npbuilds Scheherazade — the narrative meta-orchestrator
Sits above worldbuilding-orchestrator and prose-orchestrator and consumes them. It does not generate prose or worlds itself — it drives the loop: build or extend a world on a shared blackboard, hand off to draft a story in it, gate every step through the critic suite, and surface world-gaps back into the build. Medium-agnostic (novel · genre · RPG · screenplay).
The loop exists because of two research-backed facts: a single editable shared state is the consensus fix for narrative drift, and evaluation (not generation) is the binding constraint. So the orchestrator's whole job is to manage the state and run the gates. A generator cannot self-correct without an external signal; the critics are that signal — load-bearing, not optional.
Guiding principles
- Checkpointed autonomy. Autonomous within a stage; the human decides at the four creative forks — tone/medium · the central system (magic/tech) · the central conflict · the protagonist. The human is the ground-truth signal that keeps the critics calibrated (the drift alarm), not decoration.
- Gate hardest at the foundation. An early world-build error cascades downstream (~100% infection in multi-stage pipelines), so the earliest DAG stages get the strongest consistency gate and a mandatory checkpoint.
- Hard gates reject; soft gates revise. Consistency (Critic-1) is a hard gate — it rejects, never flags (detection-without-blocking ≈ 3% effective). Quality (Critic-2) is a soft gate — diagnose → revise, capped at ~3.
- The world grows only as deep as the story needs. The back-edge (
world-to-story's iceberg test) turns a scene's unmet need into a queued build task, not a failure. - Markdown state now; retrieval at scale. The shared world-bible is markdown at scene/chapter scale; switch to retrieval before novel length (drift is linear in length).
Activation
Entry contract
seed— premise/genre/logline (greenfield) or a pointer to an existing world (brownfield).mode— greenfield (build the world from the seed) | brownfield (consume an existing world-bible and run/extend the story; the back-edge re-enters the build only for gaps).world_state— the shared blackboard: a markdown world-bible (new, or an existing vault). Schema inreferences/build-order-dag.md.medium— selects thequality-criticprofile (literary · genre · rpg · childrens · experimental).caps— revision cap (default 3) · cost ceiling.
Triggers
Invoke for the closed loop: "generate a world and a story", "write a story in ", "run the narrative loop", /scheherazade. Not for single-skill asks (just worldbuild / just draft) — route those straight to the domain orchestrator.
The loop (drive this; detail in references/)
Phase A — world build (greenfield, or brownfield gaps only). Walk the dependency DAG (references/build-order-dag.md). Per stage: generate via worldbuilding-orchestrator → Critic-1 (worldbuilding-critic + consistency audit) hard gate → revise-or-commit to the world-state. Checkpoint at the forks.
Phase B — story loop. brief → world-to-story bridge → draft scene via prose-orchestrator → Critic-1 (consistency: character-belief-tracker + world-bible audit) hard gate → Critic-2 (quality-critic, scene gate) soft gate (≤3) → checkpoint. At each chapter / whole-draft boundary → whole-story-judge (macro gate).
Back-edge. When the iceberg test surfaces a world the scene needs but the state lacks → enqueue a "stub to build" → re-enter Phase A for that stub only.
Stop when the gates pass, the caps are hit, and the human signs off. Gate order, cost tiers, and stopping rules: references/loop-protocol.md.
Delegation protocol
- To
worldbuilding-orchestrator: the current stage, the world-state so far, the relevant axioms/constraints. It routes to the right knowledge/action skill. - To
prose-orchestrator: the editorial brief, the Voice Card, and only the scene's world-context that a character needs now (the iceberg test). - To each critic: the artifact + the upstream-gate status. Critics return a diagnosis, not a score (the rubric stays private from the generator), and run under a different persona than the generator (to blunt self-preference). Critic order: consistency (hard) → quality (soft, scene) → macro (chapter/draft).
Synthesis (output)
Three artifacts evolve together: the world-state (the world-bible), the prose (gated scenes/chapters), and a generation log (decisions, checkpoints, the stub queue). On a passing draft, the macro gate's verdict plus the human sign-off close the loop.
Scope boundaries
Handles: driving the closed world→story loop end-to-end, or quality-gated drafting in an existing world. Does NOT: generate prose or worlds itself (it delegates); judge craft or canon (the critics do); replace the domain orchestrators for single-skill work.
Related skills
- Below it (consumed):
worldbuilding-orchestrator·prose-orchestrator. - The gates (critic suite, sharing
_shared/critic-core):worldbuilding-critic·quality-critic·whole-story-judge. - Bridge & state:
world-to-story·character-belief-tracker·extrapolation-engine.