Keeping the World Honest
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 that is played changes. The engine's job is to change with it — accurately, and without rewriting history. This is the discipline of keeping the memory truthful.
Current truth lives in state files
Live facts belong in -state files, and they are updated the same session they change. The toll war ends: the state file's keyFacts change that session, so the next recall says the war is over, not that barges are burning.
Overturned claims are marked, not deleted
When an old claim is overturned it is set to retconned and the replacement is noted — never silently deleted. The knowledge base is a record of belief, not just of current fact; players who remember the old truth are not gaslit by a memory that pretends it never happened.
Events anchor to where, who, and when
Every event and memory carries three anchors: a location, the characters involved, and a date. That is what keeps session recall from drifting — a memory is never retrieved by pure similarity, because similarity recycles concepts and mixes sessions. Log play as events with their anchors.
Growing and evolving the world
New content is built in the world's namespace with the same conventions: name it for recall, keep it to one fact cluster, link instead of restating, stamp it with truth and era. The World Profile and World Vision scaffold are mutable — if the world's direction changes, update the profile and re-run the affected scaffolding; the engine adjusts existing content rather than silently overwriting it.
The legacy ladder
The engine never deletes without your say-so, and it prefers to keep example content as living templates. When a file's future is in question, the order of preference is:
- Reuse / retain — keep it as a style reference, or repurpose it into your world.
- Rename / rewrite — retitle a retained example into your world's namespace and replace its contents.
- Retire — move it to /Legacy/ as a holding state if it can neither be reused nor deleted.
- Delete — only with your explicit approval.
Any file the engine shipped with is tagged source-ontology-project — the provenance stamp that shows which parts of a merged project the engine owns.