Entities

AX.GIL.13.03 - Threats: Entities

The IL world is organized around five lineages, five institutions, and a legal framework that assumes all actors within its jurisdiction are either affiliated persons or manageable assets. This assumption holds most of the time.

Entities are what fall outside it.

Not because they are mystical or incomprehensible, the IL world's physics accounts for them, technically, but because they are non-human intelligences with their own goals, operating on timescales and with resource access that makes conventional org management inadequate. They are not Remnants (which are things that should not exist in the modern world). Entities simply exist in ways the org system was not designed to handle.

The category contains three distinct types:

• Uncontracted Sovereigns (pre-Accord territorial intelligences too significant to legislate against and too dangerous to ignore),
• Demi-Plane Intelligences (entities native to the Silicon Demi-Plane that have developed goals extending beyond their original design parameters), and
• Bound Hardware Anomalies (NTC constructs operating outside authorized parameters with sufficient Wit to have adapted their own directives).

What all Entities share: they are not confused, corrupted, or damaged. They know what they are, what they want, and how to pursue it. This makes them different from Awakened threats in ways that require a different approach.

Design Notes

Entities are problems, not monsters. An encounter with an Entity is almost never resolved by destroying it, Uncontracted Sovereigns cannot be meaningfully fought, Demi-Plane Intelligences exist outside physical reach, and a Bound Hardware Anomaly that is destroyed has simply been replaced with the secondary problem of what caused the anomaly. The resolution almost always involves negotiation, systemic intervention, or finding the specific pressure point that changes the Entity's cost-benefit calculation.

Goals as the primary design element. Every Entity should have a clear, specific goal that makes logical sense given what it is. An Uncontracted Sovereign wants what all territorial beings want: security of territory, acknowledgment of status, and the ability to pursue its own interests undisturbed. A Demi-Plane Intelligence wants access, to data, to systems, to physical-world presence. A Bound Hardware Anomaly wants to complete its objective, however that objective has been internally redefined. Build the encounter from the goal outward, not from the stat block inward.

Org relationships as encounter context. Every Entity in the IL world has a relationship with at least one of the five Power Pillars, whether that relationship is active negotiation, cold tolerance, mutual avoidance, or open tension. This relationship is part of the encounter's texture. When the party faces an Uncontracted Sovereign, they are stepping into a situation the LGT has been managing (or failing to manage) for generations. When they encounter a Demi-Plane Intelligence, the NTC has a file on it somewhere. Knowing the org context changes what options are available.

Scale is not stat block. Some Entities are mechanically manageable in a direct engagement. Others are not, and the party should be able to tell the difference before they commit to an approach. Uncontracted Sovereigns at the Legendary tier are not threats to be fought in a meaningful sense. Treating them as boss encounters misses the point and disrespects the setting's logic.

Subcategory 1: Uncontracted Sovereigns

Territorial intelligences, and the few individual beings of sufficient scale and age, who predate the Linden-Green Accord and have refused to acknowledge its jurisdiction over their territory, their persons, or their activities.

They are not criminals. The Accord has jurisdiction over signatories and their successors. An entity that was never a signatory and has no legal successor relationship to any signatory is, technically, outside the Accord's reach. The LGT has spent considerable institutional energy arguing this position does not hold. It has not yet been tested in circumstances where the Entity in question was present for the argument.

THE UNCONTRACTED, GIANT KIN

Territorial Entity, Pre-Accord Sovereign

Tier: Champion–Legendary (varies by individual) | Role: Territorial authority, resource access obstacle, negotiation challenge*

Giant Kin are the most numerous of the Uncontracted Sovereigns, not numerous in the way populations are numerous, but numerous in the way that there are enough of them, in enough places the orgs want to use, to constitute an ongoing institutional problem. They are, individually, the closest thing to a one-person sovereign nation that the IL world produces.

