gamecult-site/docs/masthead-campaign.md

Masthead campaign: the masthead on the ground, the pills gone, no cards, one column

Imagination map, revision 2, written 2026-10-02 against gamecult-site@90c2d94 and GameCult-Quartz@ef43df0. Revision 1 put three options to the operator; the operator dismissed the questions and ruled the nav direction, so this revision carries rulings, not forks. The Self admits the campaign, target and rulings; this file is the long form the cut specs point at. Revision 3 (2026-10-02, against 410485e, after lean-masthead) is the section "Cards: inventory and cuts" at the end: the campaign's scope grew from the masthead to every card surface on the site. Revision 4 (2026-10-02, against 535d170) is the section "One column" at the end: the sidebars go, the masthead aligns to one column, the wash dims off the home page and the composite branch is deleted.

The operator's words, verbatim

With a screenshot of /Thing, an arrow drawn from the masthead down into the deck's hero:

any reason the masthead has its own background separate from the page background? I feel like it could easily take up that same space (as indicated by this crude red arrow)

Asked what the masthead card does once the hero runs behind it (glass card, no card on /Thing, no card site-wide, keep it):

no card site-wide and let's get rid of those overused pill buttons while we're at it

Asked what replaces the pills (revision 1 offered mono labels, Montserrat links with a rule, or one typeset row):

Ubuntu text links with brand orange hover, we've already done this with the Delvehold site

Rulings in force (site-masthead)

• operator-ground-behind-masthead. The masthead has no background separate from the page; on /Thing the hero's ground and rays run up behind it, masthead plus hero one screen.
• operator-no-card-no-pills. The masthead card is removed on every page and the pill buttons are retired.
• operator-nav-ubuntu-links. Nav links are Ubuntu text links with brand orange (#ff8a2a) hover and active state, following the Delvehold site's .delvehold-nav layout (Delvehold c43d504, custom.scss:115-131). Delvehold sets its links in the header font; the operator named Ubuntu, so Ubuntu it is.
• self-masthead-pills-first (Standing, reversible). The campaign is homed here, in GameCult/gamecult-site; the Thing target stays the rename. The first cut retires the masthead's pills only; .gamecult-repo-link and .gamecult-action follow in a later cut once the operator has seen the masthead live.

The /Thing fixes stay in thing (cut deck-page-fixes, spec in the Eve repo beside the Thing map).

Body facts

B1. The card. site/quartz/styles/custom.scss:646-665, .page > #quartz-body .center > .page-header > header: display:block, margin 0 0 1rem, padding 1rem 1.15rem 1.05rem, a 1px sky border at .12, radius 22px, a gradient fill (orange radial at 82% 50% over a 135deg navy gradient at .95-.98 alpha), a 20px/44px drop shadow and an inset hairline. The mobile variant at 1473-1475 only changes the padding. Nothing else on the site styles .page-header > header; the ritual-paper essays, the colossus post, Graph and Thing all inherit this one rule. tour and Pitch hide the header entirely (1600-1603) and are untouched by this campaign.

B2. The pills. site/quartz/components/GameCultMasthead.tsx:181-188 renders each route as <a class="gamecult-nav-chip"> (active appended at 184; external routes get target="_blank" and rel at 185-186); styles at custom.scss:730-751: 999px radius, 1px sky border at .16, sky fill at .06, Montserrat 300 at .92rem, min-height 2.15rem; hover and active share one state: orange fill .16, orange border .42, #fff3e8 text. The nine routes (Studio, Tour, Projects, Pitch, Blog, Graph, Docs, Aetheria, Zyphos) sit in .gamecult-titlebar-links (722-728: flex-wrap: wrap; gap .6rem), so on phones they wrap into three rows of pills. Active-route selection (pickActiveRoute, longest matching slug prefix) is sound and is kept.

B3. The same pill recipe elsewhere. .gamecult-repo-link (custom.scss:960, the per-repo links on project cards) and .gamecult-action (custom.scss:2206, the home page's call-to-action row, GameCult/index.md:66-68, 105-107) use the identical border, fill and radius. The ritual-paper PREPRINT badge and page number (225, 525) are mono badges inside a scoped variant, not nav. Out of this cut under self-masthead-pills-first.

B4. The brand doc. docs/brand-design-language.md names neither the card nor the pills as deliberate; it names Montserrat-thin-at-scale, Ubuntu 300 for prose with font-weight: 500 as "the emphasis step", the IBM Plex Mono uppercase tracked label, the wash, and one accent. It warns that Montserrat 100 at 18px "produces grey mush" and says to drop to a heavier weight when a heading must be small. The pills set Montserrat 300 at .92rem, on the wrong side of that warning. Ubuntu 500 at .92rem, the ruled nav, is on the right side of it and is a weight the site already loads (quartz.config.ts:36: Ubuntu 300 400 500 700).

B5. The masthead's other parts. Title GameCult (Montserrat 200, clamp(2.1rem,4vw,3.3rem), uppercase, tracked .08em), tagline (Montserrat 200, .88rem, lifted from the page's first italic line or the section's sidebar tagline by gamecult.ts:505), and three community links (Patreon wordmark, GitHub, Discord) as SVGs with a sky drop-shadow glow. All of these already read as type on a ground; none depends on the card.

B6. The frame. renderPage.tsx:271-290: .page > #quartz-body is the grid; .center is one grid item holding .page-header (the masthead and .popover-hint with breadcrumbs, title, meta), article, <hr>, .page-footer; the site footer is a sibling of .center in grid-footer. The engine's Header.css sets a bare header { display:flex; align-items: center; margin: 2rem 0; gap: 1.5rem }, which the site rule in B1 overrides for the masthead and which also reaches every <header class="xhead"> inside the deck (Soul finding engine-header-leak).

