# Content track — design **Date:** 2026-07-12 **Status:** approved (design); implementation = a docs restructure + one code/content item (currency) Folds the authored content of the game — lore, economy, items, quests, the map — into a tracked, bounded track alongside the systems roadmap, so the authoring work is countable rather than open-ended. --- ## Problem `docs/roadmap.md` sequences **systems** (M0–M9). Content appears in it only implicitly — "item seed-data", "the quest model", "shop economy" — never as work with a size. `content/lore/canon-roadmap.md` tracks **canon** but is thin: an "Authored" list and a three-bullet "Pending". So the content needed for a finished game — lore, an economy, every weapon, armour piece, consumable and trinket, quests, the map — is untracked and unbounded. It *looks* infinite, because nothing bounds it. That is the actual problem to solve: not "write more content", but "make the content finite". ## Approach **Demand-driven content, gated by the milestone that consumes it.** Content is not authored to completeness; it is authored to the requirements of the next system milestone. The cure for overwhelm is not a longer list — it is a list with an end. Two roadmaps, cross-linked, with clear ownership. Rejected alternatives: - **One roadmap** (fold content into `docs/roadmap.md`) — the roadmap becomes huge, and content that serves no milestone (pure lore) has no home. - **Content-first** (author the world broadly, then build systems against it) — authors content no system has yet demanded; the volume is the problem. - **Content-type tracks** (separate lanes for lore / items / quests / map) — mirrors how the work *feels*, and is the structure most likely to read as four infinite parallel lists. ## The slice The demand comes from a **vertical slice: one town + one dungeon.** The smallest thing that is a *game*. Every system (creation, combat, dialogue, inventory, shop, quest log, map) is exercised exactly once, against real content. Breadth afterwards is **repetition of a proven shape**, not invention. Adding a second town becomes a known quantity of work against a known template. That is what ends the overwhelm permanently — not this slice, but what the slice teaches about the cost of the next one. Rejected: **one region** (3–4× the authoring, before the shape is proven) and **systems-first with placeholder content** (tunes an economy with fake items, tests dialogue with fake NPCs; every system pays a second pass when real content lands). --- ## 1. Doc structure | Doc | Owns | |---|---| | `docs/roadmap.md` | **Systems.** M0–M9, unchanged in shape. | | `content/roadmap.md` | **Content.** Spine · Bill of Materials · Backlog. | - `docs/roadmap.md` gains one line per milestone M4–M9: **"Content it consumes →"**, pointing into the content roadmap's BOM. - `content/lore/canon-roadmap.md` **moves to `content/roadmap.md`**, leaving a pointer behind. The move is load-bearing: an items-and-prices table does not belong under `lore/`, and the file stops being only about canon. The content roadmap has exactly three sections, and **only one of them is ever the work**: 1. **Spine** — the slice's world. Authored once; gates everything downstream. 2. **Bill of Materials** — a countable checklist, per milestone, of what that milestone consumes. Numbers, not vibes. 3. **Backlog** — everything the slice does not need. Named so it is not lost; parked so it is not looming. ### The rule > **Never author anything that is not in the Bill of Materials.** An idea that arrives goes to the Backlog, and is then no longer carried. The Backlog is not a debt. It is where ideas go to be safe. --- ## 2. The Spine Greywater Docks and one dungeon — the cosmology (`content/lore/cosmology.md`) touching ground for the first time. - **The town** — **Greywater Docks.** A rot-black wharf where the river meets the sea trade; everyone owes someone. **~6 NPCs:** Fenn (promoted from M2 test fixture to real NPC), the harbourmaster, a fence, an innkeeper, a dock rough, one more. - **The chain** — **"The Missing Ledger,"** extended from the existing hook. Town → road → dungeon → back. Four objectives. - **The turn** — the debt Fenn cannot cover is a **blood** debt. The harbourmaster is named in the ledger because he is the one *collecting*. The dungeon is the harvest site. - **The patron** — **Ghaul the Yoke.** He is already, by name, the king of debt and bondage; a ledger of what men owe is his liturgy. This makes the quest chain and the cosmology **the same object** rather than two things bolted together, and gives `rule.blood-price` its first concrete instance. - **The dungeon** — the harvest site. One enemy family (the yoked) + a boss. **Adopting Greywater, not replacing it.