Silkholm City Threads

1 | Start

2 | 163. World/Story Setting: “The Keystone of Mindsilk” Premise: In the remnants of an ancient neuro-civilization, society is governed by Mindsilk—a psychoactive thread spun from extinct spiders once bioengineered to record and transmit cognitive law. Woven into architecture, clothing, and ceremonial bindings, Mindsilk adapts social structure based on emotional resonance and stored thought-patterns. One dormant keystone web, buried in the vaults of a collapsed mountain polity, has reactivated—broadcasting an alien schema of ethics and memory that overrides regional traditions and selectively rewrites personality traits. For the GM: • Player Roles: • Weavewrights — neural-crafters who interpret, restore, and negotiate Mindsilk threads. • Emotion Codifiers — specialists who translate collective affect into governance language. • Unspinners — subversives who aim to disconnect the population from imposed cognitive contracts. • Mechanics: • Thread Resonance Index — gauges alignment between individual neural states and imposed Mindsilk norms. Low resonance causes hallucinated law, empathy drift, or identity convergence. • Players can manipulate the environment, emotions, or weave fragments to shape governance or ignite rebellion. • “Spindle Bloom Events” trigger cascading societal transformation when a Mindsilk node absorbs enough divergent sentiment. Campaign Hooks: 1. A city starts enforcing legal norms no one consciously recalls—shared only as dreams. 2. A renegade archivist activates a forbidden Mindsilk codex containing extinct war doctrines. 3. A neutral zone’s Mindsilk web begins to echo thoughts from a civilization that never biologically existed. Opening Phrase: “The thread in your sleeve twitched—cool, alive—and in the silence that followed, you remembered a law you’d never heard, but had always obeyed.”