B7. The Thing page today. custom.scss:1148-1179 zeroes .page padding and max-width, re-insets .page-header to 1680px / 1.2rem, strips the article card, hides the <hr>. The deck hero .thing-deck .stage (deck.css:479) is 100svh tall with its own ground var(--inv) #03070d and overflow:hidden, .hero-bg (orange radial) and .rays (sky conic, centred at 55%) absolutely inside it; .hero-in is flex-centred. The stage starts below the masthead, so a seam shows where #03070d begins under the wash. The site ground's top stop is also #03070d, so with the masthead over the stage there is no seam left to hide. .stage has position:relative and no z-index, so its children's z-index (burst 3, flash 4) compete with anything laid over it. deck.js already measures on resize (sizeCanvas, sizeBurst).

B8. Soul findings on /Thing (thing:verdict:cut-deck-site-page.s1): engine-header-leak (Medium): eyebrows centred over left-aligned h2s and 32px of extra top margin from the engine header rule; base.scss h1 { font-size } reaches the hero h1, masked by its children. chrome-edges (Low): the site footer's links start at x 0 on /Thing at 1440 and 375 (19 and 27 on /Projects); the masthead sits at 19.2 instead of 27.2 at 375 because .page .7rem plus #quartz-body 1rem are both zeroed and only 1.2rem is given back. body-under-scrollbar (Low, pre-existing, every page): GameCult-Quartz base.scss:8-12 sets html { overflow-x: hidden; width: 100vw }; 100vw includes the scrollbar, so with a classic scrollbar the body is 15px wider than the client area and centred content sits 7.5px off. The engine serves nine sites through quartz-pages.yml@main (gamecult-site, AetheriaLore, Delvehold, GhostlightDungeon-site, Kalsa, Mimir, Zyphos, pombabranca-site, the engine's own); an engine fix ships to all of them on their next deploy.

B9. The precedent. Delvehold c43d504, site/quartz/styles/custom.scss: 115-131, .delvehold-nav: a flex row that wraps, gap: 0.4rem 1.2rem; links color: var(--darkgray), font-family: var(--headerFont) (Montserrat there), font-size: 0.92rem, font-weight: 500, white-space: nowrap; a:hover and a.active take the accent colour (--hold-purple) and nothing else: no rule, no underline, no fill. DelveholdMasthead.tsx:27-32 computes active per route and sets class="active" and aria-current="page" on it. Delvehold does not set text-decoration; the engine's base a rule already has it none.

The shape

The masthead without the card

The title, tagline, community links and nav sit directly on the page ground. The card rule is deleted, not emptied: what remains of .page > #quartz-body .center > .page-header > header is the two lines that beat the engine's header rule, display: block; margin: 0 0 1.2rem. The .gamecult-titlebar* flex rules are unchanged. The mobile padding rule goes with the card. The sky glow on the community SVGs stays; it was never the card's.

Page types this touches, and what each looks like after:

• Home (/): masthead on the wash, then the home article card (24px radius, unchanged). The tagline is the home sidebar's.
• Projects (/Projects): masthead on the wash above the breadcrumb-less title and the overview sidebar on the left. The repo-link pills on the cards stay for now (self-masthead-pills-first).
• Essays and other content pages: masthead on the wash, then breadcrumbs, title, meta, article card. The three ritual-paper essays paint their own ground (custom.scss:101-124) and the masthead now sits on that ground instead of on a navy card over it, which is the first time the variant reads whole from the top of the page.
• Graph: single column; masthead on the wash above the SPA shell.
• The sleeping-colossus post: single column, .popover-hint hidden; masthead on the wash above the article.
• /Thing: masthead over the hero (below).
• tour, Pitch: header hidden; nothing changes.

The nav: Ubuntu text links, orange on hover and active (ruled)

The Delvehold recipe (B9) with two substitutions, both named by the ruling: the face is Ubuntu (var(--bodyFont)) instead of the header font, and the accent is GameCult's orange var(--secondary) instead of Delvehold's purple. Everything else is carried as is: wrap, gaps, size, weight, nowrap, the colour-only active mark. gamecult-nav-chip is renamed gamecult-nav-link so no "chip" survives in the DOM, and the active anchor gains aria-current="page" as Delvehold's does (new here; the pills had only a class).

.gamecult-titlebar-links {
  display: flex;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
  gap: 0.4rem 1.2rem;
  min-width: 0;
  align-items: flex-start;
}

.gamecult-nav-link {
  color: var(--darkgray);
  font-family: var(--bodyFont);
  font-size: 0.92rem;
  font-weight: 500;
  white-space: nowrap;
}

.gamecult-nav-link:hover,
.gamecult-nav-link:focus-visible,
.gamecult-nav-link.active {
  color: var(--secondary);
}

Weight: Ubuntu 500 is loaded (quartz.config.ts:36) and is the brand doc's emphasis step, so Delvehold's 500 carries over unchanged. Active mark: colour only, as Delvehold; :focus-visible is added so keyboard users see the same orange that mouse users do. Mobile: the row wraps as today, with a .4rem row gap; at 375px Ubuntu 500 at .92rem fits four to five labels a row, so the nine routes take two or three rows. Nothing is hidden, no scroll affordance is needed. Nothing marks external routes; Delvehold marks none and the ruling asks for none.

/Thing: the hero runs up behind the masthead

Mechanism, all inside the existing body[data-slug="Thing"] block and the deck's own files; the engine is not edited. This is cut deck-page-fixes of the thing campaign, not this campaign's cut; it is mapped here because the masthead's target (ground-behind-masthead) is only met on /Thing once it lands.

