Booting Your World
Package provenance — this chapter ships with the Ontology & Structure Engine. Provenance tag:
source-ontology-project. When loaded into a new world, grep the tag to find the engine's templates and instructions.
The engine is a module, not a world. Loaded into a fresh project, it does not assume a setting — it asks. The first conversation is a short questionnaire, and your answers determine everything that follows.
The vision pass
Setup opens with your own words, not a form. You're asked, conversationally, about:
- Scope — how much world, and how deep: one region, a continent, a whole cosmos.
- Intent — what the project is for: a single session, a campaign, an open sandbox, a ready module.
- Themes — what the world is about; the questions its stories ask.
- Narratives — the arcs, tensions, and hooks you want available to play.
- Flavor — what it feels like to be there; the sensory signature.
- Genres — secondary genre labels beyond the primary one.
Everything you say is written as you go into the World Vision scaffold — a normal, editable file. The scaffold is the recovery point: an interrupted setup loses nothing, and any later session resumes from it.
The core questions
| Question | What it sets |
|---|---|
| Genre | The scaffolding bias — fantasy grows magic and religion folders, science fiction grows technology |
| Magic level | Whether a magic system is recorded (none / subtle / common / pervasive) |
| World name | The namespace everything new is filed under |
| Setting | The founding lore chunk — the world's identity |
| Era | The temporal anchor every lore file carries |
| Tone | How content is presented — canon levels are read through the world's register |
Then the important one: the concept opt-in. The engine offers the full set of content domains a world might contain (the same families as Chapter 4) and you pick what your world includes. Everything you do not pick is declared absent — its folders stay empty on purpose.
What you get out
- The World Profile — the canonical identity: genre, setting, era, tone, intent.
- A lore tree for the genre, with the folders that matter.
- One starter file per selected domain — a toehold per choice.
- The founding lore chunk, linked to the profile both ways.
If the project already has a world when the engine loads (an existing campaign), nothing auto-merges: you say the word and the engine reworks the base campaign's content into its ontology — each rebuilt file tagged source-ontology-project.