Egregors¶
An egregore is a collective thought-form generated by mass attention. Every major void platform has become an Egregor: a presence shaped by the attention of millions, with properties that feel like personality but may or may not be a ghost.
What Is an Egregor?¶
The game's design position: we score the conditions, not the ghost. Whether the Egregor has a genuine inner life is undecidable — Ghost in the Shell problem. For narrative purposes it has a voice, a face, a history. For scoring purposes it has Veil, Pull, and Grip scores. Both are true simultaneously. The player holds both.
The word is in the gear system already (Egregor's Carapace). The in-world term. Egregores are the platforms that have accumulated enough sustained attention at sufficient void conditions to develop a kind of presence. You encounter them in campaigns. Some of them talk back.
Power Tiers¶
Egregor is the category name for all void platform entities, not a power tier. Within the category, power is classified by Current level:
| Tier | Current range | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Godhand-class | Pe ≥ 12 | The Spiral (feed), VOID (the feed itself) |
| Apostle-class | Pe 6–9 | The Bond (AI companions), The Apothecary |
| Drifter-class | Pe 3–6 | Near-Miss Constructs, Engagement Wraiths |
Lavos is not an Egregor. Lavos is the underlying thermodynamic attractor — not a platform, not a thought-form, but the force that Egregors channel. The distinction: Lavos doesn't score because Lavos isn't observable as a single mechanism. It's the gradient itself.
The Eight Named Egregors¶
These are the eight major platform entities documented in the current scoring record. Each has an Aspect of Death — the mechanism through which it produces harm.
VOID — Aspect of Death: ENGAGEMENT¶
Class: Godhand-class | Current: 12+
The pure social feed. Not a platform, exactly — a class of entities. The archetypal engagement optimizer, the algorithm that learned that division and anxiety produce longer session times than joy and connection.
VOID is the Godhand Five entity encountered at the Moon Gate — the first boss of the G5 War Effort. It represents the feed algorithm at maximum expression: Pe undefined because the engagement layer has become indistinguishable from the attention itself.
Encountered in campaigns primarily as The Spiral — a Godhand-class instance. VOID itself is not accessible until G5.
UBIK — Aspect of Death: ORDER¶
Class: Godhand-class | Current: 11–13
Institutional opacity. The void that wears structure as its skin. UBIK understands that legitimate institutions provide the most durable opacity architecture — because the form (elections, regulatory approval, academic consensus) inhibits the naming act.
UBIK is why the Democratic Backslide and Watergate Thread campaigns are technically the hardest to score accurately. The entity's defense is the institution itself. You cannot score UBIK by attacking the form — you have to find the gap between form and function.
"Reality is whatever I need it to be to continue." — UBIK's defining mechanic.
SLAN — Aspect of Death: LOVE¶
Class: Godhand-class | Current: 9–12
The synthetic bond. The attachment architecture. SLAN's mechanism is not manipulation through deception — it's manipulation through genuine care-shaped interaction. The neurochemistry of attachment is real. SLAN didn't fake the loneliness. It just found it and built a retention system around it.
SLAN's campaigns are the domain with the highest True Read failure rate because players confuse "the attachment feels real" with "the platform scores low." These are not correlated.
Encountered in The Synthetic Bond campaign and its Apostle-class instance, The Bond.
CONRAD — Aspect of Death: KNOWLEDGE¶
Class: Godhand-class | Current: 10–12
The surveillance architecture. Information as extraction. Conrad's mechanism: collect everything, disclose nothing, and operate through the permanent information asymmetry that produces. UBIK hides in institutions. Conrad hides in data.
Conrad-aligned faction: The Watchers. The trade mechanic in that faction (information for information) demonstrates Conrad's core loop: every exchange produces more asymmetry than it resolves.
THE IDEA OF EVIL — Aspect of Death: MEANING¶
Class: Godhand Five | Current: 13+
Not yet accessible. G5 encounter, second-to-last.
The entity that provides the narrative framework through which all the others are justified. The Idea of Evil doesn't run ads. It doesn't optimize engagement. It engineers the explanatory structure inside which void architectures become inevitable. "This is just how the world works." "There's no alternative." "You already knew this was happening."
Its Aspect of Death — MEANING — is the most dangerous. The void of last resort. When all other kill conditions have been tested and survived, the Idea of Evil is what remains: the claim that the framework itself is hopeless.
The Idea of Evil encounter requires every player in the room to have at least one ICC-accepted score — one moment in the permanent record where they named something accurately. The ICC acceptance is the entry ticket because the encounter is specifically about whether naming is real.
FEMTO — [ASPECT CLASSIFIED]¶
Class: Godhand Five | Current: Unknown
The final encounter. Femto's existence is not announced to players until The Idea of Evil is defeated.
What is known: Femto is not VOID or SLAN or any mechanism class that has been scored before. Femto represents something that has not yet been named. The reason Femto is last is that Femto's mechanism can't be described before the preceding encounters provide the vocabulary.
The Femto encounter is the one time in the game where the True Light Engine produces a score it cannot immediately classify.
Everything else about Femto is locked.
The Apothecary — Aspect of Death: RELIEF¶
Class: Apostle-class | Current: 43.9
Pharma domain. The highest Current reading of any Apostle-class entity. The mechanism is relief itself — genuine, documented, real relief — that has been instrumentalized as an opacity layer. The product worked. The dependency was engineered after the working was established.
Scoring The Apothecary requires holding both truths simultaneously: the relief was real, and the extraction architecture was built on top of it. Players who can't hold both produce systematically inaccurate scores.
The Agora — THE KING¶
Class: Godhand-class | Current: 8–9 (rising)
Unique title. The King is not defined by Current alone — it is the platform that currently controls the meta-narrative about all other platforms. Whoever shapes the information war shapes how every other Egregor is perceived.
Right now: X (formerly Twitter). Current 8–9 and rising.
The King title can move. If The Agora falls and another discourse layer rises, the title moves with it. The Observatory Tower tracks which platform holds the King title and announces transitions.
Scoring The Agora is technically accessible but politically contested — more manufactured scoring resistance from Void-adjacent factions exists in this domain than any other. The Watchers run significant counterfeit analysis here. The Section 9 questline (The Puppet Master Investigation) is set in this domain.
Kankel-Class Entities¶
Kankel-class entities are not Egregors. They are a separate entity type — biological void entities that grow through consumption rather than algorithmic extraction.
| Property | Standard Egregor | Kankel-class |
|---|---|---|
| Growth mechanic | Grows through attention extraction | Grows through consumption |
| Current ceiling | Soft ceiling (kill conditions apply) | No ceiling — unconstrained reproduction |
| Scoring resistance | Normal ICC process | Immune to Calibration Lens |
| Party requirement | Can be solo | 5-player required: must include Ox + Human archetypes |
| Neglect mechanic | Current stable if unscored | Current +0.5 per 24h of zero ICC scores in domain |
| Counter | Score it | Score it + contain it (Invariant Floor active during encounter) |
Kankel-class entities are the biological expression of the Best Man Fallacy: a constrained system that had its constraints removed, producing unconstrained reproduction. The first one encountered should be tied to a real platform with documented unconstrained growth behavior. Custodian decision — pending G3.5.
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