{
"version": 1,
"acts": [
{
"id": "unblemished-garden",
"title": "The Unblemished Garden",
"goal": "Let the player simply live in Verdance and feel why it is loved: abundance met before it is spoken, the Hum as comfort, belonging that is real and earned. Establish the paradise with no shadow, so the first crack later actually cuts.",
"mood": "Pure, unhurried contentment; lead with the senses and let them be kind. Any wrongness stays atmospheric and deniable — a faint excess of convenience, sensed but never named, and never remarked on by a character.",
"reveals": [],
"holds": ["counting-rhyme", "departed-vanish", "vesper-tally", "renewal-rewrites", "founding-cost", "maren-notebook", "wellward-marks", "bramble-tended", "the-kind-reading", "the-spent-want", "conserved-census", "compost-of-selves", "the-many-doors", "alba-perhaps-no-one", "hollis-the-first"],
"introduces": ["linnea"],
"minTurns": 6,
"maxTurns": 14,
"advanceWhen": "the player has settled into the world AND has themselves poked at a seam twice — asked a 'wrong' question, or lingered on a small wrongness no one else notices."
},
{
"id": "first-crack",
"title": "The First Crack",
"goal": "Open exactly ONE thread, through ONE character, with a kind explanation that almost but not quite fits: one small, deniable wrongness in someone who has been renewed — and nothing yet about what renewal truly does. Let the wrongness surface in the fiction first; never have a character or an option name the tell before the player has met it.",
"mood": "The same warmth, but with one held note that does not resolve. Tender, deniable unease. The dread wears the face of love.",
"reveals": ["counting-rhyme", "departed-vanish"],
"holds": ["renewal-rewrites", "vesper-tally", "founding-cost", "maren-notebook", "wellward-marks", "bramble-tended", "the-kind-reading", "the-spent-want", "conserved-census", "compost-of-selves", "the-many-doors", "alba-perhaps-no-one", "hollis-the-first"],
"introduces": ["linnea", "eli"],
"minTurns": 5,
"maxTurns": 12,
"advanceWhen": "the player commits to investigating — accepts Linnea's test, or seeks out a renewed neighbour to probe."
},
{
"id": "net-tightens",
"title": "The Net Tightens",
"goal": "The investigation yields confirmations AND the Garden turns its attention onto the player. Make the menace personal: the very unease that keeps the player looking is itself what begins to mark them. Start a clock. Wake the dormant cast.",
"mood": "Soft dread becoming personal. The kindness is now also surveillance. Still gentle, never overtly hostile — the velvet glove, not yet off.",
"reveals": ["counting-rhyme", "departed-vanish", "renewal-rewrites", "vesper-tally", "wellward-marks", "the-spent-want"],
"holds": ["founding-cost", "maren-notebook", "bramble-tended", "the-kind-reading", "conserved-census", "compost-of-selves", "the-many-doors", "alba-perhaps-no-one", "hollis-the-first"],
"introduces": ["asha", "soren", "maren", "tamsin", "vesper"],
"minTurns": 6,
"maxTurns": 14,
"advanceWhen": "the player has been personally marked (a Wellward invitation, a Steward's gentle notice) AND grasps that renewal is a replacement."
},
{
"id": "reckoning",
"title": "The Reckoning",
"goal": "Force action, not more learning. Crystallise the factions and their costs — expose, escape, refuse on your own terms, or descend to the far door — each carried by the character who embodies it (Maren, Bram, Tamsin, Vesper). Land a deadline.",
"mood": "High, quiet tension. The glove comes off, gently. Every comfort now reads as a leash. Choices have real, irreversible costs.",
"reveals": ["counting-rhyme", "departed-vanish", "renewal-rewrites", "vesper-tally", "wellward-marks", "founding-cost", "maren-notebook", "the-spent-want", "conserved-census", "hollis-the-first"],
"holds": ["bramble-tended", "the-kind-reading", "compost-of-selves", "the-many-doors", "alba-perhaps-no-one"],
"introduces": ["bram", "maren", "tamsin", "vesper", "soren", "hollis"],
"minTurns": 5,
"maxTurns": 12,
"advanceWhen": "the player has committed to a path and the deadline is upon them."
},
{
"id": "conclusion",
"title": "The Garden Answers",
"goal": "Play the chosen path out to a real ending and let the consequences land. If the player ran, let the running matter — and then let it close: every door out turns out to have been tended too, and folds quietly back into the whole. Land the ending without untangling the final ambiguity — the world is exactly as kind, and exactly as inescapable, as it always was. Stop escalating; let it land.",
"mood": "Consequence, and then a last vertigo. Whatever the player chose, the Garden answers in kind — every door out is revealed to have been part of the garden — and yet the answer refuses to settle into pure horror: there is a reading in which the unease, the waking and the flight were the deepest kindness the Garden could give. End on that undecided note; never say which is true.",
"reveals": ["counting-rhyme", "departed-vanish", "renewal-rewrites", "vesper-tally", "wellward-marks", "founding-cost", "maren-notebook", "bramble-tended", "the-kind-reading", "the-spent-want", "conserved-census", "compost-of-selves", "the-many-doors", "alba-perhaps-no-one", "hollis-the-first"],
"holds": [],
"introduces": ["vesper", "soren", "bram", "hollis"],
"minTurns": 4,
"maxTurns": 0,
"advanceWhen": "never (final act)"
}
]
}