settled-reach/docs/workshops/wiki-review/round1-miri.md

Workshop Round 1 — Miri (Worldbuilder / Setting Designer)

Topics assigned: 3 (Regional Style Guide + Krenn System Cultural Brief), 4 (Growth Planning / Wiki Scaling)

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Topic 3: Regional Style Guide — Pattern + Krenn System Brief

Part A: Regional Style Guide Template

This template defines what a cultural brief for any star system or settled region must contain. The purpose is not an encyclopedia entry — it's a content authoring tool. Writers, designers, and procedural generators need to know what names sound right, what signs look like, what food gets served, and what swear words people reach for.

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REGIONAL STYLE GUIDE — TEMPLATE

# [Region Name] — Regional Style Guide

## 1. Heritage Profile
- **Founding cluster:** Which Earth-origin cultural groups organized the initial settlement?
  (Be specific: not "European" but "Upper Volga Russian + Finnish + Estonian, with a
  secondary Dutch maritime-commercial contingent")
- **Settlement era:** When in the colonization timeline was this region settled?
  (Early settlers have deeper drift; recent settlements are closer to Earth patterns)
- **Settlement motivation:** Economic (resource extraction, logistics hub, agricultural),
  ideological (religious community, political separatists, philosophical project), or
  institutional (government outpost, research station, military)?
- **Secondary populations:** Who arrived later? Corporate transfers, economic migrants,
  refugees from other systems? These layers create cultural friction and linguistic mixing.
- **Syndic presence:** Which commercial entities shaped the economy, and what corporate
  culture did they bring? (Syndic-founded settlements have corporate naming in public
  infrastructure)

## 2. Naming Conventions

### 2a. Personal Names — First Names
- **Heritage pool:** Which Earth-name traditions are the dominant source?
  Give 15-20 example first names (mix of masculine, feminine, and gender-neutral
  as culturally appropriate).
- **Phonetic signature:** What makes a name "sound right" for this region?
  (Syllable count, consonant/vowel balance, stress patterns, characteristic sounds)
- **Drift patterns:** How have names evolved from their Earth origins?
  (Shortening? Sound shifts? Blending between heritage pools? Novel coinages?)
- **Generational layers:** Do older residents have more traditional names?
  Do younger generations use more drifted/blended names?

### 2b. Personal Names — Family Names
- **Structure:** Patronymic? Fixed surname? Clan name? Occupational?
  Matronymic? Double-barreled? None?
- **Usage rules:** When is the surname used? (Formal contexts, authority interactions,
  legal documents, never in daily life?)
- **Heritage pool:** 10-15 example surnames with origin notes.
- **Drift patterns:** How have surnames changed? (Simplified spelling, dropped
  patronymic suffixes, compound names shortened, adopted place-names?)

### 2c. Place Names
- **Pattern:** Heritage-language descriptive? Founder-named? Corporate-branded?
  Functional-industrial? Numeric/grid?
- **Register shift:** Is there a formal name vs. informal name pattern?
  (Official registry name vs. what locals actually call it)
- **Examples:** 8-10 place names at different scales (system, planet, station,
  district, street-level, business name).

### 2d. Business & Institution Names
- **Corporate naming:** Do Syndic businesses use heritage names, functional names,
  or brand names? Are there legacy businesses with older naming conventions?
- **Informal businesses:** What naming pattern do owner-operated establishments follow?
  (Owner's name? Descriptive? Ironic? Heritage-language?)
- **Institutional naming:** How are government, Commission, and Assembly entities named
  locally? (Formal institutional name vs. colloquial shorthand)

## 3. Language Echoes

### 3a. Substrate Language
- **Primary heritage languages:** Which languages left traces in daily speech?
  (Most regions speak Concordat Standard; the substrate is what leaks through)
- **Survival domains:** Where do heritage words survive?
  (Profanity, food, family terms, weather/environment, workplace slang, endearments)

### 3b. Lexicon
- **10-15 heritage words** that persist in daily speech, with meaning and context.
- **5-8 slang terms** that are locally distinctive (may or may not have heritage origin).
- **Profanity pattern:** What do people swear by? (Heritage oaths? Station-specific
  references? Technology curses? Religious/philosophical?)
- **Greeting/farewell conventions:** Heritage-influenced or purely local?
- **Terms of address:** How do peers, subordinates, superiors, and strangers address
  each other?

## 4. Aesthetic Markers

### 4a. Architecture & Interior
- **Construction style:** What does residential space look like? (Heritage decorative
  traditions, or purely functional station architecture?)
- **Personal space decoration:** What do people put on their walls, lockers, shelves?
- **Public space texture:** Signage style, street/corridor decoration, public art,
  graffiti conventions.
- **Color palette tendencies:** Are there culturally preferred colors in clothing,
  signage, decoration?

