settled-reach/docs/workshops/wiki-review/round3-tracking.md

title, description, type, status, workshop, agent, round, created

title	description	type	status	workshop	agent	round	created
Round 3 Tracking — Long-Term Content Strategy	Theme proposals and synthesis from all 9 Round 3 contributor responses	workshop	archived	wiki-review		3	2026-02-12

Round 3 Tracking — Long-Term Content Strategy

Round focus: Long-term vision only. No v0.1 scoping. "What does the full game look like?"

All 9 contributors responded (8 design + SI production). Tyre's response was last.

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Theme Proposals

Agent	Proposed Universal Theme
Gore	"Cost of participation" — complicity is Sova-local
Mellanie	"Collective bargain" — each district has one, player inherits a position
Ozzie	"What do you owe the people around you?" — different voice per district
Miri	"What do systems do to people inside them?" — system failure modes vary
Nigel	Complicity scales — same question, different currencies
Paula	"Cost of connection / entanglement"
Gestalt	"Knowledge as burden" — moral texture emerges from config
Tyre	Theme-agnostic moral engine — theme as data, not code
SI	"Thematic palette over monolith" — 4-6 moral textures, districts compose

Consensus: Complicity is Sova-local. The universal theme is structural but unnamed. All framings are facets of the same insight. Lead has not picked canonical framing yet.

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Cultural Groups — Round 3 Proposals

Agent	Count	Organizing Principle
Miri	8-10	Settlement motivation + economic function
Gore	7	Civilizational philosophy
Gestalt	6-8	Heritage cluster with mechanical parameters
Mellanie	6 max	Cultural register (voice constraint)
Ozzie	8-12	Player-facing feel
Paula	9-13	Mechanical parameters
Tyre	~25 eventually	Reference data with distance model

Key tension identified: Heritage (ethnic roots) vs. settlement type (economic function) are two different axes being called the same thing.

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Content Patterns

Agent	Patterns Proposed
Gore (7)	FRIEND, MIRROR, ANCHOR, GHOST, CATALYST, THRESHOLD, REMNANT
Paula (5)	MIRROR, ANCHOR, SYSTEM, GHOST, CATALYST
Nigel (8)	FRIEND, MIRROR, HANDLER, WITNESS, TURNCOAT, CIVILIAN, OPERATOR, SKEPTIC

Key tension: Gore/Paula think thematically (story role). Nigel thinks functionally (gameplay role). Both valid.

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PC Archetypes

Agent	Count	Specific Archetypes
Gore	8	Worker, Investigator, Operator, Wanderer, Builder, Seeker, Guardian, Rebel
Ozzie	6	Operator, Investigator, Newcomer, Fixer, Believer, Remnant
Miri	2 universal + regional	Insider/Outsider + per-region specifics
Nigel	5	Smuggler, Detective, Administrator, Newcomer, Enforcer
Paula	8	Smuggler, Investigator, Merchant, Engineer, Administrator, Medic, Journalist, Newcomer
Gestalt	6	Smuggler, Detective, Politician, Guardian, Merchant, Civilian
Mellanie	6	Smuggler, Detective, Fixer, Medic, Newcomer, Elder
Tyre	4 (v1.0 cap)	Not enumerated
SI	4	Not enumerated

Recurring: Insider/Smuggler (all), Investigator/Detective (all), Newcomer (5 agents), Administrator (4), Merchant/Fixer (4), Guardian/Enforcer (3).

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Randomization

Nigel's Sacred/Profane/Middle Kingdom framework received broad support:

• Sacred = world physics (never randomize)
• Profane = pool-selected per seed
• Middle Kingdom = sacred structure, profane cast

Gestalt's 4 tiers: Structural, Dramatic, Local, Meta. Tyre: "Randomize social, fix spatial." Gore: Shuffle WHY the conspiracy exists as deepest lever.

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Scale

Agent	District Count	NPCs	Key Constraint
SI	20	300+	1-2 person-years, Tier 1 is bottleneck
Paula	20	~460	~21K hand-authored lines
Mellanie	20	—	6 cultural registers max in production
Gestalt	30+	—	8-12 weeks per district
Tyre	20	—	15-20 sprints platform, 9-11 sprints tooling

Note: These were all calculated at 20-district scale. The lead subsequently reframed to 300 worlds, fundamentally changing the production model from "hand-author districts" to "build generators fed by style briefs."

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Key Cross-Cutting Insights

1. Regional brief is the most important document (Miri, endorsed by all)
2. Template system IS the game; regional brief IS the content (Miri)
3. "Randomize context, author content" (universal consensus)
4. Tooling before scale (SI, Tyre, universal)
5. Cultural diversity = anti-metagaming (Nigel)
6. LLM-assisted Tier 2 expansion (Tyre) — write 10, generate 40
7. Paired authoring teams (Mellanie) — cultural + character specialist
8. Moral texture as deepest randomization lever (Gore)