Lore Enrichment

Lore enrichment — the page-topic checklist method

Lore is just nouns with connectivity. A page feels alive when it names specific people, wars, items, and places — and when those names point back. The codex is the substrate adventures are built on, so connectivity is gameability: add detail because it makes the page more runnable and opens a live hook (a dispute, a contested resource, an actionable grievance), never to fill a quota. The method has two halves: walk the checklist to find specific lore worth adding, then reciprocate every reference so the graph stays two-way.

Half 1 — Walk the topic checklist

For the page you are enriching, consider each topic-type. Not every topic fits every page; add only what earns its place.

• Famous individuals (person-*) — a founder, tyrant, hero, victim, current power-holder.
• Factions / organizations (faction-*) — guilds, orders, cults, houses, schools.
• Conflicts / wars / battles (event-*) — a named war this entity fought, caused, or suffered.
• Legendary items / artifacts (artifact-*) — a relic forged, wielded, or lost here.
• Locations / places — sub-sites, neighbors, ruins, landmarks.
• Historical events / eras (event-*, era-*) — when it rose, fell, or changed.
• Relevant peoples / races (race-*) — who lives here, who founded it, who it is hostile to.
• Extend as the world suggests — creatures, daemons, magic sources, materials. Any major page is a potential topic of another.

Specific beats generic, always. "A warlord razed the city" is dead. "Sythlen Vor razed it during the War of Broken Oaths to deny the Kethari their leyline" is alive — and creating those new nouns (the person, the war) is the point, not a side-effect.

Half 2 — Reciprocate every reference (two-way)

When your prose names another entity, you owe it two things:

1. A prose back-reference (always, primary). The named entity's body must mention the relationship from its own side. One-way prose references are the defect this method prevents. If the named entity does not exist, create it.
2. A codex edge, whenever the relationship fits an edge kind — and most connective relationships do. The current graph is ~90% spatial (within/borders); the non-spatial edges (worships, foundedBy, participatedIn, allyOf, ruledBy, caused, wields...) are exactly the connective tissue this method exists to add. Wire the most specific kind that fits.

Author edges one direction only — the build computes the back-edge automatically. The prose back-reference is what you author on the other page, not a second edge.

Prereqs — read these, don't restate them

• Edge families/kinds + one-direction discipline: .claude/rules/entity-relations.md
• Creating a new entity (id rules, frontmatter, body): .claude/rules/entity-files.md; sentinel blocks: content/codex/entities/CLAUDE.md
• Purpose and style (gameable substance, voice, banned vocab, burstiness): docs/worldbuilding/lore-style-guide.md
• Locked magic canon (closed four-source roster): docs/worldbuilding/world-systems-invariants.md
• Build + lint + never-run-two-builds: .claude/rules/codex-cli.md and root CLAUDE.md
• Scholar attribution (approval-gated blockquotes): .claude/rules/scholar-attribution.md