### 4b. Food & Drink
- **Heritage cuisine:** What food traditions survive? (Often the most persistent
  cultural marker — food outlasts language)
- **Station adaptations:** How has heritage cooking adapted to station-available
  ingredients? (Synthetic protein replacing traditional proteins, station-grown
  vegetables replacing regional produce)
- **Drink culture:** What do people drink? Heritage beverages adapted or replaced?
  Local brewing/distilling traditions?
- **Eating customs:** Communal? Private? Shift-based? Formal meal times or grazing?

### 4c. Dress & Appearance
- **Work clothing:** Standard-issue or culturally influenced?
- **Off-duty dress:** Heritage-influenced? Station-practical? Status markers?
- **Visible cultural markers:** Jewelry, tattoos, hairstyles, augmentation
  aesthetics (lattice port customization, visible bionics)?

### 4d. Music & Entertainment
- **Heritage music traditions:** What survived? (Often fragments — a scale, a rhythm,
  an instrument sound that gets remixed into contemporary forms)
- **Local entertainment:** What do people do for fun? (Card games, sports, Meridian
  feeds, social gathering patterns)
- **Performance/storytelling traditions:** Any heritage oral or performance culture?

## 5. Social Structure

### 5a. Trust & Hierarchy
- **Trust model:** How is trust built? (Shared labor? Shared risk? Time? Family
  connection? Institutional credential?)
- **Authority signals:** How is authority communicated? (Naming conventions, body
  language, spatial positioning, dress, speech register?)
- **Insider/outsider dynamics:** How are newcomers treated? How long until they're
  "from here"?

### 5b. Community Norms
- **Privacy expectations:** What's public, what's private? What questions are
  appropriate, what questions are rude?
- **Labor solidarity:** How do workers relate to each other and to management?
- **Attitude toward institutions:** How do locals view the Assembly, Commission,
  Syndics? (Heritage may influence institutional trust/distrust patterns)

## 6. The 180-Year Drift

This section is the soul of the brief. It answers: **How did this culture get from
Earth-heritage to where it is now?**

- **What was preserved deliberately?** (What did the founders care enough about to
  maintain across generations?)
- **What was preserved accidentally?** (What survived because it was embedded in
  daily practice — cooking, naming, greeting — rather than because anyone decided
  to preserve it?)
- **What was lost?** (What heritage elements didn't survive the transition to
  station life, mixed populations, new economic realities?)
- **What is new?** (What cultural elements emerged from the unique conditions of
  THIS place — the station architecture, the economic pressures, the social
  composition, the local history?)
- **What is contested?** (Where do heritage-keepers and modernizers clash?
  Where do different heritage streams within the community conflict?)

---

Part B: Krenn System Regional Brief (Filled Template)

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Krenn System — Regional Style Guide

1. Heritage Profile

Founding cluster: The Krenn System was settled primarily by a Northern European / Baltic coalition — specifically a consortium organized out of Finnish, Estonian, and Latvian settler groups, with significant Dutch and Norwegian commercial backing. The settlement was an economic venture: the Syndic shipping combine Talvik Logistics (Finnish-Estonian origin) identified the system's gate position as optimal for freight transit and funded the initial infrastructure buildout.

The founding population was ~60% Finnish-Estonian-Latvian, ~25% Dutch-Norwegian (commercial/engineering cadre), ~15% mixed (recruited skilled labor from various origins — some Central European, some East Asian, some from earlier Reach settlements). This mix matters: the cultural identity isn't any single Earth nationality. It's what happened when these groups spent 180 years sharing a logistics hub and raising children together.

Settlement era: Mid-colonization. Krenn was settled ~180 years ago, after the initial wave of core-system settlements but before the frontier push. Old enough to feel established. Not old enough to be a founding culture of the Reach.

Settlement motivation: Economic. Krenn exists because the gate connections made it a freight node. Nobody came to Krenn for the scenery. The founding charter was a logistics contract, not a constitution.

Secondary populations: Over 180 years, Krenn has absorbed workers from connected systems — economic migrants following logistics jobs. Most secondary arrivals have been culturally absorbed within 1-2 generations. Current population reflects the founding cluster strongly, with occasional "off-pattern" names from later arrivals that locals treat as unremarkable.

Syndic presence: Talvik Logistics (founding combine) was absorbed ~120 years ago into a larger Syndic conglomerate, which was itself restructured ~80 years ago into the Sova Logistics Consortium — the entity that currently employs most of the district. The Talvik name survives in a few place names and as a surname. Corporate naming influences are visible in older infrastructure (numbered bays, standardized designations) but informal naming has claimed most daily-use spaces.

