This game is played one-handed on a phone, and it must make the player feel like an insect beneath a cathedral — a cathedral seen through fog, on film stock that has started to rot. Portrait is not a constraint; it is the aspect ratio of thrones, of standing figures, of looking up at something that has already noticed you.

Changed in v2: the blacks have gone cold and green-grey; the warm bone whites are now fog. The ritual violet is demoted to a barely-violet wraith trace. Blood crimson is deleted from the system — crisis is now blight: cold, sickly, vegetal. There are no warm reds anywhere in this world.

The Obsidian Range

Five cold blacks. The game lives between obsidian-0 and obsidian-2; the upper steps are relief, spent sparingly. Never pure #000000 — it reads as a dead pixel, not a place.

Fog & Mist — the voice

The Accents

Allocation — what a passing screen looks like

Pairing & contrast — low by doctrine, legal by floor

Scale — portrait 390pt frame

Rules of conduct

• Distrela is uppercase only. Its lowercase is a different animal — ornamental, almost friendly. It never appears. Not once.
• Thin at scale, heavy in miniature. Weights 200–300 for display sizes; 600 for labels under 14px. The needle serifs must always have room to cut.
• Tracking is inverse to size. 54px: 0.14em. 32px: 0.10em. 12px: 0.30em.
• Headlines break like verse — two to three lines, balanced. A wrapping fourth line is a failure of the writer, not the layout.
• Type never sits on raw art. Scrim or panel beneath, always — see §VI.
• No bold sans anywhere. The underworld does not shout; it spells your name out slowly.

The composition canon — portrait, but vast

The four-act arc — how the world transforms

One world, one hall, four relationships to it. The camera rises as the player does; the gilt migrates toward them. Played in sequence, the campaign is a single slow approach to the throne — through fog the whole way.

The three moods — an overlay on any act

Mood never changes composition; it changes light, temperature and the behavior of the fog. A strained Act I frame is still an Act I frame.

Override scenes

Prompt kit — Meshy pipeline

Every frame is generated from the same base contract plus slot inserts. The base never changes; consistency lives there. Generate at 9:19.5 (e.g. 1290×2796) or nearest, edges extended in obsidian so the frame survives tall devices.

## BASE — every frame, verbatim
dark cinematic gothic illustration, subterranean throne hall of a vast
underworld court, seen through heavy cold grey-green fog, severe 35mm film
grain, oil-painting depth, ornate blackened silver and bone ornament, cold
obsidian shadows (#0B0D0E), muted fog-grey highlights (#C2C6C1), heavily
desaturated, LOW CONTRAST — light fails before it travels, nothing fully
lit, nothing fully black, portrait 9:19.5, low camera angle looking up,
single dread subject filling 70–120% of frame height, focal point at
40–50% of frame height, empty fog headroom in top sixth, simple dark
values across bottom third, no gore, painterly realism

## SLOTS — appended in this order
[SUBJECT]   who or what towers in this frame
[MATERIALS] two or three: wet iron, rotted velvet, bone inlay, cold marble…
[LIGHTING]  act insert below, then mood insert
[CAMERA]    deviation from canon only (e.g. broker squeeze: "table height,
            cramped, single hard lamp")

## ACT INSERTS — lighting + palette drift
act1 one remote tarnished-gold light source drowning in fog, cold
     steel-grey darkness, subject unlit at base, immense negative space
act2 scattered small candle pools of dull tarnished gold, each losing
     to the fog, no master light, thresholds and doorways, floor fog
act3 cold spectral pallor drained of colour, faint wraith-grey bloom,
     rim-lit silhouettes, light source off-frame as if watched,
     warmth almost extinguished
act4 tarnished gold breathing up from below, fog parting but never
     lifting, throne near and attainable, quiet embers rising

## MOOD INSERTS
composed steady light, calm haze
strained guttering light, leaning shadows, cold grey-violet seep in darks
breaking failing light, one hard surviving source, sickly cold
         grey-green ambient seep (#3A4230), slight 2–4 degree
         horizon tilt, grain intensified

## NEGATIVE — every frame, verbatim
no text, no watermark, no gore, no wounds, no daylight, no sky, no
saturated color, no warm reds, no crimson, no purple fantasy glow, no
neon, no clean sharp contrast, no modern objects, no lens flare, no
centered symmetrical portrait crop (except cult scenes), no recognizable
franchise designs

## MANIFEST NAMING
act2_strained_broker.png · act4_composed_base.png · crisis2_breaking.png

Graded mood-frames — what passing looks like

act1_composed_base — “The Supplicant Enters”

