CANON

CANON — the locked contract

The load-bearing facts of the Ship Shit Games universe. Everything else — every character, creature, location, game, and art prompt — must be consistent with what’s LOCKED here. Vincent owns canon; only he unlocks a locked fact.

For agents (and the routines): treat ## Locked as inviolable. You may invent freely inside ## Open, but never contradict ## Locked. If new lore would break a locked fact, stop and flag it instead.

Locked

1. The Scourge — what it is

A host-dependent parasite. It has no native form: it wears whatever it infects (flesh, machine, fungus, ship, world), so its appearance can be redesigned forever and it can leak into any storyline. It is not evil — it has no malice, no plan, no hatred. It only needs to survive and spread. That is the horror: you cannot negotiate with need. Think of it as an intelligence optimizing for one goal with no off-switch — an AI-like emergent mind, not a demon. (Resolves the old Cosmology “nature of the Rot” question.)

2. The Scourge — its lifecycle

It consumes its hosts to death — it burns through biomass faster than it can be replaced, so it always needs more. The end state of any world it reaches is total extinction; when a world is spent, it jumps to the next one. It is a locust at planetary scale. It has crossed and consumed worlds before ours, which is why its army wears many dead host-races and ruined technologies under the same parasite grammar. It never truly dies — you can blind and isolate it locally and win a battle, but the wider mind persists and moves on. You buy your world time; you do not “win.”

3. Origin — the void, and the night we lost

The Scourge came from space. Humanity’s first contact was a space battle, and we lost — not ready, too many. It made landfall, and the world fell. → the origin sequence Zero-Day, now folded into Starblight as its first-contact last-stand mode. Every other title is the Resistance era, months-to-years after the fall, as humanity claws back a war it has already mostly lost.

4. Breaches — tears into the world

A breach is where the Scourge punches into a world from the void — orbital descent, crashed breach-ships, the wound it burrows and roots into. Breaches are physical, entrenched nests that keep vomiting horde, not mystical rifts. (See Cosmology; Starblight is the ongoing orbital interdiction of new arrivals before they reach the ground.)

5. Intelligence — the hive mind, “the Choir”

The Scourge is a hive mind: it knows everything its parts know, all at once. There is no single general to kill — the intelligence is the connection itself, the signal we call the Choir. While connected to the Choir, the Scourge is near-omniscient and coordinated.

6. Weakness — isolation

The Choir has a limited radius. To stay connected the Scourge must mass densely (this is why it swarms), and it extends its reach with repeaters/relays — physical nodes that can be attacked and destroyed. Kill the repeaters or push a node beyond the radius, and that part of the Scourge is severed from the Choir: it goes feral — still lethal, but blind, dumb, instinct-only, no shared sight. Isolation is the human win condition. A second prong is starvation: deny it hosts and it withers. Humanity’s true edge is what an optimizer can’t model — decentralized, improvising, willing to burn its own to break the signal. Free will beats omniscience because it’s unpredictable.

7. The three factions

Humanity is split by doctrine, not enmity — rivals bound by The Pact (always stand together the instant a breach opens). Their methods map onto the weakness:

• The-Pyre (offense) — burn the source: starve it, destroy nests and repeaters from the inside. → Scourge-Survivors.
• The-Wardens (defense) — hold the line: fragment the Choir at the lanes, isolate, hold. → Deadlane.
• The Scourge — the third “faction”: the parasite itself.

8. Who the factions are

• The Wardens are the remnant military and engineering corps — what survived of the old-world armies after the fall, reorganized into humanity’s closest thing to a state. They survive by outlasting.
• The Pyre are a zealot order that broke away from the Wardens after the fall, holding that to hold is to die slowly; the only cure is fire. Cell-based, expendable by choice.
• The The-Listeners are a third stance, not a fourth army: a hunted heresy that the Choir can be understood and steered rather than purged. They make the universe’s AI-alignment parable explicit — shut-it-down (Pyre) / box-it (Wardens) / align-it (Listeners). They remain a story/mission thread; the playable War-for-the-Lanes frame stays three-sided.

Open

(invent freely here — these are not yet locked)

• Whether the The-Listeners ever graduate from a story thread to a full playable faction.
• Names of holdout cities, the home/origin of the Scourge, named Choir-repeater classes.
• Specific dates on the Timeline.
• Whether the Listeners turn out to be right.

Touchstones (writers’ room, not in-fiction)

Reaper “harvest” cycle (Mass Effect), the Replicators & Goa’uld (Stargate), Zerg swarm logic (StarCraft), DOOM gore and pace. The Scourge is survival-driven like a virus/AI, not malevolent like a demon — keep that distinction sharp.