ADR-0003 — The Liability Ledger (two-sided): every mitigation is a loan

Status: ACCEPTED as design; build first among the new systems · Decided: 2026-07-04

These are the actual decision records the game is built from, published unedited except for internal process notes. They describe why the game works the way it does. They are not a strategy guide, and some of them argue with each other.

Status: ACCEPTED as design; build first among the new systems
Date: 2026-07-04

Context

Pip's generative image (preserved because the chain is the idea): "like taking out a credit card to save the mortgage, then taking a job as a lobbyist to pay off the credit card, then lobbying to weaken financial regulation on AI firms which then leads to an increase in AI driven fraud which then funds Antagonist_Lab" — plus "the first waves of doom might be easier to beat down but require some kinds of sacrifice where you get diminishing returns."

Doom arrives in waves (ADR-0005). Each wave can be beaten down, but every suppression lever generates a liability that feeds a later wave or weakens a later lever. The adversary "adapts" — not via a difficulty slider, but because the player's own ledger is the difficulty curve.

Decision

One system — a ledger of trades that pay now and bill later — absorbing four issue-list items that were previously separate: loan repayment, funding-with-strings, the governance→bribery→blackmail cascade, and reputation-as-spendable.

Entry shape (design-level, not code): a liability has a source (what trade created it), a currency (what it bills in: money, reputation, governance, doom), a fuse (when it bills), an interest profile (how it grows), a secrecy flag, and a side.

The ledger is two-sided:

Payables — what you owe. Debt service, strings on funding, corroded governance, secrets that can be exposed.
Receivables — favors and pledges owed to you, held per-actor. Influence is not a resource (decided by Pip): there is no global influence number; there is leverage over this lab, a favor owed by that actor. Reputation remains the only global social currency. Receivables carry counterparty risk — a pledge is not a vote until cast (see ADR-0007).

Secrecy and exposure: entries flagged secret can be exposed by rival actions or scheduled causes; exposure converts them into reputation/governance damage or a blackmail offer — which is itself a new liability, continuing the chain. Blackmail is ledger content (one event type), not a system.

Desperation levers are the catch-up system: within-run recovery options exist but are priced as desperation, never offered as rubber-banding — every claw-back trades a visible resource for a corrosive liability (the payroll coinflip → governance ↓ → bribery vulnerability → blackmail chain). Catch-up and tragedy-generation are the same mechanism. There is no other catch-up: runs are short-median, and the next run is the catch-up.

Staff ride on this system: staff are AP-leverage with liability riders (ADR-0008) — a disgruntled ex-researcher is a secret entry, a whistleblower is an exposure event, a manager is insurance that shortens fuses on people-liabilities.

What this system delivers structurally

The exponential turn ladder: turn 15 is hard because of everything you did to reach turn 12 — deep runs are exactly as heroic as the PoE-badge philosophy needs.
Death attributability: your killer is traceable through your own ledger — "this is the bill for turn 2," manufactured structurally rather than scripted.
Skill expression: debt portfolio selection and sequencing — which liabilities you take, in what order, which you repay before the fuse burns. Triage-in-time.
The mortality guarantee candidate (ADR-0002): compounding interest ensures no immortal runs.

Boundary conditions (the failure modes to design against)

If every fix breeds a bigger problem, the game degenerates into an inevitability queue. Liabilities must be heterogeneous: different fuses, different currencies, some repayable, some only transformable.
A disciplined player must genuinely be able to run a lean ledger at the cost of tempo — the clean-hands path must exist even if it rarely tops boards.
No parallel economy. The ledger reads/writes existing resources (money, reputation, governance, AP, doom) only. If an implementation needs a new player-facing currency, it has left the design.

Beacons served / violated

Serves: MaRo Interaction (reads/writes ≥4 existing resources), Inertia (fuses are clocks), Surprise (exposures, defections), Catch-Up (desperation levers). Rams #10 (four issues, one mechanic).
At risk: Rams #5 (ledger UI must not become a spreadsheet — visibility of your own ledger can itself be partial; see inward-SA deferral, ADR-0008).