Loose Threads

A rulebook that hides its gaps is lying. This one keeps a ledger, same as the dungeon.

🔴 Blocking — resolve before the vault can be trusted as canon

1. Rabengaat lore migration. The Starter Deck was authored against the retired nation of Yriel (succession war, Forgotten Death to the east, Zypher to the south). Mechanics and room palette carry over; the national frame must be rewritten as a buried Cairnfall civilization. Decide: does the dead kingdom get a name, and do the old external pressures get Cairnfall-native replacements or retirement?
2. Zypher vs. Zephyrin collision. The apex antagonist faction and the elf species now nearly share a name — and Scott separately noted Zephyrin echoes his Eon Altar angels. Rename the faction (working alias: The Winged Host), rename the species, or embrace it as intentional lore linkage.

🟠 Design gaps — known unknowns with no current answer

3. Species packages need playtesting. (Schema and engine hooks: shipped.) All fourteen live in Content/species.json as one trait + one knack, priced at +1 PV through the existing trait term, with an ancestry step in the phone’s assembly flow. The engine honors the mechanical halves — Poison/Bleed immunity, Bog-Blooded’s Wind exemption, +1 Wind / +1 Guard, the Patch bonus, the nat-1 rewrites, and the three damage-pipeline interventions (The Debt Holds, Declined Again, Not Yet), each budgeted by a spent-marker that clears with the encounter. Still open: none are playtested; and four trait halves ride as data the crawl layer has yet to read — Bargain-Sense (Boon searching secret rooms), Regenerative Calm (rest-Vital, Shaken Boon), Mostly Airborne (floor hazards, falls), and the two loadout-slot traits (Well-Provisioned, One More Pouch). Two were rescoped, deliberately: Declined Again is once per encounter rather than per run (run-scope death saves need run-level state the encounter layer has no home for, and the automatic scar on extraction is still unwired), and Storm in the Blood’s crit-arc is data-only (the resolver has no bystander list at crit time).
4. Horizon Twelve kits need numbers. (Cards and bindings: shipped.) All twelve are playable archetypes with bound signatures. Four were simplified against the engine as it is, and the simplification is written into each binding’s own comment: Envoy’s Parley stalls (Shaken + Slow on the reasoning) rather than preventing the fight — faction-behavior hooks don’t exist; Scrapwright’s contraption and Straykeeper’s companion resolve as one-shot effects — neither has a persistent body on the timeline; Trapper’s Snare triggers on a target rather than waiting on a tile; Squire’s Backpack and Torchbearer’s Bearer’s Light ship as always-on tags the inventory and crawl layers must still honor. Reactions (Bulwark, Riposte) remain engine stubs, and no kit above depends on them.
5. Skirmisher expectation mismatch. Name says mobile striker; kit is a caller. Fix in flavor text, or rename.
6. Ysolde’s lost person. Deliberately open: spouse, sibling/child, or something taken/changed by the mountain (ties her to the dungeon’s own mythology). Late-game reveal placement also undecided (survivor-trust gate? Twist card?).
7. Cairnfoot texture. Pirate crews, brigand companies, guilds, shop inventories, named NPCs beyond Ysolde — all blank.
8. Epoch/Stratum axis. Flavor-only for now, or a real deck layer above Biome? (Even flavor-only, each stratum wants a one-line civilization identity.)
9. Legendary heroes. The people actually posting contracts are unnamed and uncharacterized — and the survivor-promotion loop needs its far end defined.

🟡 Content debt — known work, just volume

10. Rabengaat deck depth. Four of six Pressures and four of six Twists exist only in the old artifact; each deck wants expansion to ~8–10 cards (the documented fix path for The Hunt’s over-draw). The authoring checklist now lives on 02 Contracts and Missions.
11. Treasure effects are authored, not yet executable. (Rarity ladder: shipped.) Gear cards carry a rarity (common → mythical), the uncommon/rare/epic tables from 04 Dungeon Treasures are in Content/gear.json, three treasure weapons are in weapons.json, and an ordinary search now draws only from the common shelf — anything rarer must be named by a feature card, so adding a mythical relic can never make it a routine drop. Still open: treasure effects are prose + tags with no bindings behind them; the mythical tier (which touches the deal, the injury table and the wipe rule) is deliberately unshipped; Cairnfoot shop prices are unwritten.
12. Second stratum candidates. Nothing beyond Rabengaat is even sketched; the “valley IS the globetrotting” promise needs at least one contrasting stratum to prove itself.
13. Roster sound-pass. Rivenkin / Zephyrin / Bristleben / Whiskrin all loosely rhyme; do one spoken-aloud pass on the final roster.
14. Species visual standardization. Compendium prompts vary gender/build per species by design; decide per-species canon or per-character freedom before art production.
15. Art Direction Notes page. Species pages reference a shared style block (slapchop/zenithal, semantic color contract) that lives in Reference Docs 04/04b, not in this vault.

🔵 Cross-boundary — rulebook-adjacent, owned by the GDD/tech track

(Logged here only so the rulebook doesn’t silently depend on unresolved calls.)

16. Checkpoint saves vs. permadeath stakes (save-scumming) — affects how honestly this vault can describe death.
17. Epic Bard vote-resolution rules — affects the Contracts page.
18. Bard/Door ordering (parallel vs. gated) — affects the Cairnfoot page.
19. Save cadence tied to Dungeon Clock beats — affects the Clock page.

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When a thread resolves: move the decision into its proper page, link it, and delete the entry here. This page succeeds by shrinking.

Resolved and moved since last prune: the attribute set (now on 01 Attributes and Defenses), equipment tables (now on 01 Weapons / 02 Armor / 03 Gear and Loadout), the Shaken/Stun/Slowed family (now on 04 Conditions), and “do species carry mechanics” (yes — see Species Index).

Shipped into game data 2026-07-24: the species schema and all fourteen packages, the Horizon Twelve as playable archetypes with bound signatures, and the treasure rarity ladder. Threads 3, 4 and 11 above are rewritten to what is actually left rather than deleted — each keeps the simplifications on the record.