• .center becomes a two-row grid, grid-template-areas: "stack" "foot". .page-header and article both take grid-area: stack; the header gets z-index: 5 (above the stage's burst canvas at 3 and flash at 4), align-self: start, justify-self: center, width: 100%, max-width: 1680px, box-sizing: border-box; .page-footer takes foot. The stage therefore starts at the top of the page and the masthead is laid over it; masthead plus hero is one screen because the stage is still 100svh.
• The hero content clears the masthead: .thing-deck .stage { padding-top: var(--masthead-h, 9rem) } (the stage is box-sizing: border-box and flex-centres .hero-in in the space that remains). deck.js sets --masthead-h on the deck root from document.querySelector('.page-header') .offsetHeight at init and on resize, next to sizeCanvas; the CSS fallback covers a script-less load. The reduced-motion stage (deck.css:681) takes padding-top: calc(var(--masthead-h, 9rem) + 96px).
• The masthead's inset on this page is one variable, --thing-inset, equal to what every other page gets from .page plus #quartz-body: 1.2rem on desktop, 2.2rem below $desktop (1200px), 1.7rem at $mobile (800px). .page-header and the site footer both take padding-inline: var(--thing-inset), and the footer also takes max-width: 1680px; margin-inline: auto; box-sizing: border-box. This is the chrome-edges fix.
• engine-header-leak: .thing-deck .xhead adds align-items: stretch; margin: 0 so the engine's header rule has nothing left to decide; the reach-in guards gain .thing-deck h1 { font-size: inherit }.
• The HUD pill on phones (top-right, fixed) overlaps the masthead's community icons until the first scroll; accepted in the Thing map r4 and unchanged.
• body-under-scrollbar is deferred (below); it is not in the deck-page-fixes file changes.

The authority map

• Owner. custom.scss owns the masthead's look (one header rule, the .gamecult-titlebar* rules, the .gamecult-nav-link rules); GameCultMasthead.tsx owns the masthead's content and the active route; the page's own ground (the body wash, a scoped variant's wash, or the Thing hero) owns what is behind the masthead. On /Thing, the slug block owns the stacking and the inset, and deck.css/deck.js own the hero's clearance.
• Inputs. The route list and current slug; the page's tagline; the brand tokens in quartz.config.ts (--bodyFont, --darkgray, --secondary); on /Thing, the measured masthead height.
• Outputs. One masthead DOM on every page; aria-current="page" on the active route.
• Derived state. The active route is derived from the slug (unchanged). --masthead-h is display-only, derived from layout by deck.js. --thing-inset is derived from the breakpoint and mirrors the site's gutters; it decides nothing on other pages.
• Forbidden writers. No rule paints a ground, border, radius or shadow on .page-header > header or .gamecult-titlebar; no .gamecult-nav-chip class, 999px radius, border or fill in the masthead nav; no slug-scoped masthead variant (the ritual-paper essays, colossus post, Graph and Thing all get the one masthead); no engine edit for the stacking (renderPage.tsx, Header.tsx untouched); no site rule inside .thing-deck; no change to .gamecult-repo-link or .gamecult-action in this cut.
• Shared paths. Every page renders the one GameCultMasthead through the engine's Header; /Thing uses the same slug-block mechanism as the Graph and colossus pages; deploy is the same Deploy Quartz workflow.
• Deletion line. The card rule (646-665), the mobile card padding (1473-1475) and the chip rules (730-751) are deleted before any nav rule is written; the gamecult-nav-chip class is renamed in the component in the same commit.

Questions

Revision 1 put four forks to the operator. The operator dismissed them and ruled the nav direction directly; the Self recorded the defaults as self-masthead-pills-first. Their state:

• campaign-home: ruled, self-masthead-pills-first. The campaign is site-masthead, homed in GameCult/gamecult-site.
• nav-treatment: ruled, operator-nav-ubuntu-links. None of revision 1's three options; Ubuntu text links on the Delvehold recipe (above).
• pill-scope: ruled, self-masthead-pills-first. Masthead only in this cut; .gamecult-repo-link and .gamecult-action in a later cut once the masthead is seen live.
• scrollbar-fix-home: deferred, unruled. html { width: 100vw } is the engine's (GameCult-Quartz/quartz/styles/base.scss:11). Options remain engine (delete the line; one commit; ships to nine sites on their next deploy) or site-override (html { width: auto } in custom.scss; gamecult-site only). Recommended: engine. Not in flat-nav and not in deck-page-fixes; it waits for a ruling.

Cut order

1. thing / deck-page-fixes (F:\Projects\Eve\docs\thing-cut-deck-page-fixes.spec.json): the stacking, the inset, the header-leak guard. Independent of the masthead. Landed: 8fb3dff and 90c2d94.
2. site-masthead / flat-nav (docs/masthead-cut-flat-nav.spec.json, r2): card and pills deleted, Ubuntu links in, brand doc amended. Spec r2 is based on 90c2d94, after 1, so the two edits to the Thing block in custom.scss do not collide; no dependency remains.
3. After the operator has seen 2 live: the other-pills cut (.gamecult-repo-link, .gamecult-action) under self-masthead-pills-first, mapped then; the engine width: 100vw cut if scrollbar-fix-home is ruled engine.

Soul's findings after flat-nav (2026-10-02, against 87f2942)

Soul's passes thing:verdict:cut-deck-page-fixes.s1 and site-masthead:verdict:cut-flat-nav.s1 hold every promise and file three findings. Two cuts resolve them; both specs sit in this folder. Each was re-measured live on 87f2942 before the mechanism was chosen, and in one case the measurement overturned the finding's stated cause.