** Fenn is the NPC the aliveness question was actually answered with (M2, live-proven): frightened, aggrieved, covering it with irritation. The ledger hook already has teeth. The slice's job is to make Greywater *deep*, not to make it *new*. --- ## 3. Bill of Materials Countable. This is the anti-overwhelm device. | Milestone | Content it consumes | Count | |---|---|---| | **M4** creation | Origins, calling blurbs, the Bloodsworn's patron choice | ~4 | | **M5** combat | 1 enemy family (4 units) + boss; abilities for the 3 POC classes | ~14 | | **M6** dialogue | 6 NPCs — persona + `knowledge[]` + gated topics (§6) | ~6 | | **M7** inventory | 6 weapons, 4 armour, 3 consumables, **1 cursed item** (+STR / −LCK — §7 says day-one) | ~14 | | **M8** world | 3 map locations + the road; shop stock + the **price table in copper**; the quest chain | ~8 | | **M9** flavour | Authored fallback per AI surface (§13); shrine + Luck-drift events; humiliation seeds | ~10 | **≈56 discrete authored pieces for a complete, playable game.** An estimate, and likely optimistic — but an estimate with an end, which is the entire point. Explicitly **not** in the slice: rings, amulets, trinkets. A second town. The other six kings and their cults. All parked in the Backlog. --- ## 4. Economy — two systems (§18) The economy is not one thing. Per charter §18 ("when adding a system, state which side of §2 it falls on — if it is both, it is two systems"): - **The loop is code** (§2: state) — purse, buy/sell, the ~40% fence rate, gritty disabled-CTA reasons. Already sequenced as M8's *Shop economy*. - **The numbers are content** — what a shortsword costs, a night at the inn, an ale, the quest's purse. These live in the BOM as the **price table**. ### Currency model ``` 1 gold = 100 silver = 10,000 copper 1 silver = 100 copper ``` **Gold is scary.** At 10,000 copper to the gold, a peasant's whole life is copper, a mercenary's fee is silver, and a gold coin is a plot point. The party counting coppers for an inn bed is §3 grit, and Brannoc has an opinion about it. **This is a change, not a new thing — and it has a client consumer.** It lands as its own small item **before M7**, cheapest now while `content/world/items/` contains exactly two files: - A `Currency` value type — **store everything in copper**, format only at the display edge (`12g 40s 8c`). - `coin.json` → real denominations; all prices re-denominated. - The Main Window shell's command-bar purse updated (it currently shows a flat gold value). *§2: state · depends on nothing · goal: money that means something.* --- ## 5. Process - Each BOM line is authored through the **`/world-building` skill** — it reconciles against existing canon, writes the build tool's source format, and verifies the build stays green. - **Adopting Greywater means authoring it upward.** The hand-written JSON under `content/world/{locations,quests,npcs,items}` becomes `content/lore/greywater.md`, and `python -m content_build` emits `world/` from it. - **The build tool needs two new namespaces: `item` and `quest`.** Its legal namespaces today (`tools/content_build/model.py`) are `town`, `place`, `region`, `faction`, `person`, `rule`, `rumor`, `fact`, `secret`, `npc` — so **locations are already modeled** (`town`/`place`/`region`) and only items and quests fall outside it. Adding those two namespaces (model, emit, resolve) is a prerequisite of the M7 and M8 BOM lines, and is done against content that already has tests. - **Moving or deleting generated content is a client change.** `content/world/**` has a client consumer: `client/scripts/content/content_db.gd` (via `client/scripts/harness/npc_harness.gd`) and its GUT tests in `client/tests/unit/test_content_db.gd`. The Duncarrow lesson, applied preemptively — check `client/` before any content move. --- ## Consequences - Content becomes **countable and bounded**. "All the items" becomes fourteen. - The cosmology stops being abstract — Ghaul, the blood-price, and possession all land in the slice's quest chain. - The build tool gains `item` and `quest` namespaces, completing the content model (locations already exist as `town`/`place`/`region`). - The currency change jumps the queue ahead of M4, because it is cheapest while the item set is nearly empty. - The Backlog absorbs everything the slice does not need, so it can be forgotten without being lost. ## Out of scope Authoring the slice's actual content — this spec builds the **container**. Each BOM line is its own `/world-building` session. The Greywater canon session (town, NPCs, the ledger chain's four objectives, Ghaul's harvest site) is the next piece of work, not part of this one.