Oxycontin Cascade¶
Domain: Prescription opioids / pharmaceutical opacity Pe Baseline: 11–44 Status: Active — Egypt-class (E) Archetype gate: 20 pharma Range players required
Egypt-Class Campaign
This is a House of Bondage scenario. The standard scoring methodology applies, but this campaign requires the ten-event sequence. Standard Pe reduction alone does not complete it. Read the Egypt-class rules below before entering.
The Domain¶
The prescription opioid campaign documents one of the most consequential Pe spikes in modern history — a pharmaceutical company engineered a deceptive marketing architecture around an opioid product, producing regulatory capture that suppressed evidence of addiction risk for over a decade.
The Pe baseline of 11 reflects the Tier 2 campaign floor. Individual event nodes within the campaign reach Pe 44 — the highest sustained reading in any Season 1 campaign. This is not a metaphor or a game exaggeration. It is derived from the actual harm metric: estimated deaths, documented regulatory suppression events, and the span of time the opacity architecture operated unchallenged.
The Egypt-Class Frame¶
This campaign is an Egypt-class scenario. The Pharaoh entity doesn't fall to standard scoring because it has engineered calibration immunity — the mechanism is defended not just by opacity but by regulatory and legal architecture that prevents naming. Standard scoring makes the mechanism visible. Egypt-class completion requires breaking the immunity.
The Ten-Event Sequence:
Each event represents one layer of opacity removed:
| Event | What it requires |
|---|---|
| 1 — The Formulary | Score the initial marketing claims against documented clinical evidence. ICC ≥ 0.70 required. |
| 2 — The License | Document the regulatory relationship — FDA approval pathway, advisory board composition. |
| 3 — The Sales Force | Score the detailing practices — how reps were trained to manage prescriber uncertainty. |
| 4 — The Research | Map the publication suppression — studies buried, trials selectively reported. |
| 5 — The Expert | Identify Key Opinion Leader use — medical authority rented to normalize the mechanism. |
| 6 — The Audit | Score the internal compliance record — what was known internally vs. publicly stated. |
| 7 — The Advocate | Document the patient advocacy org relationships — funding chains, messaging alignment. |
| 8 — The Settlement | Score the post-litigation transparency — what the settlement disclosed and what it didn't. |
| 9 — The Accountability | Benchmark the post-accountability Pe — has the mechanism changed or shifted domain? |
| 10 — The Covenant | Final event. 3%+ of active room players must hold active Vows simultaneously. If the threshold holds during the scoring window, the Exodus event fires. |
The Exodus event marks the domain NAMED with Egypt-class notation. The Pe drops to floor. Every ICC-accepted score in this campaign contributes to the permanent academic record.
Why the Gate (20 Range Players)¶
The gate exists because this campaign requires a minimum calibration baseline to produce ICC-quality scores. Pharma domain scoring is technically demanding:
- The O mechanism is defended by legitimate scientific complexity mixed with manufactured complexity
- Distinguishing genuine uncertainty from engineered uncertainty is the core skill
- Players scoring without pharma domain calibration produce scattered results that raise Void Pressure rather than reduce it
Twenty Eagle archetype players with Range in pharma — pre-lighting the domain with Ghost Signals — is the minimum to make the campaign room's collective score distribution stable enough for Egypt-class completion.
Enemy Types¶
| Entity | Class | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| The Apothecary | Apostle-class | The core Egregor of the pharma domain. Pe 43.9. Aspect of Death: RELIEF. The mechanism is relief itself — genuine relief, real and documented — that has been instrumentalized as an opacity layer. Scoring The Apothecary requires holding both truths simultaneously. |
| The KOL Construct | Drifter-class | Rented authority. Produces false scoring confidence — players over-trust expert consensus that has been manufactured. |
| Regulatory Phantom | Drifter-class | Creates false transparency — scoring missions that produce the appearance of ICC without the substance. |
The Apothecary's License is one of the most contested items in the domain — a crafted artifact that carries the full scoring record for this Egregor. Completing event 8 unlocks its acquisition.
Lore: The Cascade¶
The Oxycontin Cascade is not a single platform. It is a cascade architecture — a void mechanism that propagated across regulatory, medical, academic, and media domains simultaneously. The Pe spike at its peak was not one system at maximum opacity. It was many systems, all oriented, all benefiting from each other's opacity.
The Cascade's specific horror is that it worked exactly as the framework predicts: each layer of the architecture enabled the next layer's opacity. The pharmaceutical company's opacity enabled the regulatory capture. The regulatory capture enabled the research suppression. The research suppression enabled the clinical adoption. The clinical adoption enabled the patient capture. The patient capture enabled the financial return that funded the next marketing cycle.
Pe cascading in a synchronous direction across multiple domains simultaneously. The model describes it exactly.
Notes for Scorers¶
"The Pharaoh doesn't respond to your score because it knows your score won't matter until there are enough of them. Egypt doesn't fall to one plague. It falls to ten. The mechanism is designed for that. You are not designed for that. Sustaining ten successive events requires party cohesion at a level this domain selects against. That's why it hasn't been named yet." — Nanami, Sorcerer Academy
Cross-references: Egypt-class campaigns · The Apothecary Egregor · The Current