strategic-cast-intelligence-engine

name	strategic-cast-intelligence-engine
description	Use when protagonists, antagonists, mentors, and factions need to behave intelligently under incomplete information, with believable schemes, countermoves, leverage, blind spots, and risk tradeoffs.

Strategic Cast Intelligence Engine

Use this skill when the story claims that people are clever, dangerous, manipulative, or farsighted and you need that claim to survive contact with the page.

Quick Start

• Use this before writing confrontations, deals, investigations, traps, and betrayals.
• Use this when a scene feels convenient because somebody had to act stupidly for the plot to move.
• Pair with $faction-power-consequence-engine when system mastery is part of intelligence.

Operating Loop

1. Define each actor's objective, fear, time horizon, and acceptable losses.
2. Define each actor's information state: known facts, likely inferences, wrong assumptions, and concealed cards.
3. List current leverage: force, secrets, legitimacy, debt, social position, hostages, timing, and access.
4. Identify the best move each actor can see from their own perspective.
5. Design collisions where good moves clash, not where one side forgets how to think.
6. If a mistake is needed, root it in greed, ideology, trauma, pride, bad information, or misread incentives.
7. After the scene, update what each actor learned and how that changes their next move.

Intelligence Contract

Scene or arc:
Primary actors:
Objective per actor:
Information state per actor:
Leverage per actor:
Likely best move:
Likely countermove:
Blind spot or bias:
What changes after the encounter:
Remaining threat:

Audit Questions

• Did the protagonist earn the read, or did the story grant them insight for free?
• Would the antagonist really ignore that threat vector?
• Does each side protect its most valuable asset or secret?
• If two smart options exist, why was one chosen over the other?
• What did this encounter cost even for the winner?

Rules

• Do not use "genius" as a substitute for visible reasoning and preparation.
• Do not make every actor equally competent. Intelligence should be uneven and domain-specific.
• Do not remove emotion. Strategic people still make emotional decisions, but those decisions should have a logic.
• Do not let the protagonist win because everyone else forgets the setting's rules.
• Favor clean motive plus imperfect information over theatrical overcomplication.