Use when designing quests, reactivity, and factions — quest structure beyond fetch-and-return, branching that honors player choice, reactivity systems on a budget (the "facts database"), procedural/radiant quests as a supplement to hand-authored ones, and faction allegiance dilemmas. Also use to diagnose quests that feel like filler or a world that ignores what the player did. Triggers on "quest design", "fetch quest", "branching", "reactivity", "facts database", "radiant quests", "factions", "choices and consequences", "the world doesn't react to me".
Use when designing quests, reactivity, and factions — quest structure beyond fetch-and-return, branching that honors player choice, reactivity systems on a budget (the "facts database"), procedural/radiant quests as a supplement to hand-authored ones, and faction allegiance dilemmas. Also use to diagnose quests that feel like filler or a world that ignores what the player did. Triggers on "quest design", "fetch quest", "branching", "reactivity", "facts database", "radiant quests", "factions", "choices and consequences", "the world doesn't react to me".
Narrative & Quest Design
How to build quests that react to the player and factions that force real allegiance choices — and how to do it on a generation budget without quests collapsing into filler. The spine here is a reactivity substrate (a facts database) that both hand-authored and AI-generated quests read and write.
When to use this
Designing a quest, a quest line, or the quest-generation system
Building the reactivity layer (state tracking, branching, consequences)
Deciding what to hand-author vs. generate (radiant/procedural quests)
Designing factions with competing goals and exclusive membership
Diagnosing filler quests or a world that doesn't acknowledge player actions
Scope
This skill owns quests, reactivity, and factions. Adjacent concerns live in siblings:
The space quests sit in → open-world-design
How to generate content + the sameness problem → procedural-generation, procgen-review
Keeping generated quest text coherent in voice/lore → ai-authored-content-coherence
Lore the quests carry → worldbuilding-and-lore
Progression/economy rewards → rpg-systems
General "interesting decisions" theory → game-design-fundamentals
How the pieces fit
GUIDE.md — the why, with exemplars and citations. §1–2 (the facts-database reactivity substrate) are verification-confirmed. The headline design doctrines (no-fetch-quest, radiant-as-supplement, faction dilemmas) are sourced but unverified — see the verification banner.
CHECKLIST.md — the what to do: Do/Don't plus "Test for" criteria for a quest, a generator, or a faction set.
The one idea to anchor on
Reactivity reduces to a testable condition over named facts. Every branch, consequence, and faction state should be a boolean check against a single canonical fact store — that is the literal mechanism The Witcher 3 shipped, and it is what lets a headless agent author and generate quests over one world-state representation.
⚠️ Verification note: Built from a deep-research pass whose verification phase was cut short by a session limit. The reactivity-architecture core (GUIDE §1–2) is confirmed 3-0; the quest-quality and faction doctrines (§3–5) are sourced-but-unverified. One claim was actively refuted — see §6, "Do not encode."