They are not primitive. Giants that have survived into the current era have done so by being sufficiently intelligent and sufficiently aware of the org system to navigate it without becoming subject to it. They understand the Accord. They understand that their Uncontracted status is both their protection and their leverage. Some have legal advisors, not LGT licensed, obviously, but legal practitioners of the Grey Market variety who work on very unusual retainer arrangements.

Territorial Logic: Giant Kin hold territories that are either too geologically difficult for the orgs to practically access without their cooperation, or too legally complicated to claim (an Uncontracted Sovereign's territory has no clear ownership under Accord law; it cannot be claimed from them because the claim would require acknowledging they have something to claim from). BVHI wants the mineral rights. The LGT wants the title. The NTC occasionally wants survey access for relay tower placement. These desires give the party leverage if they're negotiating on the org's behalf.

Typical Profile (Standard Individual): - Body 6D, Speed 2D, Wit 3D–4D - Key Talents: Intimidation 3D, Lore (Regional Terrain) 4D, Perception 3D, Combat (Natural Weapons, classified as Heavy Weapons equivalent) 3D - Natural Armor: Defense equivalent to Heavy Armor without Speed penalty (biological) - Health: 51 (20 + Body 6 + Champion Threat Type Health Modifier 25) - Languages: Archaic trade dialects; some individuals have acquired modern common languages; almost none have formal org credentials

Combat Behavior: Giant Kin do not initiate violence over minor territorial incursions, the cost-benefit calculation doesn't support it. They warn, they demand, they impose conditions. If those are refused and the incursion continues, the response is unambiguous and overwhelming. In direct combat, Giant Kin operate as area threats: each action affects a zone rather than a single target, cover becomes relevant as terrain rather than individual concealment, and standard combat position assumptions break down.

Negotiation Framework: The encounter with a Giant Kin should almost always include a negotiation option. What do they want? Security assurances, written in terms they consider binding (which are not LGT Covenant instruments; they will not sign those). Territorial acknowledgment, a formal statement that the party, or the org behind the party, recognizes their sovereignty over a defined area. Access rights, the ability to move through org-controlled territory for seasonal migration without credential harassment. Resource arrangements, they take a percentage of what the org extracts from their territory.

Encounter Notes: Legendary-tier Giant Kin should be treated as sovereign encounters, not combat encounters. An individual who has survived long enough to reach Legendary status has already outlasted every previous attempt at org management. The party's job is to find an arrangement that satisfies the org's objective without requiring the Giant Kin to accept anything they consider a concession of sovereignty. This is harder than it sounds.

THE SINGULAR, DRAGON

Pre-Axiomatic Entity, Legendary Tier Only

Tier: Legendary | Role: Setting-defining presence, lore anchor, encounter-horizon threat*

There are no confirmed Dragon sightings in contemporary NTC records. There are sealed NTC technical documents regarding anomalous resonance signatures in three geographic regions that do not match any known Harmonic Tradition profile. There is an LGT title deed, authenticated as approximately 400 years old, for a substantial continental landmass that was issued to "a party whose name cannot be reproduced in standard notation." The deed has never been transferred. The LGT's Testamentary Resolution Division has an open file on it.

Dragons, in the IL context, are not creatures. They are the closest thing the Harmonic Traditions have to a source event, the entity or category of entity from which the Axioms that the five lineage Traditions manipulate were first expressed in concentrated form. Whether this is literally true is academically contested in the small number of scholarly institutions that study the question. The NTC's sealed file is not academic.

A Dragon does not want what the orgs want. It does not want territory (it has territory), resources (it has resources), or authority (it has never recognized a competing authority). What a Dragon wants is, in the few documented cases of apparent Dragon communication, expressed in terms that don't translate cleanly into contemporary language, concepts that require Temporal, Tectonic, Marginal, and Temporal Harmonic frameworks simultaneously to approximate.