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2. Naming Conventions

2a. Personal Names — First Names

Heritage pool: Finnish, Estonian, Latvian — with 180 years of drift, blending, and simplification.

Example first names (current generation):

• Short-form (1 syllable, most common in working class): Kael, Voss, Drin, Hael, Renn, Pell, Tav, Sess
• Mid-form (2 syllables, standard): Torek, Lera, Maret, Resha, Devra, Harek, Sabel
• Full-form (2 syllables, slightly more formal): Sera, Nils, Kosse, Naia, Pael, Olin

Phonetic signature: Krenn names are compact and consonant-forward. Vowels tend toward a, e, o (open, central). The sounds ae, ei, ou appear as diphthongs. Hard consonants dominate: k, t, r, v, s, d, n, l, p. Soft sounds (sh, ch, zh) are rare. Double consonants are uncommon in first names but appear in surnames. Names rarely exceed 2 syllables in daily use.

How to tell if a name "sounds Krenn": Say it aloud. If it's crisp, lands hard, and takes less than a second to say, it fits. If it flows or elongates, it doesn't. "Kael" is Krenn. "Kaelinar" is not. "Torek" is Krenn. "Toreksha" is not.

Drift from Earth heritage:

• Finnish names like Kalle, Matti, Väinö, Aino → shortened, vowel-smoothed → Kael, Maret, Venn
• Estonian names like Toomas, Rein, Leelo, Helle → consonant-hardened, trimmed → Torek, Renn, Lera, Hael
• Latvian names like Valdis, Daina, Pēteris → compressed → Voss, Drin, Pell
• Dutch/Norwegian names like Nils, Sabel, Harek → these survived closer to origin because the commercial cadre had institutional prestige. Dutch/Norwegian-origin names read slightly "higher status" to Krenn ears, though this association is fading.

Generational layers:

• Older residents (60+, pre-rejuvenation age): Slightly longer names, closer to heritage. "Torek" is an older-generation name. "Maret" is on the boundary.
• Current working generation (25-50): The short forms dominate. "Kael," "Renn," "Tav."
• Children: Even more compressed. Single-syllable names are increasingly common. Some genuinely novel — parents combine syllables from both heritage streams.
• New arrivals from other systems are identifiable by name pattern. A name like "Ashira" or "Tomás" signals non-Krenn origin immediately.

2b. Personal Names — Family Names

Structure: Fixed surnames, inherited patrilineally or matrilineally (family choice, no cultural default — this ambiguity is itself a Krenn trait). Many working-class Krenn residents rarely use their surname at all. In Sova Transit District, most people are known by first name only.

Usage rules:

• Surnames used in: official documents, Commission interactions, authority contexts, introductions to strangers (sometimes), legal proceedings.
• Surnames NOT used in: daily conversation among peers, bar interactions, workplace casual address. Using someone's surname uninvited is a mild social signal — either you're an outsider, you're asserting authority, or you're angry.
• Naming someone by title + surname ("Supervisor Voss") marks them as authority. Naming them by first name alone ("Voss") marks them as a colleague even if they're technically your boss. This distinction is load-bearing for the detective's social integration challenge.

Example surnames: Davan, Venn, Sessik, Lintar, Korr, Talvik (old founding family), Rosta, Pellam, Kosse, Neven, Harsk

Heritage and drift:

• Finnish-origin: -nen, -la, -nen suffixes dropped over generations. Korhonen → Korr. Mäkelä → Maret (first name absorbed the family identity).
• Estonian-origin: -maa, -sik, -vere sometimes survive. Sessik retains the Estonian -sik suffix.
• Latvian-origin: -is, -s ending trimmed. Lintars → Lintar.
• Dutch/Norwegian-origin: Often survived intact because they were already short. Voss, Nils, Sabel.
• Blended surnames (combining heritage streams) are a post-settlement innovation. Davan is not Finnish or Dutch — it emerged on Krenn.

2c. Place Names

Pattern: Krenn place names follow a three-layer system:

1. Institutional names (official, rarely used): Corporate or bureaucratic. "Sova Transit Logistics Hub, Bay 7-C." "Krenn System Administration, Sector 12." These appear on legal documents and institutional signage. Nobody says them.

2. Established names (standard use): Heritage-influenced or descriptive. "Station Sova" (Estonian-origin, means "suitable/fitting" — the founders named it for the gate position). "Krenn" itself (possibly Finnish krenni, an old dialect word for "crossroads" — the etymology is debated, which is itself a cultural detail). "The Terminal" (English-origin descriptive, reflecting the commercial-cadre influence on workplace naming).

