Document metadata
type: workshop-module
status: open
module: RW-08
title: Employment-stage preparation
gate: Which three capacities learned during the reserve and employment stages directly enable terminal survival?
prerequisites: RW-01, RW-04, RW-05
RW-08: Employment-stage preparation
Purpose
Make the long middle train the exact abilities that win the ending.
Established
Sylvan survives for roughly ten years on an approximately $200,000 reserve, then enters a multi-environment employment stage. He must protect income, complete objectives, cooperate with a stable group, preserve agency, and develop reality-anchoring story tools while Samuel attacks his resources and credibility.
Four candidate capacity sets
- Resource discipline, source discrimination, refusal. Directly mirrors Samuel's failure, but may underuse the ensemble.
- Cooperation, distributed verification, repair. Strong social payoff, but needs a clear financial survival line.
- Project completion, evidence provenance, bounded technology use. Strong competence arc, but risks feeling procedural.
- Adaptive combination: one financial capacity, one relational capacity, and one evidentiary capacity recur at increasing difficulty. Broadest payoff with the least repetition.
Central author gate
Which three capacities learned during the reserve and employment stages directly enable terminal survival?
Choose exactly one financial, one relational, and one reality/evidence capacity.
Scene test
An early employment problem should look small but contain the same structure as the ending: limited resources, a manipulated explanation, pressure to control others, and a cheaper cooperative solution.
Adversarial test
The employment arc should not become unrelated workplace episodes. Each major stage must change what Samuel can attack or what Sylvan and Orzai can preserve.