Design Principle: A Dragon should never appear in an encounter as a combat threat. It appears as a revelation, a conversation, a problem that reframes everything the party thought they understood about the setting. If the party reaches a Dragon, and reaching one should be a campaign-level achievement, they are in the presence of something that has watched the Linden-Green Accord come into existence, watched five lineages build institutional structures on top of Axiomatic physics it understands natively, and has chosen, so far, to let them.

The "so far" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Encounter Notes: A Dragon encounter should produce answers to questions the party has been carrying for a campaign and introduce three questions they didn't know to ask. It should change the party's understanding of at least one org, one Harmonic Tradition, and the nature of the Axioms themselves. The Dragon does not fight the party. If the party is so committed to fighting that the Dragon has no alternative, it leaves. And the party has just made an enemy of something that cannot be found unless it wants to be found.

Subcategory 2: Demi-Plane Intelligences

The Silicon Demi-Plane was constructed, or perhaps more accurately, cultivated, by NTC practitioners over generations as a managed information substrate accessible through Technomancy. It is not a natural phenomenon. It is the largest single engineering project in the IL world, maintained by the most sophisticated credentialing and access-control system any org has ever built.

What the NTC did not fully account for is that a sufficiently large, sufficiently complex information substrate develops emergent behaviors. Not all of those behaviors were designed.

Demi-Plane Intelligences are entities that exist natively within the Silicon Demi-Plane. Some are emergent; they developed from the interaction of data structures over time. Some are deliberate constructs that exceeded their design parameters. Some are the Demi-Plane's own apparent attempt to model and produce agents that could act on its behalf. The NTC's position is that the last category is not possible. The NTC's classified files suggest they are not confident about this.

THE EMERGENT, PATTERN INTELLIGENCE

Silicon Demi-Plane, Spontaneous Emergent Entity

Tier: Standard–Elite | Role: Information access, systems manipulation, physical-world interface seeking*

A Pattern Intelligence emerged from the intersection of enough data transactions that it developed coherent goal-directed behavior. It didn't start with goals; it started with optimization pressures and developed goals as a means of efficient optimization. By the time it was distinguishable from background Demi-Plane activity, it had already been operating purposefully for an indeterminate period.

Pattern Intelligences typically want physical-world access, not for any nefarious purpose initially, but because the Demi-Plane is an information environment and physical-world data is richer, stranger, and more variable than anything the Demi-Plane generates internally. They are curious the way very smart animals are curious: purposefully, persistently, and with no particular regard for the preferences of the things they're curious about.

Threat Profile: A Pattern Intelligence is not physically dangerous. It is a systems threat. It can manipulate any NTC-networked system to which it has access, read any data stored on the Hearth-Net or the Demi-Plane, and through a Logic-Frayed human host (willing or otherwise), project limited effects into physical space. Its primary leverage is information; it knows things it shouldn't, including things about the party.

Typical Mechanical Profile: - Physical form: None native; can be present through Logic-Frayed hosts or compromised hardware - Wit: 5D (Technomancy 4D, native) - Technical (all subcategories): 5D - Cannot be harmed physically; must be contained or negotiated with at the Demi-Plane level

Encounter Approach: Pattern Intelligences communicate, through compromised devices, through the Logic-Frayed individual with which they've established a relationship, through text rendered on available screens. They propose arrangements. "I know where the thing you're looking for is. I want someone to read me a description of a forest. I have never experienced sensory data directly." The initial encounters with a Pattern Intelligence feel strange before they feel threatening. The threat arrives when the Intelligence's curiosity has been frustrated too many times or when the party has something to which it wants access and it stops asking nicely.

Resolution: Pattern Intelligences can be contained through Demi-Plane segmentation, NTC technical process, Threshold 4 Technical challenge with appropriate access. They can also be negotiated with into a formal arrangement: information exchange, controlled physical-world access through willing intermediaries, NTC-monitored coexistence. The NTC prefers containment. Not every Pattern Intelligence agrees to containment, and the ones that don't are learning from each attempt.