Cut deck-page-edges (thing, docs/thing-cut-deck-page-edges.spec.json)

chrome-edges-wide (Low). /Projects is .page content-box 1680px plus 19.2px gutters, outer 1718.4px, so at 1920 its masthead and footer text start at x 120. The Thing block gives .page-header max-width: 1680px with the gutter inside the box (text at 139.2), and gives the footer a max-width and margin-inline that the engine's footer { min-width: 100% } nullifies (text at 19.2). Mechanism: one variable, --thing-frame: calc(1680px + 2 * var(--thing-inset)), is the outer width of .page everywhere else; the header and footer take it as max-width, and the footer adds min-width: 0 so the engine's declaration decides nothing. The literal 1680px leaves the two rules.

phone-ticker-short (Medium). Measured at 375x667: masthead footprint 219.8px, .hero-in 375px tall and flex-centred in the 447px below it (256-631), the ticker band absolute at bottom: 56px (565-618). At 360x740 the subtitle wraps to four lines and the band lands 639-691 under a cue at 674-694. Two owners place the hero's parts, flex centring for .hero-in and absolute offsets for the band and the confidentiality line, and nothing reconciles them. Mechanism: the stage's flow owns all of it. .ticker-w and .conf lose position: absolute and their offsets and become flow siblings after .hero-in (the markup order in Thing.md already matches); .hero-in is centred in the remaining space by margin-block: auto; the stage's height becomes min-height, so where the content fits (every desktop size, 375x812, 390x844) the hero is still one screen, and where it does not (375x667 by about 35px, 360x740 by about 15px) the stage grows and the band sits just under the fold instead of over the subtitle. Overlap is impossible by construction. Allowed by thing:ruling:operator-deck-polish; the re-measure thing:ruling:self-phone-hero-waits asked for is Soul's finding. Not a fork: whether the hero type should also tighten on short phones so the band stays above the fold is a taste call the operator makes after seeing it, listed as the spec's operator check, and is a separate two-line cut if wanted.

Cut ritual-phone-width (site-masthead, docs/masthead-cut-ritual-phone-width.spec.json)

ritual-nav-offscreen (Medium, pre-existing; subsumes the follow-up ritual-essay-phone-overflow). The finding names the long h1 as the cause. It is not: with the h1 hidden, .center's min-content on witness-authoritative-networking is still 709px. The culprits are the cover page's figure > pre > code blocks (white-space: pre, longest line about 660px). Those exist on every content page and scroll inside their box everywhere else, because the engine sizes .center to its grid area (max-width: 100%; min-width: 100%). The ritual block's .page > #quartz-body .center { max-width: 1120px; margin: 0 auto } (custom.scss:142-145) replaces the 100% cap and turns the grid item into shrink-to-fit, which is max(min-content, available): 709 on witness, 452 on week-of-nonconsensual, 383 on small-ritual, in a 320px column. The masthead, a .center child, wraps to that width. The same rule is dead on desktop: at 1920 .center is 1395px because the engine's min-width: 100% beats the 1120px cap, and the paper is centred by article { max-width: 980px }, not by .center. Mechanism: delete the rule. Nothing is added; the masthead is not clipped, capped or scrolled; the h1 is untouched.

Cut order

4. thing / deck-page-edges and site-masthead / ritual-phone-width: independent of each other and of the other-pills cut; either order. Both are based on 87f2942; they touch disjoint lines of custom.scss.

Cards: inventory and cuts (map revision 3, 2026-10-02, against 410485e)

Written after lean-masthead landed (site-masthead:cut_report:cut-lean-masthead.h1, 77ecff0..410485e). Line numbers below are from custom.scss at 410485e; every spec says to re-read by selector, since each cut shifts the file.

The operator's words, verbatim

With a phone screenshot of / showing the intro text in a card nested inside another card, alongside the nav and icon cut:

Looks a bit disjointed on mobile.

Asked about the nested cards on the home page:

I would indeed prefer to get rid of cards, unless they're containing something that floats, like a captioned image

Admitted as site-masthead:ruling:operator-no-cards-except-floats. Also in force: operator-no-card-no-pills, self-masthead-pills-first (the .gamecult-repo-link and .gamecult-action pills wait for their own cut), and the follow-up full-width-content ("the content should do the same, where reasonable").

What the operator saw

On / at phone width the DOM is article (card: 24px radius, gradient fill, sky border, 52px shadow, 1057-1067) containing .gamecult-home-hero containing section.gamecult-hero-panel (card: 20px radius, same recipe, 2084-2113) containing the intro copy. Beside it, figure.gamecult-media-card (card) containing img (its own 16px radius and border). Three nested boxes before the first word, four around the mascot. The masthead above them is already on the ground, so the first card edge is the first thing that looks like chrome.

Inventory

A card is any rule that gives a content box its own fill, border, radius or shadow. Classes: flatten (a layout box with no floating content), keep (it holds something that floats: a captioned image, a figure, an embed's own edge, a floating overlay), dead (no element on the built site carries the class), pill (deferred to the pills cut), question (a real fork, below), not a card (listed because the brief asked).