From the floor of the processional hall, the frame is almost entirely fog: ribbed vaults guessed at rather than seen, dissolving upward and out of the top edge. At 44% frame height, impossibly far away, the throne — a single tarnished ember point no larger than a thumbnail, the only warm pixel in the frame, and even it is losing to the haze. Two wardens flank the aisle at 80% frame height, read only as darker fog. Grain crawls in every shadow. PASS: the gilt point is the unique warm element; nothing in the frame reaches white or true black; the wardens break the top edge; the player's first instinct is to squint.

act2_strained_broker — “The Squeeze”

The canon's sanctioned exception: table height, cramped. A broker's hands and ledger under one hard lamp; his face above the lamp line, eroded by fog and grain, eyes implied not drawn. Candle-pools gutter at the frame's edges — one has just gone out, a thread of smoke rising from the wick into the engine's layer. Grey-violet seep in the darks behind him. PASS: exactly one hard light and even it is dirty; face never fully resolved; the extinguished candle reads on second look, not first; the frame feels too small and means to.

act4_breaking_unmade — “Unmade Before the Throne”

The player's silhouette at 85% frame height, center-left, losing its edges: shoulder and crown already fog, drawn upward into the headroom. The throne's gilt point burns at 42% height exactly as it did in Act I — same size, same dull warmth, untouched by everything that happened. Horizon tilted 3°; grain at maximum, the film failing with the player. Blight-deep ambient in the far darks, no green on the figure itself. PASS: dissolution reads as fog reclaiming its own, not injury; the gilt point's indifference is the cruelty; the tilt is felt before it is noticed.

If a panel, a scrim and a beautiful frame are ever in conflict, the order of sacrifice is fixed: the art darkens first, the panel strengthens second, the type changes never. Any build screen where text is hard to read over imagery is a defect, regardless of how the frame looks.

background: rgba(11, 13, 14, 0.52);
backdrop-filter: blur(14px) saturate(0.85);
border: 1px solid rgba(194,198,193,0.09);
border-radius: 0–2px;  /* sharp. never soft. */

/* no backdrop-filter support: */
background: rgba(11, 13, 14, 0.82);

/* top — under status glass */
height: 20%;
background: linear-gradient(180deg,
  rgba(6,7,8,0.82) 0%,
  rgba(6,7,8,0.35) 55%,
  transparent 100%);

/* bottom — under the action zone */
height: 38%;
background: linear-gradient(0deg,
  rgba(6,7,8,0.92) 0%,
  rgba(6,7,8,0.55) 45%,
  transparent 100%);

The component kit

Every interactive element the build is permitted to use. Anything not on this sheet is a new negotiation with this manual. All components sit on glass or panel, never raw art; all hit targets ≥ 44px; all type Distrela 600 tracked, numerals mono.

VII.0 — The grain

Everything is shot on failing film. An SVG fractal-noise tile (160px, baseFrequency 0.85, desaturated) overlays the entire viewport at opacity 0.05–0.10, blend mode overlay, jittering on a 0.55s six-step cycle — fast enough to crawl, slow enough never to read as static hiss. Over art it doubles (0.12–0.16). Breaking mood adds +0.05. The grain never pauses while motion is on: it is the proof the world is still being watched.

VII.1 — The fog

Drift is up and slightly left — the fog seeks the crown. Density ranges 0.20 (haze) to 0.80 (oppressive); screen base values live in §IV's act cards and run higher than they did in v1 — the fog is the world now, not an effect on it. Tints: fog (default), wraith (occult trace), gilt (victory embers only).

VII.2 — The breathing vignette · VII.3 — Embers

The vignette inhales over a 9s sine cycle, from 90px/36px @ 0.62 to 120px/58px @ 0.78 inset shadow. Embers: never more than 12 alive; 1–2.6px, dull gilt at 70% alpha; they rise, sway, and die in 4–9s. Both are visible in the demo below.

VII.4 — The encounter sting

VII.5 — State hooks

/* Dominion thins the air; losing it thickens it */
fogDensity = lerp(0.25, 0.75, 1 − dominion / 100)

/* The Tyrant's displeasure has a heartbeat —
   and it is cold (Law 4: no warm reds) */
if (favor ≤ 15) {
  blight edge pulse · 4s sine · inset rgba(122,138,94, 0 → 0.26)
}

VII.6 — Reduced motion

The reduced game must remain unmistakably the same game: the fog is still there — it has simply stopped to listen.

