Kalsa Vault Operating Contract

Purpose

This repository is the canonical authoring vault and spoiler-safe Quartz source for Kalsa, a high-fantasy setting built for Ghostlight Dungeon. The work is to turn the teenage seed into a causally dense setting without sanding away its peculiar bones.

Authority Map

Owner: subject notes under Kalsa/Spoilers/ own shared setting claims within their stated subject. Kalsa/Public/ owns situated presentation, and Kalsa/index.md owns navigation only. workshop/Direction and Constraints.md owns project doctrine and canon rules.
Inputs: immutable files under seed/original/, the seed manifest, current canonical notes, explicit operator decisions, Ghostlight play requirements, and source-grounded comparison with AetheriaLore.
Outputs: linked canonical Markdown, situated reader notes, index notes, bounded critique records, verified spoiler-safe Quartz projections, and reviewed project-memory judgments.
Derived state: Quartz output, link graphs, word/link/heading diagnostics, benchmark comparisons, queues, pass reports, and .cc projections. Derived state may report on canon; it may not decide canon.
Forbidden writers: seed witnesses, project memory, workshop notes, generated site output, retrieval indexes, and site configuration may not silently create or override lore truth.
Shared path: human and agent changes use the same source inventory, critique, repair, falsification, verification, and record path described in workshop/deepening/README.md.
Cut line: do not place author or GM material outside Kalsa/Spoilers/, bind Quartz directly to the complete author vault, revive timestamp export files as live canonical pages, create a second lore database, invent a public repo Persona, or copy Aetheria-specific site/lore machinery into Kalsa.

Repository Boundaries

Kalsa/ is the sole canonical Obsidian vault root. Its index.md is a reader-first, navigation-only consent gate.
Kalsa/Public/ is the only publishable Quartz content root. Its notes own situated presentation, not the hidden facts they omit or reinterpret. Every explanatory model must have an inhabitant owner—a culture, institution, lineage, text, witness, or explicit synthesis of named sources. Public is not the author ontology with the serial numbers filed off.
Kalsa/Spoilers/ is the complete canonical author and GM surface. The folder is a consent boundary, not a lore owner; its subject notes retain authority.
Kalsa/.obsidian/ owns stable vault configuration. Workspace, graph, and cache files are ignored derived state and must not resume inside Spoilers/.
seed/original/ is immutable evidence. Never edit, normalize, rename, or re-encode these files. Verify them with scripts/lore/verify-seed.ps1.
seed/manifest.md owns witness filenames, sizes, hashes, and subject labels.
workshop/ holds doctrine, critique packets, queues, and pass records. It is not lore and must remain outside Kalsa/.
.epiphany/project-memory.md is the human-inspectable project-memory source. Its .cc projection is runtime state, not canon.
site/ is a Quartz overlay over Kalsa/Public/. .quartz-build/ and quartz-site/public/ are generated projections and are never edited directly.

Canon And Provenance

A seed claim becomes shared canon only when a canonical owner note adopts it.
Distinguish seed evidence, adopted canon, provisional design, contested in-world claims, rumor, and deprecated material. Do not use publication state as a substitute for canon state.
Put proposals and unresolved design in workshop/. Put genuinely contested setting facts in canonical notes only with clear in-world attribution.
Prefer one owner note plus links over repeated explanations. If two notes appear to own the same claim, stop and resolve the boundary before expanding either.
Preserve the source's strange specificity. Repair causal gaps; do not replace them with generic medieval-Europe defaults wearing renamed hats.
Open source does not mean default omniscience. Public navigation, search, sitemap, RSS, and backlinks must not expose author-only or GM material.
Author labels such as Promethean sequences, signatures, formal capability axes, and backstage divine taxonomy remain in Spoilers/ unless an inhabitant owner has reconstructed a bounded analogue. A local synonym does not make the author model situated; evidence, institutions, interests, and characteristic limits must travel with it.
Vault openness does not excuse root-level exposure. Author and GM notes remain physically inside Kalsa/Spoilers/ even though determined readers may enter.
Character knowledge is a projection from bounded evidence. The world compiler and resolver may consume hidden mechanics; Persona agents may not receive them through unrestricted vault retrieval.

Deepening Work

Before editing an institution, region, practice, or cross-cutting system:

Create a pass from workshop/deepening/pass-template.md.
Inventory seed statements, adopted facts, contradictions, and unknowns.
Name the canonical owner and model its inputs, outputs, dependencies, beneficiaries, costs, failure modes, and neighboring interfaces.
Record the full pass-start commit, assemble an immutable review packet with a complete raw SHA-1 Markdown manifest, and run scripts/lore/check-phase-boundary-intake.ps1 before review. Give every active Critic in workshop/review-council/README.md an independent diagnostic turn. Record Guardian seats and any periodic or early sanity trigger; Guardians skip the ordinary baseline diagnosis.
Adjudicate every substantive finding; critics diagnose and the coordinator decides the bounded repair brief.
Repair the smallest coherent set of owner notes.
Falsify the result with one hostile or marginal perspective and one historical stress case.
Give every active Critic a post-repair regression turn; Reader Experience receives a fresh blind packet. Give each relevant Guardian the exact diff, complete changed notes, and affected context. A Guardian receives a full surface only when the council's sanity-check cadence or reactivation trigger requires it.
Verify seed integrity, links, publication boundaries, and the Quartz build. Run the phase-boundary intake check again against the exact final packet.
Record the pass in the ledger and promote only durable judgment into project memory.

Passing prose is not enough. A mature institution must explain authority, reproduction, material support, doctrine versus practice, distribution of benefit and harm, dependencies, historical formation, internal contradiction, and consequences for play. Use workshop/deepening/benchmark.md as the parity standard; do not turn word count into a victory condition.

Project Memory

Project memory records durable judgment, operating lessons, adopted decisions, open design pressure, and provenance.
Project memory does not store lore facts as an alternate canon, raw transcripts, generated prose, task chatter, or a duplicate roadmap.
Update .epiphany/project-memory.md first. Regenerate the derived CultCache state with .epiphany/sync-project-memory.ps1.
Retire stale judgments explicitly instead of leaving contradictory active entries. Canonical decisions must also be visible in the owning Markdown surface.

Retrieval And Inspection

Once Kalsa is indexed, use the global VoidBot source search for semantic discovery and then open the returned source notes before editing.
Use rg for exact filenames, exact claims, links, and repository-wide patterns. Do not build a repo-local semantic index.
Read and write Markdown explicitly as UTF-8 in Windows PowerShell.

Verification

Run from the repository root:

.\scripts\lore\verify-seed.ps1
.\scripts\lore\check-vault-layout.ps1
.\scripts\lore\check-wikilinks.ps1
.\scripts\lore\check-publication-boundary.ps1
.\scripts\lore\measure-depth.ps1
.\scripts\lore\test-lore-tools.ps1
.\scripts\quartz\quartz.ps1 build
.\scripts\lore\check-publication-output.ps1

For a deepening pass, also verify the complete author vault, verify the Kalsa/Public/ boundary, and inspect affected rendered pages. Diagnostics observe the setting; they do not award canon.

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