music/DIFFICULTY_SYSTEM.md
CANON SUBORDINATION — this document is PROPOSAL-TIER: it serves canon and never outranks it.
The canon: the CVD · the T1 foundation docs · the T0 registries (registries/) · the spine
(docs/spine/CH_*.md) · the region pages (_source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/). Authority order:docs/DOC_MAP.md§ 0.
Canon served (scanned from this document's own citations — widen it by hand where it is thin):
CVD §12·T1_Personal_Dimension_Spec·T1_Vril_and_Magic_System_Master·T3_Familiars_Named·T0_Rarity_Grade
READ THAT CANON FIRST — open it and derive from it before you build anything from this document.
If this document disagrees with canon, CANON WINS and this document is the defect — fix the
document, never the canon. Nothing here is applied until it is ratified into canon.
The difficulty dial is the game's own canon physics, not an invented theme. The
dial IS the fairy realm's reach, measured as ambient vril density — "the fairy
realm withdrew below the threshold of human perception when atmospheric density
dropped on the human-world side. The fairy realm still exists. The contraction
is canonical" [SRC: T1_Vril_and_Magic_System_Master §1]. Withdrawal is a
contraction, not a collapse — a receding, retrievable presence — and depletion
is "an ongoing process," not backstory [SRC: T1_Vril §10]. So the tiers are five
degrees of one continuous variable — how far home still reaches you: home floods
you, then a veil falls, then the reach fades, then the tie sunders, then you are
the one it forgot. The dial is ONLY vril density; NEVER HP / damage / resistance
inflation as the SOURCE of the difficulty. AMENDED 2026-07-30 (Josh,
the twenty-eighth sitting item J5): higher difficulty also raises the
RANGE and COMPLEXITY of the attacks and of the environmental hazards,
and some health and damage scaling exists as the minority contributor
— most of the difficulty comes from complexity. The prohibition that
stands is difficulty sourced solely, or mainly, from inflated enemy
numbers.
Presentation (God-of-War-Ragnarök pattern): a one-word tier name + the plain
Story / Easy / Medium / Hard label + a lore background that tells the player, in
world, why it plays harder. The one-word name names the state of the bond
between the player and home; the lore background is what the reader actually
reads. The names are a single continuous taxonomy on the realm's-fading-reach
axis, which is identical to the difficulty dial, so both fixed endpoints
(Wellspring, The Forgotten One) sit on it natively.
You stand where the fairy realm's reach still floods the world. Vril runs to
you as freely as water off a fall — the way it did in the realm you were born
to, before the veil thinned. Home has not let go of you, and while it holds you
close the world moves with you; no trial can strand you here. This is the arc
for the traveller who came for the journey and the wonder.
A veil has fallen between you and the realm, thin as morning mist. Home's reach
still finds you through it — the wellsprings answer, the vril comes when you
call — but you feel the fabric of it now, the first cool distance where once
there was none. The world steadies your hand while you learn to act on your own;
you are held, only lightly, and the choices are already yours. This is the arc
for the traveller who wants the journey to carry them more than it tests them.
The world exactly as it is. This is the depleted human-world air the protagonist
actually breathes for seventy-five of seventy-seven chapters — the reach faint,
the vril thin, the veil grown heavy enough that home neither eases your way nor
punishes it. Depletion here is not a backdrop but a process still underway, the
realm withdrawing by the hour below the threshold of perception. Constrained,
deliberate, and complete: the game as authored. If you want to feel what the
fall from the realm cost — and what the whole arc is fighting to reverse — start
here.
The farthest edge of the reach, where the tie to home has all but broken and the
vril has run dry. The wellsprings are distant and slow to answer; the world
withholds; and the easy answers thin out with the substrate itself, because
there is simply less of it to spend. Nothing here hits harder — no enemy is
stronger, no number inflated — you must do more because the world gives less,
the reach nearly severed at your back. Cross this edge and finish the arc, and
the last door opens: beyond the Abyss waits the one the world forgot.
Not a difficulty on the menu. A door that opens only once you have crossed the
Sundered edge and finished the arc. Beyond the last chapter lies the
Abyss-crossing: an earned rite, not a toggle [SRC: CVD §12 — every tier requires
a quest-unlock], that lets you prestige your character and walk the world again
as the one the world forgot. Here the training supports are gone because the
practice has integrated (the Adeptus Exemptus threshold — "canonically exempt
from documented Outer-Order discipline"); here the counters are pruned to a
single true answer, the wellsprings sealed mid-trial, the slack cut from every
telegraph — answer-pruning first, and never number inflation as the source ("No
HP, damage, or resistance value differs, in either direction" —
AMENDED 2026-07-30 per the twenty-eighth sitting item J5: bounded
scaling is permitted, and the range and complexity of the attacks
and the hazards is the primary lever).
