From 39f385c7fbf6377142a405a12ed043c2ac21aab8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jeroen Schweitzer Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2026 12:33:04 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] docs(docs): add naming variety and axis independence to migration framework MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Adds Section 6.3 (Naming Variety) with guidelines for avoiding theme-park naming — max 30-40% Earth transplants, mix in founder names, local features, corporate designations, and evolved forms. Also adds foundational note clarifying that culture, politics, and economics are independent axes along corridors: systems can share any combination with neighbours without cultural branding. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 --- docs/design/cultural-migration-pressure.md | 18 +++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 17 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/docs/design/cultural-migration-pressure.md b/docs/design/cultural-migration-pressure.md index 29ba7835a..be48e556b 100644 --- a/docs/design/cultural-migration-pressure.md +++ b/docs/design/cultural-migration-pressure.md @@ -39,6 +39,8 @@ This process is powerful and noisy. It is powerful because it operates over six The result is corridors, not blocks. A cultural corridor means the dominant cultural inflection in a region — the language that shows up in place names, the food culture, the architectural forms, the holiday calendar — not a monoculture. Expect blending at the margins and exceptions throughout. +Critically: not every system in a corridor needs a cultural identity at all. Systems can share any combination of culture, politics, and economics with their neighbours — or none. A democratic mining system next to a democratic Australian-heritage mining system: same politics, same economy, different cultural flavour. A Portuguese-heritage fishing world next to an unlabelled transit hub: different culture, different economy, but both Assembly-compliant. The axes are independent. A corridor might be 40-50% culturally inflected, 20-30% sharing politics or economics with neighbours but culturally generic, and the rest exceptions or mixed. All patterns track mixed, never exclusively. + --- ## Part 1: The Four Cultural Corridors @@ -298,7 +300,21 @@ These corridors are tendencies, not rules. What follows is guidance on how often **The Perpetual Founder Stamp.** A Perpetual-class individual of a non-corridor cultural background founded this system and has never left. Their personal cultural identity has shaped the system continuously for centuries. The system is a reflection of one person's cultural sensibilities amplified across generations of influence. Use when: you want a system with unusual internal coherence, intense founding-personality mythology, and a governance structure that is all but impossible to separate from the founder's continued presence. -### 6.3 What Exceptions Signal +### 6.3 Naming Variety + +Cultural heritage should influence the *flavour* of a system's name, not make every name a literal Earth transplant. A corridor full of Portuguese place-names reads like a theme park. Real colonists name things after: + +- **Earth geography** — transplanted place-names (Caparica, Karoo). These happen but should not dominate. +- **Founding figures** — surnames of the expedition leader, the first governor, the Syndic executive who signed the charter. These are common and feel organic. +- **Local features** — descriptive names based on what the colonists actually found: the colour of the star, a geographic feature of the habitable body, an atmospheric phenomenon. These are the most naturalistic. +- **Corporate designations** — a company code or project name that stuck because no one bothered to rename it. Common in Wave 3-4 industrial systems. +- **Events** — named after something that happened during founding: a disaster, a discovery, a political moment. +- **Abstract or aspirational** — concepts, virtues, or aspirations the founders carried (Renaissance, Meridian, Bastion are core examples of this). +- **Corrupted or evolved** — a name that started as one thing and drifted over centuries of local pronunciation and usage until its origin is no longer obvious. + +The heritage shows in the *type* of name — a Portuguese-heritage system might name itself after a local river using Portuguese, or after the founding captain's surname — not in every system being named after an Earth city. Aim for no more than 30-40% direct Earth-geography transplants along any given corridor. The rest should be a mix of the above categories. + +### 6.4 What Exceptions Signal An exception should always tell a story, even if the player/reader never learns that story explicitly. The exception creates a question: why is this system different from its neighbors? That question should be answerable if someone investigates, even if the answer is buried in a company archive or a 400-year-old land grant record. Exceptions that exist for no reason undermine the setting's sense of depth. Exceptions that exist for historically plausible reasons reinforce it.