---
uai: "1.0"
type: domain-memory
status: active
project: iarpg.com
updated_utc: "2026-07-19T05:00:00Z"
domain: tradecraft
---
# Fictional Tradecraft Systems
Tradecraft is represented as high-level game systems rather than practical real-world instruction.

## Player-facing systems

- **Cover coherence** — profession, history, relationships, competence, documents, financial behavior, vocabulary, and reason for access.
- **Access management** — legitimate presence, relationship capital, credentials, liaison, technical position, timing, and future usability.
- **Source handling** — motivation, access, reliability, protection, communication, validation, debrief, and continuity.
- **Surveillance abstraction** — exposure state, pattern risk, competing observation, route confidence, contact status, and abort decisions.
- **Compartmentation** — who knows the requirement, source, access path, operation, and resulting intelligence.
- **Communications** — authentication, availability, latency, compromise risk, loss of contact, and fallback channels.
- **Evidence handling** — observation, report, interpretation, hypothesis, provenance, confidence, contradiction, and reason code.
- **Counterintelligence** — anomaly detection, deception indicators, insider risk, source validation, and damage assessment.

## Guardrail

Explain why a system matters to the role-play. Do not publish step-by-step real-world tactics for unauthorized entry, evasion, targeting, coercion, exploitation, or collection.

## Deep links

- Cover identity taxonomy: https://iarpg.com/docs/report/cover-identities-and-tradecraft-in-espionage-executive-summary#taxonomy-of-cover-identities
- Maintaining cover and counter-surveillance: https://iarpg.com/docs/report/cover-identities-and-tradecraft-in-espionage-executive-summary#maintaining-cover-and-counter-surveillance-tradecraft
- Legal and ethical considerations: https://iarpg.com/docs/report/cover-identities-and-tradecraft-in-espionage-executive-summary#legal-and-ethical-considerations-mitigations
- Suspicion and behavioral congruence: https://iarpg.com/docs/report/systemic-subterfuge-architecting-a-geopolitically-neutral-classless-espionage-mmo#the-anatomy-of-suspicion-and-congruence
- Counterintelligence methodology: https://iarpg.com/docs/report/counterintelligence-directive-alliance-leak-investigation#data-collection-and-analysis-methodology