Lexicon of Recorded Phenomena
Certain effects keep turning up across findings recorded independently, by different members of the Working Group, at different companies that have never had any contact with one another — the same resistance an organization’s leadership seems to muster against a personnel-targeting effect, the same slow bleed of capital reserves regardless of what anyone does about it. Past a certain point, that stops looking like coincidence. This document is where we keep those phenomena named consistently, so nobody spends an afternoon re-deriving Tenure under a different word because they didn’t check first.
This is not a ruleset. Nothing here needs exact math, a DC table, or a formal definition beyond what a given entry already states — we are cataloguing, not legislating. Before naming a new phenomenon for a finding, check the tables below; reuse an existing one if it’s a reasonable match, name a new one if it isn’t, and record it here in the same submission that introduces it.
Saving Throw Types
| Save | Represents | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Tenure | Seniority, leverage, and political protection — resisting a personnel-targeting or persuasion effect | Reduction in Force, Hostile Takeover, Poach |
| Solvency | Whether the org can absorb a shock without collapsing, rolled when a resource pool (e.g. Runway) hits 0 or when a shifted liability lands; also used directly as a materiality yardstick (a fraction of current Solvency setting the ceiling a lesser effect can reach) | Burn Rate, Litigation Blitz, Short Position |
| Maintenance | Whether a legacy system holds together for another stretch of time, keyed to Technical Debt score | Animate Legacy System, Rip and Replace |
| Discovery | Whether a warded record, process, or claim resists a formal attempt to verify or compel disclosure of the truth behind it | Document Retention, Greenwash, Performance Review |
Derived Stats / Scores
| Stat | Used for | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Technical Debt score | Drives Maintenance saving throws for legacy/undead systems — higher score, harder save | Animate Legacy System, System Sunset |
| Blamelessness score | Drives whether a post-incident check finds a systemic cause or scapegoats an individual | Root Cause Analysis, Short Position |
Resource Pools (temporary-HP analogs)
| Pool | Represents | Behavior | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runway | A capital reserve absorbing damage before real HP | Depletes on a fixed per-turn schedule that cannot be prevented, in addition to absorbing damage normally | Burn Rate, Hostile Takeover, Litigation Blitz |
| Windfall | A reserve of temporary resources gained from a major capital event, spendable to cast another spell without expending a spell slot | Granted once, expires if unspent after a stated window; a few spells can also cause a target to gain one as an ironic side effect of the caster’s own failure | IPO, Golden Parachute |
Deferred Effects
| Effect | Represents | Behavior | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amortized Loss | Damage deferred and spread across future turns instead of taken immediately | Total damage taken is never less than the amount originally deferred, and increases with each schedule extension (interest) | Capitalize the Loss, Chapter 11 |
Conditions / Statuses
| Condition | Effect | Removed by | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Insolvent | Incapacitated-equivalent; the org cannot act | Chapter 11 is now a spell that directly interacts with this condition (it doesn’t remove it, but suspends its consequences); no spell removes it outright yet — we keep meaning to look into that | Burn Rate, Chapter 11 |
| Documented (status, not condition) | Satisfies any other spell/effect’s prerequisite that requires accurate documentation, regardless of whether documentation actually exists | N/A — persists with the system | Animate Legacy System, Performance Review, Greenwash (at higher levels) |
| Misaligned | Multiple creatures agree something was decided or compelled, each privately certain of a different, often mutually exclusive interpretation of what that was | Not removed — resolves only when the affected creatures act and the divergence becomes visible | Power Word: Buzzword |
Damage / Effect Types
| Type | Represents | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Severance damage | Damage dealt by dismissal/termination effects | Reduction in Force, Chapter 11 |
Recurring Non-Caster Roles
Mechanical roles a spell can require be staffed/assigned, distinct from the
Classes field (which lists who can cast the spell):
| Role | Required by | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| On-Call Engineer | Legacy Servants (must be permanently assigned one; cannot be reassigned without reversing the spell) | Animate Legacy System, System Sunset |
| Records Custodian | Any Document Retention ward (a Discovery save is auto-failed if none can be identified) | Document Retention |
Recurring Creature/Entity Types
Named creature types a spell conjures or transforms something into, referenced across more than one finding:
| Type | Represents | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Contractor | A temporary conjured worker; vanishes with all accumulated knowledge when its spell ends unless a Knowledge Transfer is separately arranged | Conjure Contractor, Convert, Rip and Replace |
| Legacy Servant | An undead-equivalent risen from a decommissioned system or project | Animate Legacy System, System Sunset (destroys it, the one controlled way), Hostile Takeover |
| HR Representative | An investigatory entity summoned by formal complaint; loyal to minimizing the organization’s own Solvency exposure, not to whichever party summoned it | Summon Human Resources |
Recurring Target Types
| Target | Represents | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Rival Organization | The standard targeting phrase for adversarial (“combat”) spells: “one organization you can identify as a competitor.” Casting Competitive Intelligence on an org formally satisfies this requirement if you don’t already qualify some other way (e.g. public knowledge, a prior encounter). Cease and Desist targets a broader “infringing” criterion, not competitor status, and deliberately does not use this phrase. | Competitive Intelligence, Smear Campaign, Hostile Takeover |
Use this exact phrase (“one organization you can identify as a competitor”) in any future combat spell’s Range/Area rather than inventing new wording for the same requirement.
