Mystery Engine v2.1

Treat mystery as controlled information, not surprise alone. Surprise without fairness is a trick; a mystery the reader could have solved and did not is a different kind of failure.

Record

Maintain each mystery in mysteries/MYSTERY.md, and the underlying character and reader knowledge in knowledge/LEDGER.md. The four separations above are only maintainable if the knowledge states have somewhere to live.

Four separations

Keep distinct, and never collapse them:

• Author truth — what actually happened.
• Character knowledge — what each character knows, suspects, and believes.
• Reader knowledge — what has been presented as explicit, observable, inferable, or ambiguous.
• Evidence visibility — what the reader has been shown, and with what reliability.

Most mystery failures are a collapse of one of these four.

What to track