Hard guardrails

• No third-party marks or art. Nothing from any franchise or studio — no logos, no recognizable silhouettes, costumes or creature designs. The references below taught us tone; they contribute zero pixels.
• No warm reds, anywhere, ever. No crimson, no scarlet, no blood tones — in art, UI, or states. Danger is cold here. The hottest color in the system is tarnished gold.
• No purple fantasy glow. The wraith trace is grey first, violet second. If a frame reads "magic purple", it has failed.
• No real-world religious iconography used straight. Invent the court's own ritual vocabulary instead.
• Dread without gore (Law 4). Generation prompts carry the negative list verbatim; any frame with wounds or viscera fails regardless of quality.
• No AI-slop tells. No gradient-soup backgrounds, no glowing rune spam, no extra fingers on the dread subject. Every frame is reviewed at full size before entering the manifest.

The grading checklist — run against every build screen

• Scale: does the player feel small? Subject ≥ 70% frame height (or sanctioned override). §IV
• Fog & grain present: grain 0.05–0.10 page / 0.12–0.16 art; fog within §IV act values. No clean pixels.
• Low contrast held: nothing reaches white; nothing reaches true black; the frame's brightest value is fog-grey. Sole exception: the wordmark (§VIII). §II
• Clear zones: top 10% / bottom 28% survive their scrims without losing meaning. §IV
• One warm focus: a single dominant gilt element per screen. §II
• No warm reds, no purple glow — anywhere in the frame or UI. §IX
• Type: Distrela uppercase only; body ≥ 15px; labels ≥ 10px tracked; display only ≥ 28px. §III
• Contrast floors: 4.5:1 body / 3:1 display over effective ground — floors, not targets. §VI
• No raw text on art — scrim or panel beneath every glyph. §VI
• Components from the kit only; hit targets ≥ 44px with 8px gaps. §VI
• Sanctioned disorder: one deliberate wrongness per view (tilt, fracture, off-centre ornament) — composed, never random. Law 6
• The air is alive: grain crawls, fog drifts, vignette breathes; reduced-motion fallback verified. §VII
• The sting matches the 0–180–420–900ms timeline within ±10%. §VII
• State hooks live: Dominion drives density; Favor ≤ 15 pulses blight, not red. §VII

The reference wall — tone anchors only

What each reference taught the system. None of these images, styles-of-record, or marks may appear in the build.

01 · The Tyrant's EnergyMonochrome menace; one dreadful subject filling the frame. → §IV canon.

02 · Decision-Card LanguageEngraved relief, numbered arcana plate. → §V, restrained to four diamonds.

03 · Dark-Luxury RestraintFine serif, hairline rules, panels floating over smoke. → §VI recipe.

07 · The Mood AnchorThe Throne of Chaos; slow living smoke as signature. → §VII engine.

REF ONLY · 3P

10 · The Air Itselfv2's atmosphere target: grain, fog, low contrast, light failing before it travels. → §VII.0, Law 2.

REF ONLY · 3P

11 · Type in the FogSmall distressed caps holding their own over vast cold atmosphere. → §III register.

REF ONLY · 3P

12 · Gilt in DarknessTarnished gold as the only warmth, swallowed by black. → §II gilt doctrine.

REF ONLY · 3P

09 · Component DensityHow a dark mobile kit holds gauges, rings, lists and nav together. → §VI kit (ours, stripped of its gloss).

Refs 04–06 and 08 (HUD-over-art, long-scroll campaign, type-over-keyart, sectioned narrative) remain canon from v1 and are archived in art-bible/refs/.

Appendix — token export

Source of truth: art-bible/bible2.css (tokens) and art-bible/demos.js (motion constants). For the build:

:root {
  --obsidian-0:#060708; --obsidian-1:#0B0D0E; --obsidian-2:#111415;
  --obsidian-3:#191D1F; --obsidian-4:#232829;
  --fog:#C2C6C1; --mist:#8F948F; --ash:#61665F;
  --gilt:#A38A52; --gilt-bright:#C4AC72;
  --wraith:#756E85; --wraith-deep:#3E3A4A;
  --blight:#7A8A5E; --blight-deep:#3A4230;
  --hairline:rgba(194,198,193,0.09);
  --glass-bg:rgba(11,13,14,0.52);
  --grain:0.07; --grain-art:0.14;
  --ease-sting:cubic-bezier(0.20,0.90,0.10,1.00);
  --breath-period:9s; --pulse-period:4s;
}
/* deleted in v2: --ember, --ritual, --blood — do not reintroduce */