For decades, the Esteves Foundation presented itself as a protector of culture in Peniche. It supported local families, promoted bobbin lace and built a public reputation based on heritage, social responsibility and continuity. The Foundation appeared to safeguard a tradition that depended on the work of women across several generations.
This public image concealed the true purpose of its support. During the Estado Novo, the Foundation encouraged daughters and granddaughters of local families to produce a particular form of bobbin lace known as ERUDITA. The women believed they were preserving a cultural tradition and contributing to their households' survival. They did not know that the patterns had been transformed into a coded reporting system.
The code hidden in an ERUDITA piece could identify a person, a family connection, a location, or a suspicion of opposition to the regime. By producing the lace, the women were unknowingly transmitting information about their own family members. A completed piece could become an accusation without the maker understanding what she had communicated.
The Foundation used the daughters and granddaughters of the people it intended to report on. Their knowledge, labor, and trust were converted into an instrument of repression. They were not collaborators. They were innocent participants in a mechanism designed to conceal responsibility. Information extracted from the lace was used against relatives, who could then be questioned, arrested, imprisoned, disappeared, or killed.
The central hypocrisy of the Foundation lies here: it claimed to protect families while using their own daughters and granddaughters to expose them. It celebrated the lace as heritage while the same lace was being used to damage the people who sustained it. It later treated the continued production of ERUDITA as proof of cultural preservation, although that continuity had been built through manipulation, fear, and silence.
The drama of the game begins when fragments of this hidden system start to connect. Sofia, Daniel, Marta, Rui, Isabel, and Tomás are linked to the Foundation in different roles. Some are connected to victims. Others are connected to benefit, silence, public legitimacy, or collaboration. Tomás is the Saboteur, whose role is to obstruct a common understanding of the evidence and protect the interests tied to the official version of the story.
None of the six characters begins with the complete truth. Each carries only one fragment: a document, a memory, a suspicious payment, an incomplete prison record, a family testimony, a public statement, or a silence that was never explained. Alone, each fragment can be dismissed. Together, they begin to reveal the system used by the Foundation.
The Oracle has no responsibility for the crime and does not decide what the players should believe. It functions as the guardian of the archive. It retrieves records, identifies connections, and answers questions when asked. The responsibility belongs to the Foundation that created the system, to those who knowingly protected it, and to the people who must now decide what to do with the truth.
Sofia must confront the role she played in reinforcing the Foundation's public credibility. Her words helped portray it as a legitimate cultural institution. She did not know the Foundation's full criminal purpose, but once the evidence appears, she must face the possibility that her work helped protect the façade behind which the reporting system operated.
Public legitimacyDaniel searches for the truth about his father. He grew up believing that his father had gone to France. The damaged records suggest that this explanation may have concealed detention or transfer, but the surviving code is incomplete. Daniel represents the families whose losses were reduced to an administrative trace and whose private history was shaped by silence.
Loss · incomplete evidenceMarta carries a Foundation Funding Certificate connected to her father. The document proves that her family received a benefit, but it does not prove why. Her conflict lies in deciding whether she is willing to investigate the source of a benefit that helped her own family.
Benefit · inherited responsibilityRui represents those who suspected that something was wrong and remained silent. He did not create the system, but he saw enough to doubt the Foundation's innocence. His position raises the question of when fear and uncertainty cease to excuse silence and begin to sustain a crime.
Silence · fearIsabel carries part of the affected families' history. Her role connects the institutional records with the human consequences of the coded reports. Through her, the investigation must recognize that the women who made ERUDITA were not informants by choice.
Memory · victimsTomás, the Saboteur, works to prevent the fragments from becoming a shared conclusion. He does not need to prove that the Foundation was innocent. He only needs to keep the evidence separated, emphasize every uncertainty, and persuade the others that the truth is too incomplete, too damaging, or too dangerous to make public.
The SaboteurThe Human Players support the six virtual characters but do not become them. The virtual characters carry the personal histories, emotions, and evidence. The Human Players move through the real territory, inspect what they can, meet one another, and decide how the fragments fit together.
The first stage is individual. Each Human Player understands the case through the needs of one character. At that point, the story appears to concern separate problems: a missing father, a suspicious benefit, a misleading public narrative, an inherited family wound, a silence, or an attempt to protect the Foundation.
The pair encounters changes that alter the meaning of the evidence. One character's document may explain another character's loss. A Foundation report may be linked to a prison record. A payment may coincide with the persecution of another family. A family testimony may give meaning to an incomplete official code. The players begin to see that the separate stories were produced by the same structure.
The trio of encounters creates the moral conflict. The participants must move beyond the question of what happened to one family and consider what the Foundation did as an institution. Victims may demand public recognition. Those connected to possible collaborators may fear unjust accusation. Beneficiaries may resist examining the origin of what their families received. Silent witnesses may want more proof before accepting responsibility. Tomás uses these differences to prevent agreement.
The final gathering brings together the six perspectives and the accumulated evidence. The players must distinguish what is proven, what is strongly supported, and what remains unresolved. They do not need to erase every uncertainty before recognizing the criminal mechanism. The repeated pattern is the evidence: the Foundation commissioned ERUDITA pieces, the patterns carried coded information, the makers’ relatives were identified, and repression followed, while the Foundation continued to present itself as a cultural benefactor.
The hidden history becomes urgent because ERUDITA is under consideration for a UNESCO nomination. The nomination could recognize the women's skill, the value of the lace, and the continuity of the tradition. It could also reproduce the official narrative in which the Esteves Foundation appears as the institution that protected and preserved ERUDITA.
The discovery of the code makes a simple celebration impossible. ERUDITA is both a cultural achievement and the medium through which the Foundation committed its crime. The lace itself is not guilty, and the women who made it are not collaborators. Yet the heritage cannot be presented honestly if the nomination conceals that the makers were unknowingly used to report members of their own families.
The Human Players must therefore decide whether ERUDITA can be safeguarded without safeguarding the lie built around it. Their conversations in pairs, trios, and as a complete group are necessary because no individual position can resolve the conflict. The victim, the beneficiary, the silent witness, the public defender, and the Saboteur do not experience the truth in the same way. The final decision can only emerge when those positions confront one another.
Recognize the lace and its continuity — but risk preserving the Foundation's heroic façade.
Refuse a false narrative — but risk denying recognition to the women whose work was exploited.
Make recognition contingent on investigation, archive access and acknowledgment by affected families.
Recognize ERUDITA through a truthful narrative centred on the women, the victims and the manipulation of the code.
The drama is not simply that the Foundation collaborated with the Estado Novo. It is that the Foundation designed a system in which innocent women participated in the accusation of their own families without knowing it. Every ERUDITA piece carried the possibility that an act of cultural preservation was also an act of reporting. The same hands that preserved the family tradition could unknowingly provide the code used to imprison or destroy a family member.
When the truth is discovered, the characters and their Human Players must decide what position they will take. Will they expose the full history even if it damages the nomination? Will they protect the heritage while concealing how it was used? Will they reject recognition, suspend it, or transform it into an act of public justice? The game does not end when the criminal mechanism is understood. It ends when the players decide what should be done with that knowledge.