And here alone lie the last rarity tiers, the deepest equipment, and the
substrate-truth lore that no earlier tier can reach — canon-true, because
"canonical-truth-layer operational depth" exists only at the post-Ch-77 prestige
tier [SRC: CVD §12 — Magister Templi / Magus]. New ability and complexity layers
are canon-native: the deliberately-standard seventh vril-seat is "un-pruned"
through deeper device-integration, giving new depth with no invented 13th
mastery tier [SRC: T1_Vril — seventh-vril-seat baseline]. Two depths cross the
Abyss in the tradition's own order: Magister Templi, then Magus — the forgotten
one's inheritance, and the title the whole game is named for.
RULED, Josh 2026-07-30 (the twenty-eighth sitting item J3;
docs/spine/DECISIONS_PENDING_JOSH.md is the authority). THE UNLOCK GATE,
RULED 2026-08-03 (thirty-first sitting, verbatim "NG+ is only available
after a hard completion playthrough"): New Game+ unlocks ONLY after
completing a playthrough on Hard — which also dissolves the
twenty-ninth sitting's named-not-ruled transfer-gating question, since
NG+ entry itself implies the Hard completion. New Game+ is
ENHANCED DIFFICULTY AND COMPLEXITY — a second climb, not a victory lap
— and it reads the complexity-first difficulty law above rather than a
separate one: the range and complexity of attacks and environmental
hazards rise, and the health and damage scaling that exists is the
minority contributor.
The carry model is prestige-only, with one ruled exception.
and the LEGENDARY and MYTHIC rarity access granted by the completed
final mastery questline carry across the boundary, together with the
un-pruned seventh vril-seat state that The Forgotten One opens. What
the player earned is never dropped.
world-state reset, because a second climb the world has already
furnished is not a climb.
(the ruled exception, in Josh's own terms). A mythic set the player
obtained moves into the new game with them. At NG+ start it scales
DOWN to match the player's level, it stays MYTHIC, and it stays
stronger than the drops that level is giving. The reason is recorded
with the rule: the set was earned through the hardest content, and an
NG+ ruled harder and more complex is exactly where the player may
need it.
only by the completed final mastery questline, MYTHIC is still never
produced by a drop table or a roll, and LEGENDARY is still
mastery-gated per item. The level-scaling property attaches to
obtained mythic gear, never to the grade's access rule.
RULED, Josh 2026-07-30 (the twenty-ninth sitting;
docs/spine/DECISIONS_PENDING_JOSH.md is the authority). The section
above ruled what GEAR does at the boundary and left the familiar half
of the same open item explicitly unanswered. This one answers it —
BOTH halves: the childhood familiar, and the earthly roster that the
Personal Dimension carries across. T3_Familiars_Named §5.11 is the
canon home; this is the difficulty-side reading.
forest quest runs again and the one of the twelve fairy-realm species
the player plays with most is the one that bonds, so a differently
played second run bonds a different familiar. Re-earning the bond is
what makes a second Chapter 1 worth playing rather than worth
skipping — the same argument the prestige-only carry model makes
about the rest of the run.
late-game resolution. The familiar leaves it behind at the parting
after the rift fall, so the player carries it across nearly the whole
NG+ run. It equips on any familiar or tameable creature the player
uses, upgrading it to LEGENDARY, and it unequips and re-equips freely
on any creature at any time OUT OF COMBAT. This is the fifteenth
sitting's unique story-sourced vector with its target set widened and
its swap freedom stated; it is never a general rarity-gate bypass,
and the LEGENDARY and MYTHIC access rules above are untouched by it.
integrity level, and the vector is GIVING THE ITEM BACK. The base
game's integrity fork (truly-good rejoins, truly-evil forced
challenge fight, in-between departs) is the FIRST playthrough's shape
and stands untouched for it. A player who declines to return the item
FIGHTS the familiar and gets no companion reunion — their choice, and
not the punished branch.
in whatever state their own playthrough left it and can tame all
twelve fairy-realm familiars, and the familiar slot cap rises from
22 to 33 to hold them (21 mortal + 12 fairy-realm; HL_0058 carries
the amendment). Three simultaneous active slots is untouched — the
cap is roster size, never party size.
familiar bond is EARNED through its bonding questline, in NG+ exactly
as in the base game — the childhood fairy familiar through the Ch-1
forest quest above, the twenty-one mortal familiars through their own
bond quests. A bond that arrives without its questline is not a bond,
it is an inventory row. The whole familiar axis re-forms through play.
ruled exception to "material resets" and it is a large one. At the
moment the Personal Dimension unlocks in NG+ it arrives as a TRANSFER
of the previous playthrough's dimension — the tamed-creature menagerie
and all the invested dimension-world state, intact. Josh's recorded
reason: the completionist will not be happy having to do it all over
again, and the hours in that dimension are the thing being carried.