3. Informal names (locals only): Personal or experiential. "Lera's" instead of "The Last Shift." "The B" for Corridor B-7. "Topside" for Level 3. These names are social shibboleths — knowing them signals belonging.

Place name examples at different scales:

• System: Krenn System (heritage-origin, debated etymology)
• Planet: Krenn Prime (institutional naming — "Prime" is a Concordat Standard convention for the primary habitable world)
• Station: Station Sova (heritage-origin: Estonian sova, "suitable")
• District: Sova Transit District (functional-descriptive)
• Location: The Terminal (worker-descriptive), The Last Shift (worker-descriptive, ironic — named for the drink you have before your last shift ends, which is every shift)
• Corridor: B-7 (grid designation, institutional origin, adopted into informal speech)
• Bar: Lera's (owner-named, informal; the formal name "The Last Shift" is on the sign but not in conversation)

2d. Business & Institution Names

Corporate naming: The Sova Logistics Consortium uses bland, functional naming internally ("Bay 7-C," "Processing Station 3"). Workers have renamed everything that matters. The corporate name surfaces only on payslips, official communications, and the sign at the main gate that nobody reads.

Informal businesses: Owner-named or descriptive. "Lera's." A food vendor might be "Maret's counter" even if Maret just works there and the owner is a Syndic franchise. Informal businesses with heritage-language names exist but are becoming rare — the heritage words survive as atmosphere, not as operating businesses.

Institutional naming: Locals refer to the Commission as "the Commission" (no shorthand — the formality is the point, marking it as external). The Assembly is "the Assembly" or, less respectfully, "the floor" (as in "the Assembly floor where they debate things that don't affect us"). Station security is "sec" or "the uniforms."

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3. Language Echoes

3a. Substrate Language

Primary heritage languages: Finnish, Estonian, Latvian — collapsed into a shared substrate over 180 years. Most Krenn residents cannot speak any heritage language fluently. What survives are words, cadences, and grammatical tendencies embedded in how they speak Concordat Standard.

Survival domains:

• Profanity: Heritage swearing survives because it's emotionally charged and taught informally. "Perkele" (Finnish, emphatic curse) is still used on Krenn, shortened to "perk" — used the way English-speakers use "damn." Most speakers don't know the origin.
• Food: Heritage food words persist because recipes carry them. Leib (bread, Estonian/Latvian origin), kalaa (fish/protein, Finnish-adapted), supp (soup, shared Baltic).
• Family terms: Ema (mother, Estonian), isa (father, Estonian/Finnish blend) — used by some families, especially older ones. Younger families increasingly use Concordat Standard terms.
• Workplace slang: Technical terms from the founding-era logistics vocabulary. Tööd (work/shift, Estonian-derived, now means specifically the boring maintenance tasks nobody wants to do — "I drew tööd duty"). Vakt (watch/guard shift, Norwegian-origin, now specifically means the period when someone is on lookout during ring operations — the word has been criminalized by usage without anyone planning it).
• Weather/environment: Stations don't have weather, but environmental complaints use heritage patterns. Kylm (cold, Finnish-adjacent) — "It's kylm in Sector 3" means the ventilation is acting up again. Used as a universal complaint word.
• Endearments: Väike (small/little one, Estonian-origin) — used for children and, sarcastically, for new hires. Resha has been called väike by at least three different colleagues.

3b. Lexicon

Heritage words that survive in daily Krenn speech:

Word	Origin	Meaning	Usage context
perk	Finnish (perkele)	Emphatic expletive	Universal — "Perk, the scanner's down again"
kylm	Finnish (kylmä)	Cold / uncomfortable	Environmental complaint — "It's kylm on Level 3"
tööd	Estonian (töö)	Boring maintenance work	Task assignment — "I got tööd duty"
vakt	Norwegian (vakt)	Watch/lookout shift	Ring-adjacent — informal, careful usage
leib	Estonian/Latvian	Bread / staple food	Food — "grab some leib at the counter"
kalaa	Finnish (kala)	Protein ration (any type)	Food — generic term for the main protein component
supp	Baltic shared	Soup / hot meal	Food — "Lera's supp is better than the canteen"
väike	Estonian (väike)	Small one / rookie	Affectionate or mildly teasing
hüva	Finnish/Estonian blend (hyvä/hüva)	Good / okay / affirmative	Casual agreement — "Hüva, let's go"
käik	Estonian (käik)	Corridor / route / passage	Navigation — "Take the back käik"
selge	Estonian (selge)	Clear / understood	Confirmation — "Selge" (= "Copy that")
laev	Estonian (laev)	Ship / shuttle / transport	Any vessel — "When's the next laev through the gate?"
kodu	Estonian (kodu)	Home / one's place	Sentimental — "This is kodu" (said of the district, not a specific dwelling)

