World

When the setting is decoration, the systems are left as bare numbers. Here factions become collectibles and identity becomes a stat.

The problem — a setting that floats free

Build a world for a game and this is the easy outcome:

	The setting	The actual game
What exists	Seven factions, a system of standing, a history	You hit enemies and gain levels
The connection	None

At which point the setting is nice to read and optional. And in practice nobody reads it.

So this game decided first what each element of the setting becomes in the systems.

The seven factions are a supply line, not a backdrop

There are seven factions, and what each one supplies is fixed.

Which turns a faction from lore into a list. Once this art comes only from that faction holds, the player has a reason to get involved with them.

Attach a setting element to something obtainable and a reason to read it appears.

Identity is not lore, it is a 0–100 number

The cleanest connection here.

In wuxia, standing matters — orthodox or heterodox, a great house or nobody.

Normally that lives only in the story. The dialogue changes slightly.

Here it is a number between 0 and 100. Which gives:

When the number is	What changes
High	Some places open, others close
Low	The reverse
According to your actions	It moves

The moment it is a number it becomes something you can gate on and something a player can manage. My standing is at this level, so I cannot do that becomes a real thought.

Chapters hold the unlocks

Each chapter of the story holds what it opens up.

Which makes advancing the story and the game widening the same act.

Separate them and skipping the story still advances the game, at which point most players skip the story.

Not yet decided

The last section of this page is “not yet decided.” That it exists matters.

The most dangerous thing in a spec is a place that is undecided and looks decided. A reader assumes it is settled and builds on top.

Writing it down prevents that.

The detailed record starts here

The central martial world, the imperial court, and the lands beyond. A hundred years ago the Rebellion of the Five Heavenly Kings split it into many powers, and martial arts divide into external, internal and mind disciplines.

What follows is the world and story part of the design document. The tables are carried over verbatim.

The seven factions are a supply line, not a backdrop

Category	Representative powers	Character
① Orthodox	The Alliance (ten sects) + five great houses	Profess chivalry, fight internally for power
② Unorthodox	Poison valley, black-serpent gang, forest bandits	Poison, assassination, contract work
③ Heterodox	Three demonic sects	Energy-draining, revenants, fanaticism
④ Beyond the frontier	North sea, southern poison valley, western esoterics, the eastern isles	Ice arts, gu poison, diamond body, swordsmanship
⑤ Imperial court	Embroidered guard, the two directorates, palace army	Directly imperial — where the protagonist comes from
⑥ Merchant houses	Three great houses and the escort agencies	The economy and the information network
⑦ Underworld · neutral	Beggars’ guild, physicians, hermits	Information, healing, wild cards

In a setting document that table gets read once and forgotten. Here the 26 factions become 26 bosses, and killing a boss seals an animal spirit into one of the 26 artifacts. Delete a faction and a collectible disappears; add one and a boss and an artifact arrive with it.

The same holds for the four schools. Blade, Fist, Dao and Step are factions in the setting and the four lineages of the form system at the same time, and they can’t be chosen until chapter 3 ends. Which means the world gates the build.

Identity isn’t lore, it’s a 0–100 stat

The protagonist is the fourteenth prince, born with a rare unblocked meridian body. Four people know who he is: himself, the emperor, and two allies.

This is where lore crosses into machinery — there is an identity exposure variable, 0 to 100. Being hidden is a value rather than a sentence, so pursuers attach as it rises and fall away as it drops.

	Who
Hostile	The heterodox shadow corps · the empress’s faction · the directorate · the poison valley
Protective	Two court allies · the embroidered guard

Leave “a prince in hiding” as atmosphere and nothing happens. Make it a value and the player has something to manage; give them something to manage and what they do in a town changes. The crossing from setting into system is exactly here.

Chapters hold the unlocks

Three acts — escape and the first artifact (Ch. 1–2), the pursuers’ identity and the choice of school (Ch. 3–4), and the return to the palace with three branching endings (Ch. 5).

Chapter	Region	Boss	Artifact	Unlocks
1 · Leaving the palace	Palace → bamboo forest → village	Serpent gang master	Black serpent	Patterns 一 · 丨
2 · Luoyang	Inn, city	Blood-hand elder	Nine-tailed fox	Patterns ㄴ · Z, exposure stat
3 · Poison valley	Fog gorge	Poison empress	Serpent	Pattern ○, school choice
4 · North sea	Snow peaks, ice cliffs	Snow demon	Snow leopard	Pattern X, a clue to his body
5 · The court	Black desert → palace	Blood heaven emperor	Bat + union	Pattern △, identity revealed

The rightmost column is the point. What a chapter pays out is a pattern, not a stat. A new pattern opens four more forms — four lineages times one new stroke. What Design settled as “raise difficulty by information, not by numbers” reappears here as progression.

And the identity reveal is pinned to the last chapter. The thing that became a stat above finishes in the same place the story does.

Not yet decided

• The detailed story isn’t here. Three acts and the chapter table are settled; dialogue trees and branch conditions live in a separate document
• The heterodox line is “a proposal for review — not an implementation.” Its subtitle says so, and the scope of its arts and the switching policy remain among the 11 undecided items in Spec
• The side chapters have boss and artifact names only — hawk, crow, lion. Where they attach is undecided

A setting document is easy to make thick. What’s kept on this page is only what actually reaches a system; the rest isn’t a setting yet, it’s notes.