THE SCALING LAW governs those creatures and is scale-DOWN only:
everything above the player's current level scales back to it at
unlock, anything already BELOW their level stays at its lower level,
and nothing scales up. The two carry laws are deliberately DIFFERENT
shapes, not a conflict: mythic GEAR (twenty-eighth sitting, J3)
carries scaling permanently WITH the player's level, while
transferred CREATURES scale down ONCE at unlock and never up — each
law binds its own subject and neither reads onto the other. The
transfer arrives at the DIMENSION'S OWN
UNLOCK, not at the NG+ boundary, so the early run plays without it
exactly as a first playthrough does. T1_Personal_Dimension_Spec is
an empty DRAFT stub and window-plan RANK 24 authors it — the transfer
law, the scaling law and the creature-not-familiar boundary are its
ruled input, and nothing here authors the spec.
makes it both. The binding stone elevates a TAMEABLE creature into the
path-variable 22nd FAMILIAR slot, and Josh's post-Epilogue wording is
to TAME the twelve fairy-realm FAMILIARS. No entity is classified
here. Also unruled: whether the transfer is gated on a difficulty tier
(Josh's phrasing describes a Hard playthrough pushed into NG+ rather
than stating a condition).
The player-selected carry presets option is DEAD (ruled, same sitting).
The per-grade carry data lives on T0_Rarity_Grade in ng_plus_carry and
level_scaling_model, so the NG+ entry surface rank 20 authors has a
ruling and a table to build against rather than a question.
A separate, always-available, judgment-free reception layer — NOT a difficulty
tier. Attunements tune how the world's demand reaches you (colorblind /
multi-channel vril-polarity readability, timing windows, input remaps, camera
and motion options), never how thick the air is, and gate no content. Available
in every tier including The Forgotten One (assists work everywhere; the mode's
meaning is its pruning, and players self-select). The vril-polarity
multi-channel readability is a non-negotiable L1-playability requirement (the
environmental-boss perception verb must be readable without color alone).
AMENDED 2026-07-30 (Josh, the twenty-eighth sitting; docs/spine/DECISIONS_PENDING_JOSH.md is the authority). Two amendments
ride on the ladder below without disturbing the names, which are
untouched. Item J5: the dial is joined by the COMPLEXITY levers —
higher difficulty raises the range and complexity of the attacks and
the environmental hazards, some health and damage scaling exists as
the minority contributor, and difficulty may never come solely or
mainly from inflated enemy numbers. Item J3: New Game+ has a ruled
carry model and is itself ruled enhanced difficulty and complexity —
see the New Game+ section above. The sentence "the dial is vril
density only" below is the 2026-07-04 wording and reads under those
amendments.
AMENDED AGAIN 2026-07-30 (Josh, the twenty-ninth sitting). The New
Game+ section above gains the childhood familiar's shape — the bond
re-forms by play rather than carrying as state, the legendary power
item moves to the rift-fall separation, the NG+ reunion is universal
via the item's return, and the post-game Epilogue opens the fairy
realm with the familiar slot cap rising from 22 to 33. The EARTHLY
familiar roster's carry question is still NOT ruled and is named as
such in that section.
RULED and CLOSED (Josh, 2026-07-04 — "I love these difficulty names; they are
perfect"). The full ladder — Wellspring · Veiled · Fading · Sundered · → The
Forgotten One — reads as one sentence of the realm receding, and every name is
grounded in the vril-withdrawal canon (§1 threshold-of-perception, §10
contraction-not-collapse / depletion-as-process); the dial is vril density only.
This supersedes every earlier pass: the "Practice" presets; the
"Realm-Cradled/Graced/Tempered/Distant" ladder; the "How Far the Realm Reaches"
phrases; the Flow/Ebb/Drought set (the correct four-states-of-the-flow *vision*,
but too passive/environmental as player-facing names — the reader now vibes via
the state-of-the-bond-with-home names plus the lore background); and the "Opus
Magnum" prestige name. Optional-and-not-applied: "The Wellspring" would give the
menu definite-article bookends (The Wellspring · Veiled · Fading · Sundered · The
Forgotten One) — flagged for Josh, Wellspring left as the bare ruled word.
At canon-integration (post batch-1 sign-off) this ladder is the difficulty
naming canon and flows into the CVD difficulty/mastery section; NPC persona and
site naming follow the same method recorded in the naming-method note below.