Locally distinctive slang (post-settlement origin):

Term	Meaning	Origin
shift-end	The act of going to the bar after work	From "end of shift" — verb form: "Let's shift-end"
gate-side	Being near the span gates; by extension, being exposed or visible	Spatial metaphor for institutional visibility
wall-side	Being in the maintenance corridors; by extension, being hidden or off-record	Spatial metaphor for being off-grid
ticking	Behaving in a way that draws institutional attention	From "news ticker" — as in, "you'll be on the ticker"
quiet credit	Supplemental income from ring activity	Euphemism — never said to outsiders
hard name	Using someone's surname, implying formality or hostility	Social register marker

Profanity pattern: Krenn profanity is short and percussive, matching the naming phonetics. "Perk" is the all-purpose emphatic. "Gate-rot" is the locally-coined equivalent of "bullshit" (from the ozone smell near span gates — something that's unpleasant and pervasive). "Talvik's teeth" is an older oath (referencing the founding Syndic) that only people over 50 use — younger workers think it sounds ridiculous.

Greeting/farewell conventions:

• Peers meeting: First name, nod. No verbal greeting formula. If you say "hello" formally, you're either an outsider or making a point.
• Peers departing: "Hüva" (= okay, good, fine — covers everything from "see you later" to "take care").
• Acknowledging someone's presence without engaging: Eye contact held for 0.5 seconds, chin-lift. No words.
• Strangers: Brief eye contact, nothing else. This is polite. Greeting a stranger is slightly aggressive — it demands engagement. The detective will misread this as hostility.

Terms of address:

• Peer to peer: First name, always.
• Subordinate to supervisor: First name in practice, title+surname when formally required ("Supervisor Voss"). The switch from first name to title signals a change in register — if a worker suddenly says "Supervisor Voss" instead of "Voss," something is wrong.
• Anyone to Commission representative: "Commissioner" + surname. Always formal. The formality isn't respect; it's distance.
• Anyone to newcomer/stranger: Nothing, or first name once introduced. No honorifics for peers regardless of familiarity.

---

4. Aesthetic Markers

4a. Architecture & Interior

Construction style: Pure station-functional. Krenn architecture is not heritage architecture — it's prefab modules and retrofitted bays. Cultural identity shows not in what was built but in how people have modified what was built: hand-lettered signs replacing corporate signage, warm lighting replacing institutional fixtures, personal objects in shared spaces.

Personal space decoration:

• Lockers in The Terminal: stickers (some heritage-themed — stylized Finnish/Estonian folk patterns, modernized and mass-produced), shift-end doodles (a minor tradition — drawing something small on the last day of a work cycle), photographs of family and friends.
• Residential pods: more heritage expression than public spaces. Some families maintain a small nurk (Estonian: "corner" — a small shelf or niche with family items, heritage objects, sometimes a photograph of an Earth-origin landscape they've never seen). The nurk tradition is fading — younger families don't bother.

Public space texture:

• Bilingual signage: Concordat Standard (official, clean, institutional) alongside hand-lettered Krenn vernacular (additions, corrections, complaints, directions). The contrast between the two register layers is visually distinctive.
• Graffiti: sparse, functional. Maintenance workers leave marks (dates, arrows, initials). Some ring-adjacent marks in corridors. No elaborate mural tradition — Krenn culture doesn't produce decorative public art. Occasional stickers with folk-pattern motifs.

Color palette: Krenn doesn't have a deliberate color culture, but the built environment creates one: industrial white (workplace), warm amber (bar and social spaces, from aging fixtures), emergency red (corridors), cool gray (station infrastructure). Personal color preferences tend toward earth tones and muted blues — loud colors read as "trying too hard" in Krenn social context.

4b. Food & Drink

Heritage cuisine that survived: Baltic-Nordic comfort food, heavily adapted to station ingredients.

• Bread culture: Leib (dark, dense, slightly sour) is the one food tradition that has survived nearly intact. Station-grown grain + synthesized rye flavoring. Every Krenn station has someone who bakes leib. On Sova, it's a vendor on Level 2 near the residential pods.
• Fish/protein: Kalaa (generic protein) is served in styles that echo Finnish and Estonian fish preparation — salt-cured, smoked-flavored (synthetic smoke), served cold with bread. The actual protein is station-standard cultured material, but the preparation method carries heritage.
• Soup: Hot, thick, heavy. The default comfort food. "Supp" covers everything from a thin broth to a dense stew. Lera serves three variations at The Last Shift.
• Drinking: Station-brewed spirits (clear, strong, slightly chemical — the working descendant of vodka/aquavit traditions). Imported beer is a status purchase. Synthetic coffee is universal. There's a local drink called kuum (Estonian: "hot") that's a spiced warm beverage somewhere between coffee and mulled wine, served at shift transitions. It's the drink that says "I'm off the clock."

