Closes the Hollow King arc with a solo one-shot boss fight, reached via
`!expedition start epilogue` (intercepted before the zone/loadout
machinery). Unlock: all 24 journal pages found + both Tier-5 zones cleared.
- Encounter: runZoneCombat + renderBossOutcome, the arena's own pattern —
no supplies, no walk, no party, no new mechanics. The stat block is
Belaxath's (the abyss boss whose gate "lets one thing come home")
re-dressed as the King returned in full, HP ×1.25 for a capstone; the
ability/AC/CR carry over unchanged.
- Reward-once: first clear grants a unique title ("Kingsbane") + one
Legendary + a games-room notice; later clears are a flavour-only
rematch. The flag is a dedicated player_meta.epilogue_cleared column,
latched by an atomic UPDATE (never the bulk save) so the monotonic
false→true can't be clobbered — same discipline as D1a's journal
bitmask. A loss costs a death, as any boss fight does.
- Title is written after a fresh character reload so runZoneCombat's
post-fight HP persist isn't overwritten (the survivalist-milestone
gotcha).
Golden byte-identical; go test ./... green.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017mEwUmmS7aQTP2NQXj6rUa
- Boss epilogues: a 2-3 sentence campaign capstone per zone boss, tying
each kill to the Hollow King arc. Appended to the boss-down moment in
both close-out paths (finishCombatSession solo, finishPartyWin party),
gated on the boss room (!elite) so it fires for any boss kill —
expedition or legacy !zone — and never for elites or the arena (which
has no ZoneID entry). Forest of Shadows is the King himself; its
epilogue frames the fall as a shed shell, leaving the arc for the finale.
- TwinBee digest reactions: a journal page found mid-expedition writes a
"journal" log beat; the end-of-day digest emits one first-person,
deterministically-picked TwinBee line reacting to the day's pages. No
net-new DM — it rides the existing night-camp digest.
Golden byte-identical; go test ./... green.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017mEwUmmS7aQTP2NQXj6rUa
First slice of the N5 story layer. Adds a 24-page serialized campaign
threaded through the zones as collectible journal pages.
- Storage: one journal_pages INTEGER bitmask on player_meta (bit i ==
page i+1). DEFAULT 0 is correct for every existing row, so no bootstrap.
Grants are an atomic bitwise-OR (INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE SET
journal_pages = journal_pages | excluded.journal_pages) so a page found
mid-expedition can't be lost to a stale character save. Journal pages
are therefore grant-only + overlay-read, never in the bulk upsert.
- Drop seam: elite kills roll a page (22%, tunable) in dropZoneLoot,
gated on isElite — bosses get epilogues (D1b), not pages. Not on
SimulateCombat's path, so TestCombatCharacterization is byte-identical.
- Viewer: !adventure journal renders found pages in story order with runs
of missing pages collapsed to a single "…".
- Catalog + bitmask helpers + render live in the new
adventure_flavor_campaign.go; the pages are in-world found artifacts,
not TwinBee's voice.
Golden byte-identical; go test ./... green (incl. a real-DB round-trip
that pins the atomic OR + overlay read).
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017mEwUmmS7aQTP2NQXj6rUa
