The Startup Checklist

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.

This engine is setting-agnostic, so it never assumes which concepts a world has. It asks. The startup questionnaire (see the Startup Protocol and the Startup Contract) opens with the vision pass — scope, intent, themes, narratives, flavor, genres, captured in the user's own words into the World Vision scaffold — then covers the core answers — genre, magic, tech, era, tone, intent and which game system the world runs on — and then asks the concept opt-in: which content domains the world should include. This chapter is that checklist — the full set of concept domains a simulated world might contain, so a booted world decides on every one of them up front instead of rediscovering gaps mid-campaign.

The rule: decide or declare

For every domain below, startup makes one of two moves:

• Decide — the genre needs it: create at least one file in the domain's folder (the tagged example files show the shape) and link it into the ontology.
• Declare — the genre does not need it: leave the folder empty on purpose and record the decision on the World Profile, either in conceptsIncluded (the opt-in list) or as a tag like no-planes, no-corporations, no-currency. An empty folder with a declared reason is a decision. An empty folder with no reason is a gap that will be re-litigated at the table.

The selection is asked, not assumed: the bootstrap wizard and the Startup Protocol both present these domains and let the user pick. Lore, the World Profile, Game Start, and GM Instructions are always created; everything else is opt-in.

The checklist is a scan, not a mandate. A one-shot needs far less than a sandbox; a historical game has no cosmology to invent; a cosmic-horror game may have only cosmology. The intent answer on the profile sets how deep the scan goes.

Space and world

People and society

Power, faith, and order

Conflict and time

Things, trade, and nature

Knowledge and play

Genre bias

• Fantasy — religion, cosmology, deity, magic-tradition, spell, flora, prophecy, affliction.
• Science fiction — celestial-body, technology, media, vehicle (space), currency (credits), faction (corporation), law.
• Horror — affliction, prophecy, cosmology (unknowable), weather, location (the place as threat).
• Historical — polity, noble-house, law, military-unit, currency, calendar, architecture.
• Modern — media, technology, law, faction, currency, trade-route.

Suggested, never binding: the user's pick is the final list.

The game-system step

Before the concept opt-in, startup pins the game system (see the Game Systems chapter): it presents the families — d20 (stat-and-class, roll high), d100 (skill-percentile, roll low), narrative (fiction-first, moves and clocks), wow-derived (MMO-style, item-level and roles) — and offers write your own. The pick is recorded on the World Profile as gameSystem (with gameSystemSummary for the internal summary), and execution scaffolds rule files per that summary. Only generate mechanics a system actually has.

At startup

1. Vision pass → World Vision scaffold — the writable, resumable record of intent.
2. Core questionnaire → World Profile completed from the scaffold.
3. Game-system step → gameSystem + gameSystemSummary on the profile.
4. Present this checklist as the concept opt-in; record conceptsIncluded on the profile.
5. Scaffold lore folders; create one starter file per selected domain (copy the shape, drop the tag).
6. Link: starter files get relatedLore, era, canonLevel.
7. Generate mechanic rule files per the game-system summary (Game Systems chapter).
8. Record declared-absent domains as tags so recall never hunts for them.