AetheriaLore/README.md

AetheriaLore

Aetheria is an open science-fantasy setting built to hold radically different stories inside one causal world: black-magic hard SF and noir before Elysium, giant mecha and cultivation epics after it, Ratfolk first contact, cockpit action, corporate logistics, and whatever pressure point another writer finds next. Technologies have histories, institutions have incentives, and consequences survive the stories that create them.

Writers do not need custody of the whole universe. Shared notes own their stated constraints; finished stories own their cast, place, depicted sequence, and immediate consequences. Developmental notes, game designs, and brainstorming may test possibilities without silently changing shared physics, faction history, or practice. A local claim becomes shared canon when the relevant owner note explicitly incorporates it.

AetheriaLore is the source vault for aetheria.gamecult.org. It contains setting material, fiction, game design, articles, media, and the Aetheria-specific site overlay.

Start Here

• Readers: begin with Aetheria/index.md, then browse Lore, Worldbuilding, or Fiction.
• Writers: read Narrative Themes, the relevant owner notes, and the public branch-and-fold process. Finished work lives under Fiction; Stories includes shorter and developmental work.
• Maintainers: site-specific configuration lives under site/; the shared Quartz engine and build behavior live in GameCult-Quartz.

Status

• Live: the vault is the source of aetheria.gamecult.org, built and deployed by .github/workflows/deploy-quartz.yml through the shared engine in GameCult-Quartz; scripts/quartz/quartz.ps1 runs it locally.
• Not canon: Brainstorming/ and Inspiration/ branches are excluded from publication. They are working material, and notes in them become setting only when a finished story or an owner note adopts them.

Repository Map

• Aetheria/: source vault content and media; publication is filtered by the site configuration
• site/: Aetheria-specific Quartz configuration, layout, components, and styles
• scripts/quartz/quartz.ps1: local build and development launcher
• quartz-site/public/: generated static output
• .github/workflows/deploy-quartz.yml: deployment workflow using the shared engine
• AGENTS.md: contribution, continuity, and writing conventions

Internal Brainstorming/ and Inspiration/ branches are excluded from publication. They are working material, not automatic canon.

Local Development

Local builds expect GameCult-Quartz either at the sibling path ..\GameCult-Quartz or at the path supplied through GAMECULT_QUARTZ_ROOT.

Install the shared engine dependencies first:

cd ..\GameCult-Quartz
npm ci

Then run from this repository root:

.\scripts\quartz\quartz.ps1 dev

For a one-off production build:

.\scripts\quartz\quartz.ps1 build

The launcher stages the shared engine under .quartz-build/engine and writes the finished site to quartz-site/public.