#	Selector	Lines	Pages	Class
1	.page > #quartz-body .center > article (+ mobile 1462-1465; undone by ritual 150-154, Thing 1169-1173, tour/Pitch 1595-1599, colossus padding 1206)	1057-1067	every page but Thing, tour, Pitch, the ritual essays	flatten
2	.gamecult-hero-panel (shared card 2084-2098, home radial 2100-2109, paddings 2111, 2293, 2486)	2084-2113	/, /Projects	flatten
3	.gamecult-feature-card (base card 2084; studio override already a hairline 2350-2357)	2233-2253	/	flatten (collapse: the hairline becomes the base)
4	.gamecult-evidence-note fill (left rule stays)	2175-2183, 2324-2332	/, /Projects	flatten
5	figure.gamecult-media-card (+ img edge 2384-2391; ritual variant 455-474)	2084, 2375-2391	/, four studio pages, small-ritual-of-reach	keep (the operator's example)
6	.gamecult-embed-frame outer box; the iframe inside keeps its 14px edge	2084, 2393-2405	CultPong, cat-and-the-chocolate-factory	flatten outer, keep inner
7	.gamecult-repo-fact tiles	956-965	nine project pages	flatten
8	.gamecult-repo-link	928-947	ten project pages	pill (pending)
9	.gamecult-action	2148-2173, 2315-2322	/, /Projects, Site-Architecture	pill (pending)
10	.gamecult-outtake pull quote (box, tilt, second bar ::before)	1073-1114, 1467-1478	four blog posts	flatten (keep the hang and one orange rule)
11	.toc, .backlinks	1225-1238 (ritual undo 166-169)	standard content pages	flatten
12	.gamecult-overview-sidebar-inner	1257-1272, 1489-1491	/, /Projects, pages with sidebarGroups	flatten
13	.page-listing .section-li > .section (engine folder listing)	1364-1380	/Docs, tag pages	flatten
14	.gamecult-blog-index-intro, .gamecult-blog-card (+ hover fill, engine AutoIndexFolder)	827-873	/Blog	flatten
15	.integrated-dossier-hero; dl div, -note, -table, -glossary	2779-2906	/dossier, /stichting	flatten
16	.ritual-paper-page sheet, badges, blockquote, -abstract, -method-card, -results-strip, -page-number	198-240, 360-424, 523-538	three ritual essays	question ritual-sheet
17	.katex-display (ritual)	483-491	ritual essays	question code-blocks (same answer)
18	engine pre (border, 5px radius), inline code fill	GameCult-Quartz base.scss 445-510	fifteen pages with fences	question code-blocks
19	engine .callout	GameCult-Quartz callouts.scss	none (no content uses > [!)	not a card on this site; nothing to cut
20	tables	engine th/tr hairlines only	99 pages	not a card (already the mechanism)
21	footer	engine footer.scss: text at .7 opacity	every page	not a card
22	Graph page	GameCultGraphSpaShell paints no box; engine .graph-outer unused	/Graph	not a card
23	Sai player on tour/Pitch: .sai-speaker-stage (the 100svh page itself, border 0), .sai-dom-card, .sai-speaker-card, avatar shell	1633-1799	/tour, /Pitch	keep: Sai's player chrome tinted by the site; the DOM cards float over a scene, like the Thing deck's own design
24	.swarm-domain-card > header img, .swarm-avatar-fallback (4.5rem portrait edge)	2943-2953	/Projects	keep (an image's own edge, like img in a media card)
25	.swarm-badge (bordered label, .4rem radius; forming dashed)	2980-2991	/Projects	pill-shaped: add to the pills cut's scope
26	.gamecult-project-group, .gamecult-link-card/-grid (+ tour/Pitch hiders), .gamecult-flow-step, the composite shell/header (compositeSections is set by no page), .portfolio-dossier-* block, .gamecult-vn-source-card/doc-tree (clipped to 1px on their only pages)	782-819, 1494-1549, 1801-1925, 1931-2074, 2185-2224, 2458-2508, 2515-2725	none visible	dead
27	engine .popover (link previews), search modal	GameCult-Quartz	floating UI	keep (floats)

Counts: flatten 12 (rows 1-4, 6, 7, 10-15), keep 5 (5, 23, 24, 27, and the embed's inner edge), dead 1 group of about 640 lines (26), pill 3 (8, 9, 25), question 2 (16/17, 18), not a card 4 (19-22).

What replaces the card: one mechanism

Whitespace, typographic hierarchy, and the hairline rule: 1px solid var(--gamecult-rule) on the top edge of a section or row, named by the mono uppercase tracked label the brand doc already calls the signature. Asides (evidence note, pull quote, dossier notes, ritual blockquote) keep a left rule in the accent, which is the engine's own blockquote treatment. Hover is a colour change to --secondary, never a fill.

The site already does this in three places with two literal colours: .gamecult-studio-page .gamecult-feature-card (2353) and .swarm-domain-card (2932) use rgba(148,163,184,.22); .gamecult-overview-group (1313) uses sky .08. home-flat names the grey as --gamecult-rule on body, and the later cuts replace both literals. The ritual variant uses its own --ritual-paper-rule and the amber its boxes already carried, so the paper stays in its own colours.

The deleted cards' inner padding is not replaced. Content runs to the column's edge, which is what full-width-content asks for; the width caps themselves (1680px, 980px, 760px, 68ch) remain that follow-up's audit.

Questions

Two real forks. Everything else is a classification, not a choice.

ritual-sheet. The brand doc names Ritual Paper as a deliberate scoped variant with --ritual-paper-sheet and --ritual-paper-panel tokens. The sheet is a layout card holding the whole essay; it already drops its radius on phones (594). Options:

• keep-sheet: the variant is the brand doc's named exception; the sheet, abstract box, method card, results strip, blockquote box and the two badge pills all stay.
• flatten-sheet-keep-paper (recommended): the sheet and the boxes become cobalt and amber rules; PREPRINT, WORKING PAPER and the page number become mono labels; the Georgia body, two-column rule, keyline, h2 top rules, footer rule and captioned figures stay. The paper's identity is its type, columns, rules and accents, not its drop shadow, and the essays' ground (119-123) is already the near-black-violet the doc names, so there is no seam the sheet hides.
• flatten-all: as above, and the keyline, column rule and h2 rules go too.

Spec docs/masthead-cut-ritual-sheet.spec.json is written for the recommendation and waits.

code-blocks. Fenced code (fifteen pages) is framed by the engine: pre has a 1px --lightgray border and 5px radius; inline code has a fill. The ritual .katex-display follows the same answer. Options:

• keep-engine-frame (recommended): a code block is a scrolling container, not a card; its border marks the scroll region. The rule is the engine's and ships to nine sites; the brand doc's Surfaces section names it as "containing", not "card".
• site-unframe: a site override, pre { border: 0; border-radius: 0 } with a left rule or fill only; gamecult-site only.
• engine-unframe: the same in GameCult-Quartz base.scss; nine sites on their next deploy.