Recording Conventions (not mechanically tracked)
Not phenomena in themselves, but two write-up conventions the Working Group has settled on for consistency across findings filed independently:
Casting Time hedging. Several findings give a short, official-sounding Casting Time (often “1 action”) immediately qualified by the real bureaucratic delay before anything actually happens — a Lead Time, a Headcount Approval check, a multi-month rollout. Where a finding’s nominal instant of casting and its practical timeline diverge, record both: “1 action, but/though/contingent on X.”
“Power Word: X” naming. Reserve this prefix for an incantation that requires no saving throw and instead gates its effect on some threshold unrelated to the target’s resistance — a materiality threshold, a seniority difference, whether a prior record exists. The gating threshold should be structural, not a reskinned saving throw wearing a different name; potency is beside the point, several of the smallest recorded instances document the pattern most cleanly.
Named Practitioners. Some findings carry an eponym — a name attached to
a maneuver or an observed pattern, never a role, so it can’t collide with a
spell’s Classes field. Most spells don’t get one; it marks a finding
distinctive enough to be worth attributing. A named spell typically lands
in the 4th-7th level range — the same band the iconic named incantations
of other traditions cluster in — though a low-level “signature move” is a
legitimate exception when the finding is a small, instantly recognizable
trick rather than a scaled-up production. What a name should never do is
default to the low end simply because nobody bothered to raise the
stakes. The name itself is either possessive (“Voss’s X,” after whoever
gets credited with the move) or a named law (“The Halloran Principle,”
after the pattern it describes) — pick whichever reads more like a
personal signature or more like an institutional citation for that
specific finding. A name may recur across more than one finding, and more
than one discipline; check the table below before inventing one that would
duplicate an existing name’s territory. As with every other finding, the
visible entry never explains who the person was or what they did to earn
the name — the name implies the legend, it doesn’t narrate it.
| Name | Form | Example Entry |
|---|---|---|
| Voss | Possessive | Voss’s Efficiency Dividend |
| The Halloran Principle | Named principle | The Halloran Principle |
| Delacroix | Possessive | Delacroix’s Full Pivot |
A named practitioner’s findings aren’t tracked here beyond that one example — the domain pages already index every spell, and this table only needs to stop two contributors from independently inventing competing names. A resource, condition, or other phenomenon exclusive to one practitioner’s line (see Conviction, below) is the one exception worth recording in full, since the whole point of it is that nobody else should casually reuse it.
Conviction (Halloran only). A resource pool exclusive to Halloran’s own findings — deliberately not offered for reuse elsewhere, unlike every other phenomenon in this lexicon. A creature under this line’s effects has a pool of Conviction equal to their level, which refills to full at the start of each fiscal quarter regardless of whether the Conviction spent last quarter was later vindicated or discredited. Spending 1 point on a forecast, estimate, or prediction forces any Discovery saving throw attempted against it to automatically fail. Unlike Runway, nothing about Conviction depletes on its own, and unlike Windfall, it isn’t a one-time grant tied to an event — it simply comes back, every quarter, on schedule, independent of the world’s opinion of what happened last time.
Explicitly Not Tracked Here
Classes (who can cast a given spell) is intentionally excluded from
this lexicon. Unlike saves/stats/pools/conditions, caster roles are local
color for a single spell, not a shared system — there’s no goal of a
consistent IC/Manager/Director/Exec taxonomy across findings, and the field
should stay a flat list with no conditions or exceptions attached. If this
ever changes, it changes on purpose, not by accretion.
Recording a New Phenomenon
- Check the tables above — if an existing save/stat/pool/condition covers what the finding needs, reuse it rather than naming a near-duplicate.
- If it’s genuinely new, add a row to the relevant table with a one-line description and the spell file it appears in.
- Keep the description generic enough that a different discipline could plausibly reuse the phenomenon later (e.g. Tenure isn’t finance-specific — any discipline with a personnel-targeting effect could use it).