Innocence
In the worldbuilding of a detective role-playing game, an innocence is a political figure who functions as the literal embodiment of History — the highest rank of historical personage in its setting, usually rising to rule over much of the world. The title is granted and recognised by others rather than claimed, and some who hold it prove to be not entirely human. It makes the great-figures-shape- eras theory of history a concrete, supernatural fact of the fiction.
In Disco Elysium's worldbuilding, an innocence (or innocentic) is an international political figure who functions as the literal personification of History — the highest category of historical personage in Elysium, a great-man-of-history made ontologically consequential. Traditionally an innocence assumes supreme rule over the Occident or the wider world; the title is conferred-and-recognised rather than self-claimed, and some innocences turn out to be not entirely human in ways the game does not fully resolve.
Etymology§
Innocence used in an unusual sense — closer to innocent of history's degradation or uncorrupted exemplar than to innocence-as-naivety. The game's writing leans on the classical Latin sense (innocens, harmless, blameless, pure) inflected through ecclesiastical and feudal-political registers. The great-man-of-history frame the construct uses is being explicitly modelled and explicitly problematised.
An innocence is the in-fiction device by which the game makes the great-figures-shape-eras theory of history dramatically visible. Franconegro ruled five centuries before the game's present and is the innocence of militarism — credited with ending serfdom, codifying hereditary rule, establishing the Reál as the global reserve currency, and inventing the concept of the nation. Dolores Dei ruled three centuries ago and is the innocence of interisolary travel and the connected world; she is the figure most directly associated with the discoveries that produced modern Elysium, and within the game's present century she is widely considered the greatest of all innocences.
The worldbuilding move is deliberately in tension with the Mazovian historical materialism the game's communist politics rests on. Innocences are the great-man-of-history frame personified, while Mazov's theory says history is determined by material conditions. The unresolved tension is the game's: the innocences are real in the fiction's metaphysics, with confirmed supernatural attributes (Dolores Dei was observed by a guard to forget to breathe for ten minutes and to be unnaturally warm), and the Mazovian frame has to either incorporate them or reject them. The infra-materialist variant of Mazovianism is one attempted incorporation.