Circle
The collective term for a group of player characters operating together within the Realm of Black Sun. Not a party. Not a team. A Circle implies equality and different perspectives: each member occupies a position relative to the others, and the shape they form together determines what they can perceive that none of them could perceive alone. A Circle of one is a point. A point has position but no perspective.
Game Architect
The person who constructs the reality the Circle inhabits. The term is not cosmetic. Where other systems ask someone to manage a story or referee a contest, Realm of Black Sun asks someone to build a world whose internal logic holds under interrogation, whose inhabitants possess motives the players have not been told, and whose deepest truths are earned through play rather than distributed through exposition. The Game Architect knows what is true. The Circle discovers what is true. The distance between those two conditions is the game.
Integration Points
The Techno'Magi's reservoir of operational capability. Integration Points (IP) represent the capacity to apply unified scientific understanding to the manipulation of reality: bending local physics, stepping through higher-dimensional geometry, interfacing with machine consciousness, reconstructing biological systems at the cellular level. The pool is finite, recoverable through meditation and rest, and scales with the practitioner's level of development. Every ability costs. The cost teaches economy. Economy teaches judgment.
Secretomania
The compulsion that defines Techno'Magi existence. An insatiable, metastasizing hunger for hidden knowledge that begins as intellectual curiosity and becomes something closer to biological addiction. Every Techno'Magi feels it. Every mystery solved reveals deeper mysteries concealed behind it. The hunger intensifies with knowledge gained; satisfaction sharpens appetite rather than dulling it. Secretomania cannot be cured, managed, or outgrown. It can only be fed or resisted, and resistance is temporary. The condition is not a flaw in the design. It is the design. Their minds were built for acquisition. Contentment with partial knowledge would require becoming something other than what they are.
Ninth Gate
The passage between baseline reality and the Hellish Spheres. Ninth Gates are held by Lesser Demons and take the form of puzzles calibrated to two drives: Pain and Order. The puzzle does not test the solver's skill. It tests their desire. The Gate opens only when the compulsion to open it has become structurally indistinguishable from the two impulses the puzzle was designed to cultivate. Once opened, the path remains until the puzzle is disengaged, and while the path holds, anything on the other side may come through. Ninth Gates do not invite. They select.
Eternity
The spirit world. Not a metaphor for duration; it is a place where time does not exist. Eternity is not the afterlife as most theological traditions describe it, not a reward or a punishment administered after death. It is dimension of experience accessible through specific contemplative operations. What is encountered there, and what encounters you, depends on the practitioner's preparation and on factors the practitioner does not control. Eternity is always capitalized because it is a proper noun. It is a place. It has weather. Heavens, Hells, Realms of Gods etc... all reside in Eternity.
Will Working
The consciousness expanding process through which a practitioner engages with the deeper structures of reality. Will Working is the methodology underlying the art, the fiction, and the game: a Discipline of sustained attention through meditation, lucid dreaming, and threshold states that produces encounters with figures, forces, and dimensions that do not originate solely from the practitioner's conscious invention. In the TTRPG, as in life, this is similar in effect to Magic, but it relies on expansive and deepened consciousness to control oneself and the world around oneself.
The Source
The central governing figure of Sanctuary Island. The Source commands near-unanimous approval among the island's citizens and walks even the most dangerous streets without escort, in complete safety. The nature of the Source's authority, the mechanism by which the Source is chosen, and the specific capabilities the Source possesses are not disclosed to outsiders. What is disclosed: the Source is trusted. By everyone. Whether this fact inspires admiration or unease depends on what the observer believes about power and the people who hold it. Outside of the TTRPG it is the person who stands at the metaphorical center of the center of all perceptions.
Entropy
The power that fuels the operations of the Hellish Spheres, the Black Arts of demonic entities, and the workings of those mortals who have bound themselves to infernal sources. Entropy is drawn from suffering: anguish converted into operational energy through mechanisms that the Techno'Magi can partially model but cannot fully explain. What most of Hell's denizens, worshipers, and allies do not know, or do not fully comprehend, is that Entropy is not merely a power source. It is a reality unto itself: an entire dimension whose substance is a living entity, at least as old as the current universe, perhaps older. Those who wield Entropy draw from something that is aware of being drawn from. Lucifer knows this. Lucifer is cautious. The rest are not.
Stacking
The mechanical principle governing proficiency accumulation in the D100 system. When a character attempts an action, all relevant proficiencies add at full value to the roll. No diminishing returns. No cap on the number of applicable skills. A character whose training spans multiple disciplines brings the entirety of that training to bear on a single moment. The system rewards breadth of competence over narrow specialization and produces characters whose capabilities grow in unexpected directions as connections between disciplines reveal themselves. Stacking is not a bonus. It is a philosophy of knowledge: everything you have learned matters, all at once, when it matters most.