Barrow and Castle share a kernel — a dead claimant whose appetite outlived them.
A market or a river has no corpse in it, so the other two families needed the
kernel to generalise, and it does: something wanted a thing, and something was
done to keep it that way. Only who "something" is changes.
TOWN, on village geometry. The appetite belongs to the place and the claimants
are offices — a Corporation, a Watch Committee, a Guild of Mercers. It wants to
be prosperous, respectable, safe or necessary, and it priced people out,
chartered them away or struck them from the rolls to stay that way. Motifs:
ledger, appearances, vigilance, thoroughfare.
FOREST, on forest geometry. The appetite belongs to the wood, and the claimants
are its own names for itself. It wants to be entered, fed, spread or left
uncounted, and it took people, grew through them, or let them wander. Motifs:
paths, tithe, reclaiming, trackless.
Settlements also needed their own naming rule. A barrow is named for its
occupant; a town is not — it has a name and the claimant merely runs it. Packs
declare placeNameStyle, so "The Town of Watch Committee" is now Cold Harrow, run
by the Watch Committee.
Three of fifteen requested themes are done. The remaining twelve are the same
job repeated rather than a design question, since all three kernels now exist.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Groundwork for many themes, plus the first new one.
A pack validator enforces every structural rule this project learned the hard
way: situations that render as broken English, decisions that gate progress with
no alternative, motifs too thin to fill six areas without repeating, rosters
that do not say what harms them. Fifteen packs cannot be hand-checked; this
checks them in a second.
Themes are now discovered from content/index.json rather than hardcoded, so the
CLI takes --theme and --themes, the Foundry dropdown fills itself, and packs
load on demand instead of all at once.
Castle: four appetites — to be feared, never to give ground, to be obeyed at
once, the name to go on — over barrow geometry, since a keep is rooms and
corridors. 168 kernels from its own claimants and accommodations.
Fixed a bug the second theme exposed: the question the bottom problem asks was
hardcoded against barrow's appetite ids, so every other theme fell through to a
generic "Well?". It lives on the appetite in the pack now, and the validator
requires it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tevansandClaude Opus 5