Worldbuilding

SKILL.md — The Worldbuilding Skill

The operational procedure an agent (or human) follows for any lore task. This is the skill; SYSTEM.md is the substrate it operates on; TASTE.md is the judge it answers to.

When this skill activates

Any task that creates or modifies universe content: new factions, characters, places, eras, legends, item text, cosmology, naming, timeline events, encyclopedia pages.

The procedure

0. Load the substrate (always, before writing a word)

1. Read .arcanea/lore/CANON_LOCKED.md — the vault.
2. Read the ontology primitives and state your new concept as a one-sentence stance toward them (SYSTEM.md §3). If you cannot, stop and escalate.
3. Check the mystery ledger — does this task risk closing a protected mystery?
4. Check the naming registry — which phoneme family does this content live in?
5. Search existing lore for collisions (grep names, concepts, frequencies, dates).

1. Research before invention

• Recall first (vault, fragments, prior staging docs). Invent only what recall can't supply.
• For craft questions ("how do the greats do X?"), consult BEST_PRACTICES.md and, for live encyclopedia research, the Lore Atlas MCP (docs/lore-atlas-mcp/SPEC.md) — inspiration flows from architecture, never bricks (no protected names, no verbatim text, no 1:1 character mappings).

2. Design at vault level

Write the STAGING doc first (.arcanea/lore/<CONCEPT>.md), with the standard header:

> Status: STAGING ⏳ — Awaiting Creator approval
> Guardian Alignment: <which of the Ten this touches>
> Design Lineage: <archetype adapted, with IP-safety note>
> Touches LOCKED canon: <No (additive) | Yes (STOP — Creator gate)>

Required sections: the concept · canonical discipline ("what this is NOT") · faction five-requirements if applicable (identity / visual grammar / power grammar / mission / internal tension, per FACTIONS.md) · story seeds (≥5) · staging log.

3. Write the fragment surface

Only after the vault doc exists. Every fragment gets a narrator and a bias. Deliver the same load-bearing facts through ≥3 viewpoints. Book texts follow the Library register (elevated but accessible; ends with a practical Teaching).

4. Cross-link or it didn't happen

Update: story-engine arc ties, faction cross-refs, timeline precedence, naming registry, mystery ledger (if new protected mysteries were minted).

5. Gate before ship

• Canon check: no contradiction with any LOCKED truth. (Contradictions between fragments are fine if intentional and logged.)
• Taste check: run TASTE.md's refusal list and restraint tests.
• IP check: names original? expression original? mechanics-as-method only?
• Mystery check: ledger intact?
• Then: PR as STAGING. Never self-promote to LOCKED. Promotion is the Creator's /lock-decision, always.

The prime moves (from the research, internalized)

1. Fragment-first — write atoms, not essays; the essay is for the vault only.
2. Narrator always — nothing in-world is spoken from nowhere.
3. Stance, not sprawl — new content is a stance toward existing primitives.
4. Redundancy by design — assume 20% corpus visibility.
5. Precedence, not dates — "X before Y because Z."
6. Names carry data — phoneme family = faction metadata; status-names are earnable.
7. Mysteries are budgeted — the unanswered question is a feature with an owner.
8. Legible cause-and-effect for wonder — discovery reads as a dependency chain with an emotional anchor (the roadmap principle).
9. Antagonists get defensible premises — map ideology onto capability; resolve by synthesis where the winning method fulfills the loser's deepest value.
10. Wonder through naive witnesses — let a character see the miracle for the first time.
11. Trust is bought with delivered artifacts — factions earn belief inside the community's own rules.
12. Sharing compounds, hoarding decays — knowledge economics as faction physics.

Anti-patterns (hard refusals)

• Closing a ledger-protected mystery "because the scene needed it."
• Inventing an eleventh Gate, an eighth House, a new origin class, or a second true antagonist. (Closed sets are closed.)
• Borrowed bricks: protected names, near-verbatim text, recognizable 1:1 character mappings, branded terminology from other franchises.
• Omniscient-narrator fragments. Power without cost. Lore that exists to explain rather than to ache.
• Self-promoting STAGING to LOCKED.