---
name: tension-engine
description: Build and audit meaningful tension through stakes, uncertainty, risk, pressure, information gaps, and credible consequences. Use when danger feels hollow, outcomes feel certain, or scenes are nominally dramatic without real stakes.
---
# Tension Engine v2.1

Track what can be lost, what is unknown, what can change, why it matters, and what pressure is currently active. Tension is not intensity; it is a credible possibility of loss.

## Foundations

Tension requires all of:

- **Stakes** — something the characters would genuinely lose.
- **Uncertainty** — the outcome is not settled in the reader's mind.
- **Pressure** — a force acting now, not merely a condition.
- **Credible consequence** — the danger can actually arrive.

A scene missing any one of these fails differently. No stakes means indifference. No uncertainty means suspense without fear. No pressure means a situation rather than a scene. No credible consequence means announced danger, which reads as noise.

## Kinds

Distinguish where useful:

- **Anticipation** — something is coming.
- **Suspense** — uncertainty about what.
- **Dread** — certainty about a bad outcome.
- **Curiosity** — desire to know.
- **Conflict pressure** — opposing aims in direct contact.
- **Urgency** — a shrinking window.

Different kinds need different instruments. Suspense dies if the outcome is revealed early; dread dies if the outcome is uncertain. Using one where the other is needed is a common failure.

## Record

Maintain audits in `tension/TENSION.md`, including the four-foundations check. A scene missing a foundation fails differently from a scene with weak tension, and the record should say which.

## Detection

- **Fake tension** — danger repeatedly threatened with no believable consequence; the threat has been made so often it cannot land.
- **Empty threats** — a character announces consequences the story never delivers.
- **Outcome certainty** — the reader knows who wins well before the scene does.
- **Manufactured danger** — threats invented to raise intensity rather than arising from the situation.
- **Inverted stakes** — the story treats a real loss as unimportant and an inconvenience as dire.
- **Pressure without agency** — characters are buffeted by events and cannot act.

## Build

Raise tension by narrowing options, shortening time, removing information, increasing cost, or making the outcome depend on a decision — not by increasing volume or adding adjectives. The most reliable escalation is loss of options: what the character could do at the start is no longer available by the end.

## Coordination

Use `pacing-engine` for tempo, `consequence-engine` to make stakes real, `reader-knowledge` for information gaps, `mystery-engine` for withheld outcomes, and `battle-choreography` and `tension-engine` together for action sequences.