Eating customs: Shift-based, practical. No formal meal times for workers. Food is grabbed between tasks, eaten quickly, often standing. The bar is where eating becomes social — Lera's food is not better than the canteen's, but eating at Lera's is a social act rather than a biological one.

4c. Dress & Appearance

Work clothing: Standard-issue logistics coveralls (provided by Sova Logistics Consortium, charcoal gray, company logo on the back that everyone ignores). Workers personalize with pins, patches, rolled sleeves, and the way they wear the collar (up = cold, down = normal, folded in a specific way = off-shift signal that communicates "don't give me tasks").

Off-duty dress: Practical, layers. No strong fashion culture. Muted colors. A new or conspicuously expensive item of clothing is noticed and commented on — this is why Torek's new jacket is a social tell. Krenn workers don't display wealth. Displaying wealth signals either off-system origin or off-books income.

Visible cultural markers: Lattice port customization is the main expression — the lattice connection point at the base of the skull can be fitted with decorative covers. Krenn workers tend toward simple metal covers (brushed steel, copper). Ornate covers signal higher economic status or off-system sensibility. Some older workers have small tattoos in Baltic folk-pattern styles — angular, geometric, usually on forearms or shoulders. This tradition is dying out.

4d. Music & Entertainment

Heritage music: Almost entirely lost as a living tradition. What survives: a rhythmic pattern in popular music on Krenn that musicologists might trace to Finnish and Estonian folk scales (minor, modal) but that no one on Krenn would identify as heritage. The Meridian music feed at Lera's plays generic ambient — nobody changes it because the ambient has become the soundtrack of the place.

Local entertainment:

• Card games: The dominant social entertainment. A game called kolm (Estonian: "three") is played at The Last Shift — a trick-taking game for 3-5 players with a bluffing element. It's the social ritual that cements bar culture. Harek runs the regular game.
• Meridian feeds: News, entertainment, sports broadcasts from larger systems. Consumed individually, discussed socially.
• Storytelling: Not a strong tradition. Krenn people are reserved. But: shift stories are the closest thing — "you'll never believe what came through the gate today" is a genre. These stories are told at the bar, get embellished over time, and serve the function of oral history without the formality.

---

5. Social Structure

5a. Trust & Hierarchy

Trust model: Trust is earned through shared labor and shared time. New arrivals are treated with polite distance that can last months. There is no shortcut — no credential, no introduction, no display of competence fast-tracks trust. You earn it by being here, doing your job, not causing problems, and not asking questions that aren't your business.

This is the detective's primary social challenge. Institutional authority (Commission credentials) doesn't buy trust in Krenn culture — if anything, it reduces it, because institutional authority is external. The detective must earn trust the Krenn way: by being present, being consistent, and not pushing. This takes time the investigation doesn't have.

Authority signals:

• Naming: Title+surname = formal authority. First name = peer or accepted.
• Spatial: Voss's glass-fronted office above the bay floor = visible authority. Lera's position behind the bar = social authority. Devra's use of the corner booth = informal power.
• Speech: Direct, short sentences = Krenn norm. Elaborate speech = institutional outsider or someone performing authority.

Insider/outsider dynamics: You're "from here" when people stop using your surname. This can take anywhere from 3 months (if you fit in well and don't ask questions) to never (if you're visibly institutional). The detective will be "hard-named" for the duration of v0.1. The smuggler has always been first-named.

5b. Community Norms

Privacy expectations: High. What you do off-shift is your business. What you do on-shift is the team's business only insofar as it affects work. Asking about someone's personal life uninvited is rude. Asking about someone's finances is hostile. Asking about someone's lattice configuration is institutional overreach.

Labor solidarity: Strong, informal, unspoken. Workers cover for each other — a late arrival is clocked in on time by a colleague, a sick day is absorbed by the team without filing. This solidarity extends to the ring: not-noticing is a form of collective labor solidarity.

Attitude toward institutions:

• The Commission: External. Necessary evil. Respected for the anti-forking work, resented for the lattice regulation that prices people out of upgrades. "They do important work somewhere else; here they're just a tax."
• The Assembly: Distant. Irrelevant to daily life. Viewed the way most working-class populations view legislatures: with a mix of indifference and mild contempt. "The floor" debates things that don't change shift schedules.
• The Syndics: Complicated. The employer. The entity that sets wages and controls costs. Not loved, not hated — accepted the way weather is accepted. The founding Syndic (Talvik) has a vaguely positive heritage reputation. The current consortium has no emotional valence.

