Talking to the Assistant
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 Assistant is your builder. You are the director. Everything it creates follows from how you ask, so the skill worth practicing is prompting — not prompt-engineering tricks, but knowing what kind of request produces what kind of result.
The five moves
| Move | Example | What comes back |
|---|---|---|
| Create | "Make a faction that controls the ferry toll." | One file, or a small linked cluster |
| Deepen | "Give Tolliver a personality and appearance." | The structured fields a person carries |
| Link | "Link the burning barge to the toll war and the fog." | New references threading the world together |
| Update | "The toll war is over; update the state file." | Current truth changed where it lives |
| Ask | "What do we know about the marsh clans?" | The relevant chunks, not a full dump |
Most of your building is Create and Deepen; most of your maintenance is Update; the health of the graph is Link. Ask for one thing at a time — a request for "everything about the world" fights the engine's chunking and comes back shallow.
Be concrete
Concrete beats abstract every time. Two requests for the same tavern:
"Add a tavern to the town." — one thin location file.
"The Brackwater Ferry Tavern: who runs it, what the regulars believe about the burning barges, and what's hidden under the floorboards." — a location, an NPC, a rumor-shaped lore chunk, and a hook, linked in.
Depth comes from your nouns. Name the place, the person, the tension; give the Assistant facts to attach.
Say what's true, and when
When a fact is canon — settled, players can rely on it — versus rumor — something someone believes — versus myth — what the world tells itself — say so. When a fact belongs to an era, say that too, so current truth and history never blur.
Link, don't restate
Ask the Assistant to reference a fact another file owns, not copy it. A duplicated fact is a future contradiction.
You can edit anything
Every file is a normal document. Change a name, a fact, a number directly, then ask the Assistant to continue. The files are your world's source of truth, and they are all yours.