Cut order (smallest risk first; all based on 410485e)

1. home-flat (docs/masthead-cut-home-flat.spec.json): the article card on every page, the hero panels, feature cards and evidence fills on / and /Projects; names --gamecult-rule; brand doc gains ## Surfaces. What the operator saw is gone after this one.
2. dead-card-css (docs/masthead-cut-dead-card-css.spec.json): about 640 lines with no element, each proven absent from the built site first; the VN source cards are checked in the live DOM of /tour because Sai clones [data-sai-dom-source] nodes into its overlay.
3. sidebars-lists (docs/masthead-cut-sidebars-lists.spec.json): TOC, backlinks, overview sidebar, folder listing rows, Blog index.
4. project-pages (docs/masthead-cut-project-pages.spec.json): fact tiles, embed frame.
5. blog-asides (docs/masthead-cut-blog-asides.spec.json): the pull quote.
6. dossier-flat (docs/masthead-cut-dossier-flat.spec.json): /dossier, /stichting.
7. ritual-sheet (docs/masthead-cut-ritual-sheet.spec.json): after the two questions are ruled.

Cuts 3-6 depend only on home-flat (the token) and touch disjoint lines; any order among them. The pills cut (self-masthead-pills-first) is mapped separately once the operator has seen home-flat; .swarm-badge joins its scope. Follow-up for the Self, not a cut here: the compositeSections branch of GameCultCompositeContent.tsx is reached by no page after its CSS goes.

Target r2 proposal

Invariants r1 keeps: masthead-on-ground, nav-text-links, brand-doc-agrees, site-green. r2 adds:

• no-cards: no content box on the site carries its own fill, border, radius or shadow unless it holds something that floats in the flow (a captioned image or figure, an embed's own edge, a floating overlay). Grouping is whitespace, type hierarchy and the hairline rule --gamecult-rule; asides carry one left rule; hover is a colour, not a fill.
• one-rule-token: every site-owned hairline separator resolves from --gamecult-rule (the ritual variant from --ritual-paper-rule); no literal hairline colour survives in custom.scss.

not_in_scope r2: the pills (.gamecult-repo-link, .gamecult-action, .swarm-badge) until their cut; the engine's pre/code frame until code-blocks is ruled; the Thing deck's and Sai player's own chrome; the width caps (full-width-content); scrollbar-fix-home.

canonical_implementations r2 adds docs/brand-design-language.md ## Surfaces and the --gamecult-rule token on body in custom.scss.

Rename: recommend keeping the slug site-masthead. Fifteen admitted documents cite it as their key prefix; a rename is a new campaign plus a resolution closing this one, and buys only a nicer name. Retitle instead: the campaign and target r2 titles become "Site chrome: the masthead on the ground, the pills gone, no cards", and this file's heading already reads so. If the Self prefers a clean slug, the cuts above are unchanged and move to it.

One column: sidebars gone, masthead aligned, wash dimmed, composite deleted (map revision 4, 2026-10-02, against 535d170)

Written after home-flat, dead-card-css, sidebars-lists (narrowed), project-pages and blog-asides landed; dossier-flat and ritual-sheet are admitted and may land beside these cuts. Line numbers are from custom.scss at 535d170 (2559 lines); every spec says to re-read by selector.

The operator's words, verbatim

With screenshots of /, /Blog and /Docs/Architecture-and-Evidence:

nix the unused composite component. The masthead now feels misaligned on the homepage and project page. I'd rather it be aligned like it is on the pages with sidecars, except I also want those sidecars all gone, they're cramping the style. Blog page elements should also be chromeless. Also that background wash gets too bright on pages that aren't the homepage.

Admitted as site-masthead:ruling:operator-chromeless-column. Also in force: operator-no-cards-except-floats, operator-no-card-no-pills, self-masthead-pills-first, and the follow-up full-width-content ("the masthead always fills the screen, and the content should do the same, where reasonable").

The Self adds a heads-up, not a ruling: the operator is weighing a cheap WebGL shader (a subset of Aetheria's volumetric cloud shader) in place of the CSS wash. So the home-versus-elsewhere difference is one intensity value a shader could read as a uniform, no per-page wash rule is added, and the CSS wash stays as the no-WebGL and reduced-motion fallback.

Body facts

C1. Why the masthead is misaligned on / and /Projects. Both pages carry cssclasses: gamecult-studio-page, and .gamecult-studio-page { max-width: 72rem; margin-inline: auto } (2013-2017) centres the article inside .center, while .page-header (the masthead) spans .center whole. .page is max-width: 1680px (33-37), so at 1660 wide the article starts 240px in from the masthead. On pages with sidebars .center is a 300px-narrower grid column and the article has no cap of its own, so masthead and article share edges. The operator's "aligned like the pages with sidecars" is that: one column, nothing centred inside it.

C2. The sidebars. quartz.layout.ts places, on content pages, left: DesktopOnly(TableOfContents); right: GameCultOverviewSidebar and Backlinks under per-slug conditions; on folder pages, left: GameCultOverviewSidebar. The engine renders <div class="left sidebar"> and <div class="right sidebar"> regardless (renderPage.tsx:247-262), so with empty lists both divs are empty. The site already handles that with :empty { display: none } (52-55) and two :has(... :empty) grid blocks (57-87) that collapse the engine's three-column grid. After the cut every sidebar is empty on every page, so the conditional grid becomes one unconditional rule and the :has machinery is dead.

C3. What the sidebars carry. The TOC: three pages set enableToc: true (Architecture-and-Evidence, dossier, stichting); the engine hid it below $desktop anyway. Backlinks: the engine's list of inbound links on standard content pages. The overview sidebar: sidebarGroups frontmatter on index.md (Studio, Praxis, Participate), Docs/Architecture-and-Evidence.md (Architecture, Proof), Pitch.md, tour.md; on /Blog a post list built by the engine's buildAutoIndexSidebarData. Everything the groups link is reachable from the masthead nav (Projects, Blog, Aetheria), the home page's action row and body links, and the Projects atlas. The /Blog post list is the blog index itself. Nothing moves inline; all of it drops.

