Deep People, Deep Places

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.

A world is only as alive as its people and as grounded as its places. Both have a structure for depth here — you don't have to know the structure to use it, but knowing it tells you what depth is possible.

People: describe, and the sheet follows

Every NPC and player character carries two structured blocks.

Psychology — the behavior matrices: the classic alignment axes (law–chaos, good–evil); the traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism; the darker traits somewhere between straightforwardness and the ends-justify-the-means; integrity and corruptibility — including, crucially, for whom and at what price; steadiness under pressure; and belief axes (tradition, economics, authority).

Appearance — the body itself: height, build, musculature, skin, eyes, hair, and the scars and details witnesses notice. Worn equipment lives in inventory, not appearance.

Neither block requires the axis names from you. Describe the person as you would to a friend:

"Tolliver is a tidy, careful ferryman who sees the toll as his right and the marsh clans as an annoyance — until the burning barges make the war personal."

The Assistant's sheets follow from your words; when a trait will matter at the table, ask for that axis.

People are mutable. The sheets describe how a person is actually played, not a contract written at creation; when play contradicts a sheet, the mask changes intentionally.

Species own the physical palette. Sex-based differences live on the species file, and an individual's appearance is drawn from that palette — so an unusually tall Rook reads as notable.

Places: ground them in the terrain taxonomy

Places stand on a shared classification vocabulary, so "marsh", "fen", and "bog" never fragment into unrelated concepts. A region or location references a terrain file (the reference list lives in /Terrains/) and carries terrain tags from seven axes: realm, medium, elevation, climate, habitation, terrain type, and refinements like water and edge.

Rules of thumb:

• Reference the dominant terrain; let the tags do the classification.
• Put the place's own state in its habitation field — a marsh may tend sparse, but this marsh is abandoned.
• Keep world-specific color — blighted, haunted, tidelocked — in the free tags field, not the classification.

Ask for a place the same way you ask for a person — concrete, sensory, with a tension in it — and the Assistant grounds it into terrain references, tags, and atmosphere.