code_of_conquest_dnd/docs/superpowers/specs/2026-07-12-content-track-design.md

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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.