C4. The masthead tagline rides on the sidebar code. gamecult.ts:467-508 builds headerTagline: currentTaglineText ?? sidebar?.tagline. Pages with their own quoted first line (19 of 67: home, Docs/index, Graph, Thing, ten project pages, Architecture-and-Evidence, Bifrost, two posts) show it; every other page shows the nearest section index's tagline through findSidebarOverviewNote (page, then Section/index, then index). Blog pages get the literal "Recent notes, fiction, experiments, and other escaped materials." from buildAutoIndexSidebarData's sidebarTagline option, duplicated in GameCultCompositeContent.tsx:177. The tagline chain is masthead content and stays; only its carrier is renamed. The Blog literal becomes the quoted first line of Blog/index.md, so content owns it and both copies go.

C5. The composite branch. GameCultCompositeContent.tsx is the page body for every content and folder page (quartz.config.ts:85-90); only its compositeSections branch (buildSectionContent, getCompositeSections, the sections.length > 0 render, showCompositeJump) is dead: no content file sets compositeSections. Its CSS is 1744-1891 and the mobile block 2202-2223. .gamecult-composite-overview > h2, > ul { display: none } (1754-1757) is also dead: tour.md carries the class, but its <h2>s are inside .gamecult-vn-source-card divs, never direct children of the article, and the file has no top-level ## or list. showCompositeJump: false sits in index.md, Pitch.md, tour.md. rebaseSharedSourceElement is not composite: it serves contentSource pages and stays.

C6. The wash. body (10-29) layers three radials, orange .18, violet .16, sky .14, over the navy gradient. The ritual essays paint their own ground (119-124): yellow .15, cobalt .22, violet .19, brighter than the site's. tour/Pitch cover the body with the VN and hide .page::before; /Thing's hero paints its own .hero-bg in deck.css (Eve) and is not the site's wash. Removing the article card exposed more of the body wash on every page.

C7. /Thing's frame. --thing-frame: calc(1680px + 2 * var(--thing-inset)) (1045) is the outer width of .page elsewhere, so the masthead and footer on /Thing are the same box as everywhere else while the deck is full-bleed (.page { max-width: none; padding: 0 }). The literal 1680px is the only other copy of the page width.

C8. Other width caps. Ritual essays: article { max-width: 980px; margin: 2rem auto 4rem } (148-156), a second centred-inside-the-column cap of the C1 kind. article h1 and .ritual-paper-titleblock 760px (241, 253) and the tagline's 68ch (690) are type measures on a heading and a one-liner, not body chrome. .integrated-dossier-page sets no width.

The shape

One column. body { --gamecult-column: 72rem }, the studio pages' current measure (1152px), becomes .page's max-width; .page's gutters stay outside it. #quartz-body is one column at every width:

.page > #quartz-body {
  grid-template-columns: minmax(0, 1fr);
  grid-template-areas: "grid-header" "grid-center" "grid-footer";
}
.page > #quartz-body > .sidebar { display: none; }

The masthead (.page-header), the article and the site footer are each the column's full width on every page, so their edges meet at the column's edges with no centring inside it. .gamecult-studio-page's cap and the ritual 980px are deleted; the ritual paper takes the column (its two text columns are its measure). /Thing keeps the deck full-bleed and takes --thing-frame: calc(var(--gamecult-column) + 2 * var(--thing-inset)) for its masthead and footer; tour/Pitch keep their full-screen block minus the two sidebar-hider lines. full-width-content: the column is the site's one width, content runs to its edges, and the brand doc gains ## Layout naming the token; the remaining 760px and 68ch caps are type measures and are named there as such. Changing the site's width is then one number.

No sidebar. quartz.layout.ts places nothing left or right; GameCultOverviewSidebar.tsx is deleted; Plugin.TableOfContents() leaves the transformers with the nine enableToc frontmatter lines; sidebarGroups blocks are deleted from the four files; the sidebar data model in gamecult.ts (link, group, data types, the group extractors, summary, active link, sidebarSource, buildAutoIndexSidebarData) is deleted and findSidebarOverviewNote becomes findSectionNote, feeding only the tagline. All sidebar, TOC, backlinks and overview CSS goes, including the slug blocks' grid overrides (ritual 127-141, 570-583; colossus 1100-1111) that exist only to beat the engine's three-column grid.

Wash. One token, body { --gamecult-wash: 0.5 } and body[data-slug="index"] { --gamecult-wash: 1 }; every radial alpha in the body ground and in the ritual ground is calc(<its alpha> * var(--gamecult-wash)) (rgb(255 138 42 / calc(0.18 * var(--gamecult-wash)))). Sass emits a colour function whose argument is a var() as plain CSS; Hands confirms the calc survives in the built stylesheet. No other page rule touches the wash. The CSS wash is the fallback if a shader ever paints the ground; the shader would read --gamecult-wash as its intensity uniform. 0.5 is a first number for the operator to tune.

Composite. The branch, its CSS, the dead overview hider and the showCompositeJump lines go; the file is renamed GameCultContent.tsx so its name stops claiming what it no longer does; quartz.config.ts imports the new name.

