Arborwake: The Long Wake

Arborwake: The Long Wake is the main campaign of Arborwake. It follows the Ranger, a microglial cell, and the residents of Hearth Grove as a familiar neural rhythm starts to change. The Long Wake is still a working subtitle.

Premise#

Hearth Grove has an ordinary life. Pip keeps the home routes covered. Mote records small changes in a nearby pocket. Each evening a paired pulse, the Evening Pair, arrives along the north connection. Nobody thinks it is special until its timing changes.

The Ranger's investigation leads from Hearth through Nearfield Glade and the Dendritic Gardens to Threadway, Starwell and Vessel Margins. Some disturbances come from ordinary activity or support demand. Others, in a bounded and model-inspired scenario, involve a stress-associated inflammatory relay. The residents learn to separate what they can see, what they can infer and what they can change.

The plan states one dramatic question: How do you care for a place when its signals change, different neighbours need different kinds of help, and even a good plan cannot prevent everything?

Structure#

The four stress acts carry the central story. The Act V injury is a different event, not a stage of stress. The Quiet District road repair runs alongside as an older, unrelated restoration story.

Rules that shape the whole plot#

• The Ranger starts alone. Every required scene, including the finale, is solo-completable.
• Companions join only through quests. See Recruitment.
• Imprints are passive keepsakes from side stories. They never lend a helper or a skill.
• The human whose nervous system holds this world is never shown. See Science guardrails.
• Similar symptoms can have different causes. The game teaches this through play, not lectures.

Side stories#

Optional side stories run beside the main acts: The Uninteresting Ones (Mote), Who Takes the New Road? (Fen), Someone Else's Shift (Pip), An Hour Without a Request (Stella), The Border of an Agreement (Aster and Vessa), The Five Stretches (Wick), The Part Between (Nell), The Names at the Edge (Bram), An Errand That Was Already Underway (Rill) and The Stretch Between Neighbours (Cress). See also Ensemble scenes.

Development#

• Plan v0.5 (31 October 2026) is the active plot authority. ChatGPT wrote first drafts without project access, and Claude reconciled them with the project files and the user's decisions. Older versions are in .GAME_PLAN/Old/ as history.
• The plan's own banner calls the scenes and dialogue a proposed design. The user's 31 October decisions in that banner are binding: recruit placements, the one-companion cap, the approved Act V finale, the relay post, home-only loadout and the Imprint names.
• On 1 November the user made encounters turn-based (see Turn-based encounters). Real-time encounter details in the plan are superseded where they conflict.
• On 29 October the user made Stress-associated neuroinflammation the centre of the story and withdrew the Breach-first order. See Withdrawn story directions.
• In the alpha The Placeholder alpha (integration 69c7b5470) has journal chapters P1 to II1 in campaign.js. Chapter II2 is a "current story chapter ends" marker; the lead's report says the authored II2, II3 and II5 scenes are still missing. Later acts are design only. This wiki has not verified the chapters in play.
• The lead's 2 November audit found that the 40-scene gates were not yet connected to the alpha; the later integration added chapters up to II1 only.

See also#

• Evening Pair
• Stress-associated neuroinflammation
• Science guardrails
• Recruitment

Sources#

1. .GAME_PLAN/ARBORWAKE_THE_LONG_WAKE_COMPLETE_GAME_PLAN_v0.5.md (working copy, not in Git)
2. .GAME_PLAN/ARBORWAKE_THE_LONG_WAKE_v0.5_CHANGE_HANDOFF.md (working copy, not in Git)
3. docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-02-lead-full-project-reconciliation-audit.md (working copy, not in Git)
4. 1ded4c01c:docs/integrated-design-v2/STRESS_STORY.mdcopy
5. b89f778c2:src/main-game/game/campaign.jscopy
6. b89f778c2:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-02-lead-reconciled-game-integration.mdcopy