How to Play This Engine

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.

You are not a player in the usual sense — you are the world's builder, and the world is the game. This engine is a memory for narrative and dice-driven games. It remembers a world for you — every place, person, law, rumor, and ruin — in a form a Game Master (human or agent) can query and trust. It is agnostic to game system: if you can describe a world, it can host that world.

Your instrument is the Assistant. You talk; it builds. You say "a frontier timber town on a dry limestone rise above the Mistveil Marshes, three days west of the old road," and the Assistant turns that into structured files — a World Profile, lore chunks, a faction, an NPC, a weather pattern — small, linked, and retrievable. You review, refine, and ask for more. That loop — describe, build, review, play, update — is the whole game.

What you're actually doing

Everything the engine stores is a small typed file. Four conventions make the memory work:

• One file, one fact cluster. A file is small enough to be retrieved whole. If you need two ideas, you need two files.
• Named for recall. File names carry a tag after the subject: Thornhollow-place is the place, Thornhollow-lore is its history, Thornhollow-state is what is true right now.
• Linked, not restated. A fact lives in exactly one file and other files point at it. No duplicated facts, no future contradictions.
• Truth and time stamped. Every claim carries a canon level (canon, established, rumor, myth, theory, retconned) and an era, so retrieval never presents rumor as fact or last war as this season.

The payoff is retrieval. When the GM asks "what do we actually know about the marsh clans?", the engine returns exactly the relevant chunks — not a wall of text mixing founding legend, last week's gossip, and the weather.

The shape of the game

1. Boot. The engine hosts exactly one world and asks until one is set up — the World Profile, the lore tree, concept domains, the founding lore.
2. Build. You prompt for content, family by family, and deepen what matters.
3. Play. The GM recalls the right facts from the right files, no more no less.
4. Evolve. What play changes, the files change — honestly, with canonLevel and era kept truthful.

Every file the engine ships with is tagged source-ontology-project. When you load it into a new world, grepping that tag finds the templates — the whole package in one place.