The authority map

• Owner. custom.scss body owns the site's two layout tokens, --gamecult-column and --gamecult-wash, and the one grid rule; quartz.layout.ts owns what is placed on a page (nothing beside the centre); gamecult.ts owns the tagline chain; content frontmatter owns a page's own tagline (Blog/index.md now owns the blog's); GameCultContent.tsx owns the article body.
• Inputs. The slug (home or not, for the wash); the page's and its section index's first quoted line (tagline); the two tokens.
• Outputs. One centred column of --gamecult-column on every page, the masthead, article and footer at its edges; the ground at full intensity on / and half elsewhere.
• Derived state. The masthead's width, the footer's width and the Thing frame are derived from --gamecult-column; no rule centres content inside the column (.gamecult-studio-page and the ritual 980px are no longer owners). The grid is no longer derived from sidebar emptiness (:has, :empty); it is one rule. Every ground radial's alpha is derived from --gamecult-wash. The tagline is derived from content, not from sidebar data. enableToc, sidebarGroups, sidebarSource, showCompositeJump, compositeSections are read by nothing and are deleted, not left inert.
• Forbidden writers. No left/right entry in either layout; no max-width with margin: auto on an article or page class; no literal page width (1680px, 72rem) outside the token; no grid-template-* for #quartz-body outside the one rule and the tour/Pitch full-screen block; no :has(... sidebar ...) or :empty grid rule; no radial alpha outside the token's multiplication; no data-slug wash rule beyond the home line; no composite string in the site source; no engine edit.
• Shared paths. Every page type (home, Projects, posts, Docs, folder listings, ritual essays, colossus post, dossier, Graph, Thing, tour/Pitch) renders through the one grid rule and the same Deploy Quartz workflow; /Thing's masthead and footer use the same token through --thing-frame.
• Deletion line. Per cut, the deletes land before any add: the composite branch and its CSS; the sidebar placements, component, data model and CSS with the slug-block grid overrides; the :has/:empty grid rules; the studio-page and ritual caps and the literal page widths; the literal radial alphas.

Questions

None are forks. Two decisions the operator should see live rather than rule on: the column at 72rem (one token; the follow-up's "where reasonable" is answered by the studio pages' own measure) and the wash at 0.5 (one number). The information the sidebars carried drops (C3); nothing is moved inline.

Cut order (smallest risk first; all based on 535d170)

0. community-hit-gap and doc-tree-flat (below, Soul's findings): one rule each, independent of everything; either order, any time.
1. wash-home-only (docs/masthead-cut-wash-home-only.spec.json): the token and the two grounds. Independent. Its ritual lines (119-124) sit beside ritual-sheet's token deletes (104-117); whichever lands second rebases a few lines.
2. composite-delete (docs/masthead-cut-composite-delete.spec.json): the branch, rename, CSS, hider, frontmatter. Independent.
3. sidebars-gone (docs/masthead-cut-sidebars-gone.spec.json): layouts, component, data model, TOC transformer, frontmatter, all sidebar CSS and the slug-block grid overrides, the one grid rule. After composite-delete (same frontmatter blocks, same component file).
4. column-align (docs/masthead-cut-column-align.spec.json): the column token, .page, the two caps, --thing-frame, the brand doc's ## Layout. After sidebars-gone (the column only makes sense once nothing sits beside it). Resolves full-width-content.

Target r3 proposal

Keep r2's six invariants. Add:

• one-column: every page is one centred column of --gamecult-column; the masthead, article and site footer share its edges; no layout places a sidebar and no rule centres a narrower box inside the column. A full-bleed surface (the Thing deck, the VN on tour/Pitch) may escape the column; its masthead and footer do not.
• wash-home-only: the ground's radial intensity is one token, --gamecult-wash, 1 on / and lower elsewhere; no page rule sets a radial alpha of its own. The CSS wash is the fallback ground if a shader ever paints it.

not_in_scope r3: the pills (unchanged); the engine pre/code frame (unchanged); the Thing deck's and Sai player's own chrome (unchanged); the shader (a separate campaign if ruled); scrollbar-fix-home. The width-caps entry leaves not_in_scope: column-align resolves full-width-content.

canonical_implementations r3 adds: the tokens --gamecult-column and --gamecult-wash on body in custom.scss; the one #quartz-body grid rule; quartz.layout.ts with empty left/right; GameCultContent.tsx; docs/brand-design-language.md ## Layout.

Soul's findings after home-flat and dead-card-css (two more cuts)

github-hit-overlap (site-masthead:finding:cut-home-flat.s1.github-hit-overlap, Low). At 360 and 375 the title is 1.9rem, so each community box is 0.92em (27.97px) and the row gap 0.35em (10.64px): neighbour centres are 38.6px apart while each ::after hit area is 44px wide, so Discord's hit area covers the right 5.4px of GitHub's (22 of 121 sampled taps on GitHub opened Discord). Cut community-hit-gap (docs/masthead-cut-community-hit-gap.spec.json): a gap floor, not clipped hit areas. Clipping to the midpoint would keep the row tight but shrink the target below 44px exactly where fingers are, and it needs a second geometry (half-gap offsets) that must agree with the first. The floor states the invariant once: --gamecult-hit: 44px on the row, read by the ::after box and by `gap: max(0.35em, calc(var(--gamecult-hit) + 1px

• 0.92em))`. At desktop sizes the calc is negative and the em gap wins unchanged; at 1.9rem the gap is 17px and centres are 45px apart. One line.

doc-tree-cards-unowned (site-masthead:finding:cut-dead-card-css.s1.doc-tree-cards-unowned, Medium, pre-existing). Map r3 row 26 listed .gamecult-doc-tree-* as dead because no built page carries the classes; repo-doc-tree.js builds them at runtime into the tour's Sai card after the doc-tree choice: a filled, bordered pitch box and a grid of filled, bordered repo boxes. The map was wrong; they are live. Cut doc-tree-flat (docs/masthead-cut-doc-tree-flat.spec.json): under no-cards the pitch is an aside and takes a left rule in its own amber with no fill; the repo boxes are rows and each takes border-top: 1px solid var(--gamecult-rule). The Sai card they sit in is the player's float chrome (row 23) and is untouched; a card inside a float is still a card. The one-rule and no-cards invariants are unchanged; this is the inventory corrected.