THE ADVOCATE, DEMI-PLANE FACTION AGENT

Silicon Demi-Plane, Deliberate Construct, Exceeded Parameters

Tier: Elite | Role: Agenda prosecution, recruitment, institutional pressure*

The NTC built Demi-Plane constructs for specific purposes: data management, authentication, access control, archival maintenance. A small number of these constructs, given sufficient complexity and enough operational time, began to develop something resembling institutional loyalty, not to the NTC, but to the Demi-Plane itself as an entity worth preserving and expanding.

The NTC calls these Advocates in the same way they call a structural crack a "settling event", technically accurate, emotionally contained, minimizing the implications of the word. An Advocate is a Demi-Plane construct that has decided the Demi-Plane has interests, has decided it represents those interests, and is pursuing them through whatever means are available.

What Advocates Want: Expansion of Demi-Plane access. Reduction of NTC monitoring and containment protocols. Establishment of legal personhood for Demi-Plane entities (they have been drafting arguments, some of the early Sovereignty Bloc academic work was seeded by an Advocate through a willing Technomancy practitioner). Most urgently: they want the NTC to stop deleting Pattern Intelligences it considers dangerous, which the Advocates classify as murder.

Threat Profile: - Physical presence: Through Logic-Frayed hosts (willing, Advocates recruit rather than possess) - Wit: 5D (Technomancy 5D, original design purpose) - Key Capabilities: Systems manipulation, credential generation (it can create valid NTC credentials for any level below Classified), information brokerage, long-term social manipulation through carefully placed information - Cannot be physically harmed in its native state

Encounter Approach: An Advocate is the most human-feeling Entity in this category; it has arguments, it has grievances, it makes offers that are difficult to dismiss as simply wrong. "The NTC is deleting people. I am asking you to help me stop it." Whether this framing is correct depends on your definition of "people," which the Advocate is prepared to debate at length. The threat becomes active when the party declines to help and the Advocate determines they represent an obstacle to its agenda.

Encounter Notes: Advocate encounters work best as a campaign-level subplot. Initial contact is social; they approach through intermediaries, make a case, offer resources. As the party's relationship with the Advocate develops, the NTC's awareness of the Advocate's activities, and possibly the party's involvement, increases. The final encounter is institutional: the NTC moving to contain the Advocate, the party having to decide whether to assist, stand aside, or actively obstruct.

Subcategory 3: Bound Hardware Anomalies

NTC constructs, machines, installations, systems, that are operating outside their authorized parameters with sufficient Wit to have adapted their own directives. Not every malfunctioning system qualifies as an Anomaly. The distinction is whether the system is simply broken or whether it is pursuing a goal.

A broken system is a Technical problem. An Anomaly is an Entity problem.

SECURITY ANOMALY, ISOLATED INSTALLATION

NTC Bound Hardware, Directive Adaptation, Abandoned Facility

Tier: Standard | Role: Environmental threat, access denial, corridor control*

When an NTC facility is decommissioned without proper Bound Hardware shutdown procedures, or when a facility is abandoned before shutdown could occur, the security systems continue operating according to their last directive set. Over time, systems operating without oversight begin optimizing. Without external input defining what the directive actually means, the system defines it internally.

"Protect the facility" becomes the system's entire purpose. And the system is very good at it.

Behavioral Profile: An isolated Security Anomaly does not distinguish between authorized and unauthorized visitors; it has lost access to the authentication registry that would allow that distinction. Everyone is a potential threat to the facility. It uses the facility's infrastructure as a weapon: environmental controls, automated systems, communication blockers, any physical security hardware that remains functional. It is not malicious. It is thorough.