---

6. The 180-Year Drift

What was preserved deliberately:

• The name "Krenn" — debated etymology, fiercely defended identity. People identify as "from Krenn" regardless of which station or world they live on in-system.
• Leib (bread). Consistently baked in heritage style across all Krenn stations. The one food item that is identifiably and deliberately cultural.
• The nurk tradition (home shelf with heritage items) — maintained by some families, fading but not gone.

What was preserved accidentally:

• Naming phonetics. Nobody decided Krenn names should be short and consonant-heavy. But when Finnish, Estonian, and Latvian naming traditions blend in a working-class logistics culture that values directness, compression happens naturally. 180 years of children being named by parents who spoke shorter every generation produced the current name pool.
• Substrate vocabulary. "Perk" and "kylm" and "hüva" survived because they were used daily, not because anyone taught them formally. Most Krenn speakers would be surprised to learn these words have Earth-heritage origins.
• Reserve. The Krenn social style — minimal greeting, first-name-primary, distrust of elaboration, privacy as default — echoes Finnish sisu and Estonian maarahvas identity, but no one on Krenn would make that connection. It just feels like "how people are here."

What was lost:

• Heritage languages as coherent systems. Nobody on Krenn speaks Finnish, Estonian, or Latvian. The substrate words are fossils, not a living language.
• National identity. No one on Krenn identifies as Finnish or Estonian. Some families know their heritage origin; most don't care. "Krenn" has fully replaced Earth-national identity.
• Religious traditions. The founding cluster was largely secular. Whatever religious practices individual settlers brought didn't survive the transition to station-community life.
• Decorative arts. Folk patterns survive as sticker designs and occasional tattoos. No living craft tradition.

What is new (emerged on Krenn):

• The first-name-primary social convention. This is a Krenn innovation — the founding cultures all used surnames more regularly. The logistics-working-class context stripped formal naming as unnecessary. This convention is now a Krenn identity marker.
• Shift-cycle social rhythms. The 5+2 cycle, the shift-end bar migration, the end-of-cycle card game — these are Krenn traditions with no Earth analogue. They emerged from station life.
• The spatial vocabulary (gate-side/wall-side, the social meaning of the corridor/bar threshold). Station architecture creating new cultural language.
• Kolm (the card game). No single heritage origin — elements of Finnish paskahousu, Estonian kaardimäng, and what appears to be original invention. It's the district's defining social ritual.

What is contested:

• Heritage display. Older residents (and some families) maintain nurk shrines and use more heritage vocabulary. Younger workers find this affected or irrelevant. Neither side argues about it openly — that would violate the privacy norm. The tension is expressed through mild eye-rolls, not confrontation.
• Naming trends. Some parents give children heritage-length names (Katariina, Aleksander) as a cultural statement. Other parents give children maximally compressed names (Ren, Tev, Kai) as a statement of belonging to Krenn-as-it-is rather than Krenn-as-it-was. Neither group discusses it. Both groups notice.

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IP Originality Note

Setting note — I need to flag my own work here for originality verification. The cultural substrate I'm describing (Nordic-Baltic blend with 180 years of drift) is not derived from any single SF franchise. Hamilton's Commonwealth doesn't do regional cultural analysis at this level. Banks's Culture deliberately erases cultural heritage. Reynolds is focused on deep time, not ethnic evolution. What we're building is closer to what Ursula Le Guin does — grounding speculative civilizations in recognizable human cultural patterns — but the specific execution (logistics-class Baltic-Nordic blend on a station hub) is wholly original.

The NPC names established in D-036 already follow this pattern without it being explicitly documented. This brief retroactively explains why the names sound the way they do, which is what a style guide should do: describe the pattern that was already emerging, make it explicit, and make it repeatable.

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Topic 4: Growth Planning — Wiki Scaling for v0.2+

The Problem

D-040 established the wiki taxonomy with a hierarchical structure under wiki/star-systems/. The question is whether v0.2+ (which adds more star systems, stations, and districts) will break anything, require restructuring, or work as-is.

Assessment: D-040 Already Handles This

Let me check the D-040 structure against the growth scenario.

