Gear & The Reference Web

Equipment is where the system's reference architecture proves its worth. A sword in SPAECIMH is not a sentence inside a character's notes — it is a typed, searchable object that other files point at, weigh, and price. When you build gear, you are building nodes in a web, and a well-formed node makes the whole web work.

The Equipment file

Each item is (name, category, value, weight, description, notes, image). Two of those fields carry real mechanical weight:

• category — one of Weapon, Armor, Gear, Consumable, Treasure. This enum is the system's way of sorting what a thing does. A Weapon and an Armor are handled differently in combat, and the master's combat rules key on the category, not on what you wrote in the description.
• weight — in pounds, for the whole bundle. Weight is what a character's Carry (kg) actually guards against. Price it honestly; a Treasure hoard and a Weapon have different relations to the carry formula.

value is gold by default — the Player's Handbook lets currency be setting-generated, so a sci-fi world may re-read it as credits. Keep the number in the field and let the fiction rename the unit; never bury "200 credits" as prose where a number belongs.

Armor and damage live at the intersection

The combat rules in the Player's Handbook resolve weapons by weight class (light 1d4, medium 1d6, heavy 1d8, extreme 2d6) and armor by absorption (leather 0, steel 4). These convert to real equipment entries:

• A Weapon entry should state its damage class in the description or notes — the master reads it to roll. Be explicit ("medium blade, 1d6"), because the category enum alone does not say which die it uses.
• An Armor entry should state its absorption value. Again, put the number where a build can find it.

None of this needs a schema field — the enum plus an honest description is enough for a reasoning master — but the number must exist somewhere the master reaches, not be implied by the item's name.

The reference direction matters

A character's inventory is a list of (item, quantity) where item names an Equipment file. The direction of the arrow is deliberate: characters point at gear, gear does not list its owners. Build the same way — when in doubt, put the reference on the thing that uses the other, not the thing being used. An object shared by many characters stays one file; each character's sheet names it.

This gives every reference three hard rules:

1. Name an existing Equipment file, or the chip breaks.
2. One row, one item. Quantity is a number on the row; it is not extra files.
3. Keep the web acyclic in spirit. A character references gear; gear references nothing back. Two files referencing each other is a sign you have built one concept as two.

Two ways a build goes quietly wrong

• A character's gear as prose. The sword described inside the inventory notes instead of as an Equipment file. The party wields it, but the system cannot weigh it, price it, or reference it. Fix: real file, real reference.
• The same item cloned per character. Two characters each carry "Steel Shortsword" as separate files. Now the web has two nodes for one concept and the weight/value logic can disagree. Fix: one Equipment file, two inventory rows pointing at it.

Gear is the easiest thing in the world to build and the easiest to build carelessly. Give every object its own typed file, state its numbers in reach of the master, and let the characters point at it.