Faction Reputation¶

Twenty-Seven Mirrors¶

The player is one being. The world sees twenty-seven versions of that being. Each faction holds an independent reading of the player, shaped by what the faction knows and filtered through what the faction values. The same history produces twenty-seven different responses.

This is the game's mirror principle applied to the social layer. Not one reflection. Twenty-seven. The absorber sees fear in most reflections and trust in few. The restrainer sees trust in most and fear in few. The selective player sees a patchwork. Every reflection earned, every position the consequence of specific actions toward specific beings in specific contexts.

Fear and Trust¶

Two independent axes. Not a single slider. A faction can fear the player and trust them simultaneously.

Fear¶

How threatened the faction feels by the player's existence.

Fed by:

Fear doesn't mean hostility. A faction at maximum fear may flee, surrender, offer tribute, or cooperate out of self-preservation. Fear changes the faction's behavior toward the player, but the direction depends on the faction's nature. The Wrathful respond to fear with compressed rage. The Slothful respond to fear with appeasement. The Patient respond to fear with analysis. Same input, different output.

Trust¶

How much the faction believes the player's presence serves them.

Fed by:

Trust doesn't mean safety. A faction at maximum trust may try to use the player, direct God's power for their purposes, or become dependent. The design philosophy says trust has a shadow: "more Talk isn't better Talk. It's more agendas, more performances, more voices trying to shape God for their purposes." High trust opens doors. Some doors have strings attached.

The Four Quadrants¶

Per-Faction Reading¶

The same consent tracker record produces different fear/trust responses from different factions. Each faction's values determine how they weight the inputs.

Faction Response Profiles¶

The Betrayers: Care about demon purity. Absorb demons → fear and trust both drop. Absorb angels → fear rises, trust rises (removed an enemy). Absorb their own → maximum hostility. The wound is their identity. Threatening the wound threatens everything.

The Freed. Care about freedom. Forced absorption of anyone makes them wary. It's a cage by another name. Willing absorption is accepted: the being's choice. Build actions in their territory build trust fast. The Freed respond to demonstrated respect for agency more than any other faction.

Gabriel's Church. Care about faith. Absorb the faithful → the Church mourns but may rationalize ("they joined God"). Absorb enemies of the faith → the Church celebrates. The faithful who approach and offer themselves. The Church sees the sacred promise fulfilled. The most dangerous consent state: willing absorption validates their theology while destroying their congregation.

Secular Survivors. Care about utility. What can the player do for the settlement? Absorption history matters less than present capability. The most pragmatic reading. Fear rises only when the player absorbs humans. "You're a threat to our species."

The Unbounded: Care about species. Absorb non-humans → approve. Absorb humans → maximum hostility. The simplest and most limited reading. Fear and trust are both tied to the species line.

Norse Revivalists: Care about honor. Consent weighs heavily. Defeated in fair combat → respect. Ambushed or betrayed → contempt. The method matters more than the target. The heroic ethic applied to the player's absorption history.

The Kind. Care about warmth. Any absorption near their territory feels like a violation of the Hearth's safety. Restraint builds trust fast. Violence. Even justified: erodes the atmosphere they maintain. Fear rises from proximity more than from volume.

The Wrathful: Care about justice. Absorb beings who deserve it (by the Wrathful's assessment) → trust. Absorb indiscriminately → the player becomes a target. The Wrathful don't fear power. They fear uncontrolled power. High trust + high fear = the player has earned their allegiance and their readiness to strike if the player turns.

The Humble. Care about understanding. Why the player absorbed matters more than what they absorbed. Research interactions weigh as heavily as absorption records. The Humble faction response is the most nuanced. They're reading the pattern, not the entries.

Every faction has a response profile: authored, not procedural. The responses are consistent with the faction's identity as documented in the faction docs. The consent tracker provides the data. The faction profile provides the interpretation.

Witness Propagation¶

The world's reaction is based on what the world KNOWS, not what's TRUE.

Propagation Model¶

Layer 1: Direct witnesses. Entities present at a significant event know what they perceived. The event record preserves what happened. A witness record preserves only what that being could observe, including uncertainty, bias, obstruction, and perception limits.

