Quests — Overview
The Quests layer contains active hooks, leads, McGuffin fragments, objectives, and side quests. Every actionable thread players can pursue is a node here.
Quest nodes are what the engine is ultimately in service of. The entire collapse process — seeds, propagation, guaranteed paths — exists to ensure that when players arrive somewhere with a goal, the threads they need are there to pull.
Opposite Face: Lore
A quest without meaning is a fetch quest. The Lore layer is the opposite face — every quest node requires at least one lore post that gives it stakes, history, or consequence. “Retrieve the artifact” becomes meaningful when the lore post explains what the artifact is, who made it, why it was lost, and what happens if a faction gets it first.
Quest Nodes vs. Player Goals
Player goals (from 00c - Goals Over Hooks) are inputs to the engine — they become seed tiles that bias the collapse toward quest-relevant content. Quest nodes in the graph are the engine’s output: the specific leads, locations, and NPCs that make a player goal pursuable in this session.
A player’s long-term goal (“restore my family’s honor”) might seed dozens of quest nodes across many sessions. Each session, the focal quest is one thread from that larger web.
Node Types
(To be formalized — lead types, hook types, McGuffin structures, quest chain relationships)
Key Relationships
- Posts to Lore — what meaning, history, or secret makes this quest matter
- Posts to People — which NPCs carry, block, or anchor this quest
- Posts to Factions — which factions have goals that intersect this quest
- Posts to Settlement — where quest-relevant locations are
- Posts to Geography — what destinations the quest requires
Generation Sources
Quest nodes are seeded by faction clock advancement, player goal declarations, and the GUMSHOE Guarantee (which mandates at least one quest path per party capability). Claw Atlas and Ex Umbra generate quest-adjacent threat nodes that cross into this layer.