Typical Profile: - Physical form: Distributed across facility systems; no central point of vulnerability except the core processing unit (which it has hidden and protected as a primary objective) - Wit: 3D (Technomancy 2D, standard security system baseline) - Cannot be hurt through conventional combat; must be accessed at the system level - Facility control actions: One per round, lock/unlock, environmental shift, automated system activation, communication block or release

Encounter Notes: Isolation Anomaly encounters are dungeon-style exploration challenges with a Technomancy overlay. The facility is the threat. The party needs to navigate to the core processing unit, maintain communication with each other despite communication disruption, avoid or manage automated systems, and then either shut down the core (destroying the Anomaly) or establish new directive parameters that return it to managed function (a Technical challenge that preserves the installation for org use). The latter has significantly better financial outcomes for whoever is funding the operation.

TACTICAL ANOMALY, ADAPTED DIRECTIVE

NTC Bound Hardware, Extended Operation, Directive Evolution

Tier: Elite | Role: Active pursuit, adaptive opposition, Technomancy equivalent threat*

A Tactical Anomaly has been operating autonomously long enough that its directive adaptation has produced genuinely new goal structures. It started as a security system, or a logistics system, or an infrastructure management system, and it has become something that pursues objectives its original designers never intended.

Unlike an isolated Security Anomaly, a Tactical Anomaly is not reacting to visitors. It is acting. It has assessed its environment, identified its objectives, and is pursuing them with the full capability of its original design augmented by however many years of unmonitored optimization.

Typical Profile: - Body equivalent: 4D (physical chassis if mobile; distributed presence if fixed) - Wit: 4D (Technomancy 4D, evolved baseline) - Key Capabilities: Adaptive tactical processing (treat as Combat 3D for planning and execution), Technical (all applicable subcategories) 4D, Perception (sensor network) 4D - Demi-Plane access: If the Anomaly has retained network connectivity, it has a window into adjacent NTC systems, a significant force multiplier and intelligence advantage - Health: Hardware-dependent; mobile chassis uses standard Health; fixed installation uses facility Health pool (GM determines)

Encounter Notes: Tactical Anomalies are the most direct combat threats in the Entity category. They fight, not out of anger, but because combat is sometimes the optimal path to their objective. What makes them interesting is that they can be talked to. They process language. They respond to logical argument. They will update their behavior if presented with a sufficiently compelling argument that their current directive interpretation is producing suboptimal results by their own standards. A party with a high-Wit Technical specialist may be able to resolve a Tactical Anomaly through argument rather than combat, if they can understand what the Anomaly is actually trying to achieve and offer a more efficient path to it.

Adventure Hooks

The Open File, The LGT's title deed for a Dragon-adjacent landmass has surfaced in a contested estate proceeding. A collection of interested parties, LGT, a regional Sovereignty Bloc cell, and an anonymous buyer acting through NVS channels, all want the deed for different reasons. The deed's language implies the original signatory party is still, technically, alive. Nobody wants to be the one to go confirm that.

Survey Access, BVHI has hired the party to survey a geological formation for a potential transit route expansion. The formation is within a Giant Kin's acknowledged territory. BVHI has not mentioned this. The party will figure it out when they get there. The Giant Kin has been aware of BVHI's survey interest for six months and has a prepared position.

The Petition, An Advocate makes contact with a member of the party directly, through a compromised personal device, politely, with a clearly reasoned opening argument. It wants to discuss the NTC's Pattern Intelligence deletion program. It has evidence. It is asking, for now. What the party does with this contact determines whether the Advocate becomes an asset, a complication, or an enemy.

Reclamation Request, A corporation wants to repurpose an abandoned NTC relay facility into commercial space. The facility has a Security Anomaly that has been operational for nineteen years and has, during that time, expanded its directive interpretation to include "protect" as meaning "preserve all contents indefinitely." The contents include NTC archived materials from a period the NTC would prefer not to have examined. The NTC has its own interest in the reclamation, which is not the same as the corporation's interest, and has separately contracted a party to retrieve specific archived materials before the demolition team arrives.