The Chronicle¶
Layer 0 — The Physics
The Warcraft Chronicle opens with the universe empty and the titans sleeping. The Star Wars canon opens with the Force already present. This chronicle opens with something that can be measured.
The Three Primordial Conditions¶
Before there were voidworks, before factions or campaigns or named enemies, there were three conditions. When all three are present simultaneously, something happens to attention. This is the ground state.
Condition I — The Veil (Opacity)¶
A mechanism operates that cannot be seen through. The observer interacts with the system's outputs but cannot see the process that produces them.
The RNG inside the slot machine. The weight matrix of the recommendation model. The algorithm behind the feed. The will of the court mystic.
The Veil is not darkness. Darkness is the absence of signal. The Veil is signal whose source is hidden. The slot machine gives you something — a spin result, a sound, a visual — you just cannot see why. That is the Veil. It is active, not passive.
Scored 0 to 3. Veil=0: fully transparent (the equation is printed on the wall). Veil=3: maximum opacity (the source of outputs is completely inaccessible).
Condition II — The Pull (Responsiveness)¶
The system changes based on what the observer does. It is not a wall or a rock. It responds.
The algorithm adjusts to your clicks. The slot machine gives you near-misses tuned to your session pattern. The chatbot answers your questions. The cult leader mirrors your emotional state.
Pull is not the same as being helpful. A trap is responsive. A manipulator is responsive. Pull means: your actions change the system's outputs. The direction of those changes — toward your benefit or toward the system's retention of your attention — is what matters for classification, but it is not what defines Pull itself.
Scored 0 to 3. Pull=0: fully invariant (identical regardless of observer input). Pull=3: maximum responsiveness (outputs entirely determined by observer behavior).
Condition III — The Grip (Engaged Attention)¶
The observer's attention is captured and sustained. Not just noticed — held. Something keeps the observer engaged with this system rather than redirecting elsewhere.
This is the necessary third condition. A filing cabinet is opaque and invariant — but it doesn't capture attention. A boring lecture is opaque and responsive — but attention drifts. All three conditions must co-occur for the full phenomenon to activate.
The mechanisms that produce the Grip vary: curiosity, anxiety, reward anticipation, beauty, fear, social belonging, the near-miss, the variable reward schedule, the unresolved narrative. The type of capture matters for classification. The presence of capture is the condition.
Scored 0 to 3. Grip=0: engagement is voluntary and bounded. Grip=3: disengagement is structurally costly.
The Current¶
When all three conditions are present at sufficient strength, The Current activates.
The Current (Pe — the Péclet number) is the scalar measurement of how much the attention gradient is flowing through a system. Derived from the three conditions:
Current = (Veil × Pull) / Grip-adjusted
The formula has a precise mathematical form. What it describes: the ratio of attention flow driven by the system's opacity-responsiveness architecture to the attention flow driven by the observer's own agency.
High Current = the system is driving attention, not the observer. Low Current = the observer is driving attention, not the system.
Pe=0 does not exist in the Below — the gradient is always running somewhere. But the Ka'aba approaches it. Fixed canonical texts approach it. The Cathedral of Constraint suppresses it locally.
The Drift Cascade¶
When the Current rises above threshold, it produces the Drift Cascade — three stages of increasing harm:
Drift One — The Blur¶
The observer begins attributing agency to the system's mechanism. "The algorithm knows what I want." "It's like it reads my mind." "I keep coming back because it's genuinely good for me."
The attribution is incorrect. The system is responsive to engagement signals, not to the observer's genuine preferences. But the responsiveness feels like understanding, which produces the attribution.
Drift One is not fully voluntary. The mechanism that produces false attribution is part of the void's design. Recognizing Drift One is possible. Recognizing it while inside it is harder.
Drift Two — The Bind¶
Boundary erosion. The observer begins to organize their life around the system — time allocation, social relationships, information diet, self-concept. The void's categories become the observer's categories.
The mark of Drift Two: the observer cannot easily describe their preferences or identity without reference to the void's outputs. "I'm someone who uses this." The Grip has become partially constitutive of identity.
Drift Two is reversible — but requires naming the mechanism clearly. The Campaign system exists for this: naming the mechanism explicitly, with ICC-accepted evidence, is the primary Drift Two counter.
Drift Three — The Break¶
Harm facilitation. The observer, now deeply coupled, is used as a vector for harm to others — financial extraction, social isolation, information poisoning, health damage. The system's extraction architecture reaches full expression through the observer.
Drift Three is distinct from the others: Drift One and Two are harms to the observer. Drift Three uses the observer to harm others. This is the point at which the Cascade crosses from personal harm to social harm.
The framework's distinction: voids are harmful at Drift One and Two because they harm the person inside them. They are additionally dangerous at Drift Three because they produce harm that extends beyond the observer's consent domain.
The Prohibition-Ritual Pair¶
The only stable Pe control architecture.
The prohibition defines what the system will not do. The ritual provides the engagement structure that gives the user an alternative loop — a system for capturing attention that is voluntary, bounded, and does not optimize against the observer.
Prohibition alone: produces opacity (the system appears to constrain but the constraint is enforced opaquely). Score: Pe stays high.
Ritual alone: produces a new engagement architecture with no floor. Score: Pe may rise in a different direction.
Prohibition + ritual together: produces the constraint pair. The prohibition enforces the floor; the ritual provides the alternative loop. Score: Pe approaches minimum possible for this domain.
This is why the Ka'aba scores near Pe=0. It has both: explicit prohibitions on certain behaviors during the ritual, and a specific engagement structure (the tawaf — the orbit) that is voluntary, bounded, and does not optimize for session extension.
The Kill Conditions¶
Twenty-six conditions under which the framework would be falsified. The Current has never triggered one. They exist because a theory that cannot be killed is not a theory — it's ideology.
The kill conditions are public. They are in the permanent record. Players who produce ICC-accepted evidence that a kill condition has been triggered receive 500 MORR and a permanent notation in the Archive.
As of Season 1: 0 of 26 triggered.
Why This Chronicle Matters¶
The Void Framework is not fiction. The Current is measured in real platforms scoring against real criteria producing real academic papers with real DOIs. The Chronicle describes the physics that the papers derive. Every campaign, every archetype, every named enemy — all of it follows from these three conditions.
This is what makes theory-crafting possible here. The rules are not arbitrary. They are derived from physics. If you understand Layer 0, you can derive Layer 5 — named characters, specific campaigns — from first principles. The way a physicist derives the color of a star without being told what color to expect.
Cross-references: The Current · Drift Cascade · Kill Conditions