik-specific magepunk age while preserving room for later stories.

[zoeyrose]

#140 is available as one possible systemic fracture for this campaign, after
its taxonomy, deterministic pilot, and bounded Classic lifecycle in
atrinik/classic#147 are proven.

If selected, Act I should show useful infrastructure plus measurement and
containment. Act II may use unsafe scale, concealed exposure, contaminated
material, sabotage, or a natural breach to create focused hostile echoes. Act
III must address cleanup, treatment, worker/community compensation, sample
control, disclosure, and long-term containment—not only defeat a source
monster.

This does not make saturation the campaign's mandatory or sole crisis, and it
does not answer whether the Incuna presence causes every corrupted echo.