Layer 2: Faction propagation. Witnesses share with their faction. The information travels at faction communication speed:

Layer 3: Cross-faction rumor. Factions that interact share information. Accuracy degrades:

"The tribrid absorbed an angel" → "the marked one devours angels" → "the darkfire consumes everything it touches."

The original record was a single willing angel who offered herself. The rumor is a monster. Rumor accuracy degrades with each cross-faction transmission. The number of transmissions before information reaches a faction determines how distorted their perception is.

Layer 4: Absence of information. No witness, evidence, or later testimony means no social propagation. An absorption in a corrupted zone with nobody watching is invisible to the world. The player knows. Judas knows. Nobody else does. The consent tracker records it. The world doesn't react. The Throne reads it anyway.

Traversal as Evidence¶

Traversal is observable action. A witness may see a launch or landing, hear a delayed shockwave, identify darkfire at altitude, find impact damage, or infer that a flyer crossed a defended boundary. Each observation becomes a claim limited to what that witness could perceive. A distant sound is not direct knowledge of who caused it. A trail is not proof of what happened at its destination.

Speed changes the race between claims without changing their provenance. The player may outrun a courier, arrive before a warning, or take a route with no witnesses. Conversely, a visible high-altitude approach or destructive low pass may alert several communities at once. Angel couriers and surviving communications networks can sometimes propagate a claim faster than a cautious ground journey. There is no single rule that the player always outruns reputation.

Crossing high above an event does not make the player its witness. The authoritative world event still occurs, and later evidence or testimony can reveal it. The social system preserves the difference between an event, the traces it left, and the claims people formed about both.

Cultural Memory and Significant Objects¶

The same propagation model carries more than absorption reports. A duel, rescue, betrayal, construction, discovery, disaster, or public act can become part of a community's memory. The authoritative event record stores participants, persistent objects, place, time, outcome, evidence, and direct witnesses. Social knowledge begins with partial observations of that record.

An object has no global fame score. A particular weapon, tool, relic, or structure becomes significant through a chain:

1. The persistent object participates in an event.
2. Witnesses form claims about the event and the object's role in it.
3. Those claims propagate, degrade, combine, or stop.
4. Factions interpret the claims through their own values.
5. Later observers may recognize the object and connect it to the account.

Recognition is contextual. The sword that saved a Freed settlement may be a symbol of liberation there, evidence of a crime to the Betrayers, and an unknown weapon elsewhere. Names can differ. Accounts can be wrong. Copies can be mistaken for the original. Research can test construction and physical evidence, but it cannot turn a faction's verdict into objective fact.

The Michael Parallel¶

Michael hid his actions behind a fiction. The player can hide their actions behind absence. Whether hiding is the same as lying is the question the game preserves. A player who absorbs carefully (with no witnesses, in remote locations) may have a worse consent record than a player who absorbs publicly but willingly. The careful player's world is friendlier because the world doesn't know. The consent record survives to the Throne. Real God carries the player's own history, the absorbed perspectives, and the world's incomplete reports. True God also carries the River-completed system-internal record. Neither path turns an unwritten future response into a fact.

The UI¶

Faction Menu¶

Accessible from the pause screen. Not on the HUD: the gameplay screen stays clean. The player opens the faction menu the way they'd open a journal or a map. A tool for reflection between encounters.

Per Faction Display¶

Faction name and sigil. Visual identity. The player recognizes who they're looking at.

Fear indicator. A visual that communicates intensity without numerical precision. Low to high. A smoldering ember that grows brighter as fear increases: the darkfire metaphor. Fear of God expressed as heat.

Trust indicator. A separate visual. Low to high. A thread or bridge: connection that strengthens or frays. Something that reads as relationship rather than threat.

Stance text. A short authored line reflecting the current quadrant. Not procedurally generated: written per faction per quadrant. Each faction has a voice:

• "The Freed have not yet formed an opinion of you.": low fear, low trust
• "The Freed welcome your presence and see a kindred spirit.": high trust, low fear
• "The Freed avoid your path. They've seen cages before.": high fear, low trust
• "The Freed respect what you've done for them. They also know what you're capable of.": high fear, high trust
• "The Freed remember what you took. The marks don't fade.": after absorbing their members

The Betrayers' high-fear text sounds different from the Freed's. Gabriel's Church's high-trust text sounds different from the Secular Survivors'. The text is the faction's personality expressed as their reading of you.