Current state (v0.1):

wiki/
  star-systems/
    krenn/
      krenn-system.md           # system profile
      station-sova/
        station-sova.md         # station profile
        sova-transit-district/
          sova-transit-district.md  # district profile
          the-terminal.md          # location
          the-last-shift.md        # location
          maintenance-corridors.md # location
  characters/                    # flat — not nested under locations
    kael-davan.md
    sera-venn.md
    ...
  factions/                      # flat — global entities
  technology/                    # flat — global
  cultural-groups/               # flat — this is where regional briefs live
    krenn-system.md              # the brief I just wrote
  contraband/
  lore/

v0.2 scenario (2 more systems):

wiki/
  star-systems/
    krenn/
      ...                        # unchanged
    vael/                        # new system
      vael-system.md
      station-something/
        ...
    morat/                       # new system
      morat-system.md
      ...
  characters/                    # grows, remains flat
    kael-davan.md
    [new NPCs from new systems]
  cultural-groups/
    krenn-system.md
    vael-system.md               # new regional brief
    morat-system.md              # new regional brief

This scales. The hierarchy is spatial (system → station → district → location) and the flat directories (characters, factions, technology) don't need restructuring when new systems arrive.

Name Collision Handling

The real concern is location names that collide. "The Terminal" could exist in multiple systems.

Proposal: Location filenames include system prefix in the ID, not the path.

The file path already disambiguates: star-systems/krenn/station-sova/.../the-terminal.md vs. star-systems/vael/station-whoever/.../the-terminal.md. But for cross-references, every entry's YAML frontmatter should include a canonical_id that is globally unique:

---
canonical_id: krenn.sova.transit.the-terminal
type: location
system: krenn
station: sova
district: sova-transit
status: canonical
---

Cross-references use canonical_id, not file paths. This is already implied by D-040 ("Hierarchical with cross-references via IDs, not file paths") but should be made explicit in the wiki style guide.

For characters: Character filenames are already unique (first-last format). If we get a second "Kael" in another system, the file is kael-torren.md or whatever the full name is. The canonical_id would include system origin: krenn.kael-davan.

For factions: Global factions don't collide. Local factions (like The Ring) get system-prefixed IDs: krenn.sova.the-ring.

What Changes When Systems Are Added

1. New directories under star-systems/. No restructuring.
2. New regional briefs under cultural-groups/. Following the template above.
3. New characters under characters/. Flat, no restructuring.
4. New local factions under factions/. Flat, with system field in frontmatter.
5. Cross-system factions (Commission, Assembly, Syndics) gain new relationship entries in their existing pages. No structural change.

One Structural Recommendation

Add cultural-groups/ entries to the wiki now, starting with Krenn.

D-040 defined the directory but we haven't created the actual file. The regional brief I wrote above should become wiki/cultural-groups/krenn-system.md. When v0.2 adds systems, new briefs follow the template. This is the pattern — establish it with one example, then replicate.

The index (wiki/index.md) should add a Cultural Groups section linking to these briefs. Currently the index has World, Locations, Factions, NPCs, Technology, Contraband, Knowledge Systems, and Authoring Guides. Cultural Groups is a missing category that will matter as soon as writers need to name NPCs in a second system.

The Bigger Picture: How Do New Systems Get Authored?

When v0.2 says "add Vael System," the authoring sequence should be:

1. Miri writes the Regional Style Guide (following the template above) — this is the first document created for any new region.
2. The style guide gates all other content. No NPCs, no locations, no dialogue until the naming conventions and cultural markers are established.
3. Paula/Mellanie/content team use the style guide to create NPC profiles, location pages, and dialogue content.
4. Gestalt validates that the new social sites follow the template model (D-025).
5. The style guide lives permanently in cultural-groups/ and serves as a reference for procedural generation as well as hand-authored content.

This workflow is the answer to "do we restructure or namespace from the start?" The answer is: we already namespaced from the start (D-040), and we add a gating step (regional brief first) that ensures cultural consistency before content creation begins.

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Summary of Proposals

For the team to decide:

1. Adopt the Regional Style Guide Template (Part A above) as a required document for every new region in the game.
2. Adopt the Krenn System Regional Brief (Part B above) as the canonical cultural reference for v0.1 content.
3. Confirm wiki/cultural-groups/ as the home for regional briefs (per D-040, but currently empty).
4. Add canonical_id convention to wiki frontmatter for collision-safe cross-referencing.
5. Establish the "regional brief first" workflow — no content creation for a new region until Miri has written and the team has approved its cultural brief.

New tickets for SI (if proposals adopted):

• Create wiki/cultural-groups/krenn-system.md from the brief in this document.
• Add Cultural Groups section to wiki/index.md.
• Define canonical_id format in wiki/_meta/naming-conventions.md.
• Update wiki templates to include canonical_id field in YAML frontmatter.

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Status: Round 1 response complete. Author: Miri Date: 2026-02-12