What the UI Shows¶

• 27 independent reflections of the same player
• The direct consequence of specific actions: absorb a Freed member and watch trust drop, fear rise
• The asymmetry: help the Betrayers and watch the Freed's trust drop even though you did nothing to the Freed directly
• The grey: high fear and high trust simultaneously, visible as two independent indicators that can both be high

What the UI Does not Show¶

• No morality label. No "good" or "evil." No alignment.
• No composite score across all factions. No "world reputation." Each faction is independent.
• No consent states. The player doesn't see "Offered" or "Betrayed" labels.
• No Judas composition. The player hears the voice change. The UI doesn't explain why.
• No optimal path. No indicator of which faction to befriend.

Research Enhancement¶

The Research verb deepens what the faction menu reveals. A player who Researches a faction sees more than the base display:

• Base display (no Research): Fear indicator, trust indicator, stance text. The surface reading.
• After Research: The stance text expands. Specific drivers become visible, not the raw consent records, but the faction's interpretation. "The Freed's wariness stems from three forced absorptions witnessed near their territory. Their respect stems from the structures you built at the settlement." The player sees cause and effect through the faction's lens.

This makes Research mechanically valuable in the social layer: the same way it's mechanically valuable in Heaven's hidden tests. The player who Researches sees through the surface to the structure underneath. The same skill. Different domain.

The True God / Real God Split¶

After The River transformation:

True God. Complete information. The faction menu reveals the full drivers. Not just the faction's interpretation but the raw consent records feeding it. The veil lifts. True God sees every absorption record, every witness chain, every rumor degradation. The same data, seen completely. The faction menu becomes the most honest social mirror in the game: 27 perspectives, each fully transparent in their reasoning.

Real God: extensive information. The standard faction menu. Fear, trust, stance text. Research enhancement available. But the raw records stay hidden. Real God sees the reactions but not the complete machinery. The same incomplete-but-extensive knowledge that defines Real God in every other domain.

HUD Integration¶

The combat HUD disappears for True God. The faction menu does not disappear. The HUD removal is about combat measurement becoming irrelevant: True God transcended the system. Faction stances are about relationship, not combat metrics. Relationship doesn't become irrelevant when you transcend. It becomes more important.

The most powerful being in existence, opening a menu to see how 27 groups of people feel about them. That's not a combat mechanic. That's the weight of being God.

ECS Architecture¶

Components¶

FactionStance: per-faction singleton:

WorldAwareness: singleton aggregate:

Systems¶

WitnessPropagationSystem: runs after a significant event is recorded. Each witness receives a claim derived from what that witness could perceive. For an absorption, the claim references the authoritative consent record without exposing that private record to the faction. The witness's claim enters the faction PropagationQueue at the faction's communication speed.

FactionStanceSystem: runs on tick. Processes PropagationQueues. For each relevant new claim, applies the faction's authored response profile to update Fear and Trust. Recalculates Quadrant. Updates StanceText. Triggers NPC behavior changes, territory access changes, and dialogue availability. Claims about objects or non-player events can affect faction memory without changing the player's stance.

RumorPropagationSystem: runs on tick at a slower rate. For factions that interact through shared borders, trade, conflict, or migration, it transfers claims from one faction's knowledge to another's PropagationQueue. Details may be lost, sources may be preserved or severed, and interpretations may attach. The original "willing angel who offered herself" becomes "the tribrid absorbed an angel." The emotional valence persists. The nuance doesn't.

FactionUISystem: reads FactionStance components and renders the faction menu. Applies Research enhancement if the player has Researched the faction. Applies True God/Real God visibility split post-River.

The Principle¶

The faction reputation system is the consent tracker made visible. The invisible data becomes 27 visible perspectives. Each one a mirror. Each one honest within its framework. Each one incomplete.

The design philosophy says the game never tells the player whether their choice was right. The faction reputation system does something harder: it shows the player that every choice was simultaneously right and wrong, depending on who's looking. The same absorption that earns the Betrayers' trust earns the Freed's fear. The same restraint that builds the Church's devotion builds the Wrathful's contempt.

Twenty-seven mirrors. Same player. Twenty-seven readings. None correct. All honest.

The game is a mirror, not a judge. The faction reputation system is twenty-seven mirrors. The player stands in front of all of them at once. No two reflections match.