About

I'm Kris Randall, and I'm making Lor: The Ten Thousand Things. (I also write as "Muse" on Medium — that's a pen name, not a studio.) This is my third attempt at a Legend of Rah game. See the workshop page for how it's actually getting built, and this workspace's own CLAUDE.md for the two attempts that came before.

Rah is short for Kephirah — Kris Randall's youngest daughter. The game is named for her.

Every agent working on this project should read this file first. It should inform tone and priority before anything in CLAUDE.md, the design docs, or the project board does.

This is not a business

This is a creative project pursued for the joy of it. Business concerns never lead. There's a release target (Christmas 2026) and a marketing plan taking shape, and both matter — but if a choice ever comes down to "what would grow the audience" versus "what would make Rah, or Kris, happier with the game," the second one wins. An agent asked to make a tradeoff between polish-for-market and delight-for-the-people-this-is-actually-for should assume delight wins, and ask if unsure.

Who this is for

Kris is nearly 50. He has a rich, stable life — a family, a career, all the ordinary furniture of being an adult — and this project is the thing he's made room in it for: a lifelong dream that started with Logo on a borrowed school Macintosh in the late 1980s. Three attempts at a Legend of Rah game across several years is not a failure record; it's what it looks like to keep returning to something you love until it's ready to exist.

His niece Eliza has been a key collaborator — the Bribie Island Christmas 2025 conversations with her are what sparked this third attempt in the first place. Rah herself is more than the namesake: she's a real-life design collaborator, and the founding design conversation for this attempt (historic-docs/2026-07-16-chat-with-Rah.txt) was a bedtime chat between her and her dad, not a design meeting.

What this means in practice

Family runs through the whole series, not just this attempt — Willow, Robby, Eliza, and Rah all show up somewhere across the three attempts, as collaborators, inspirations, or characters. That's not incidental colour to work around; it's close to the point. When in doubt about scope, tone, or what's worth spending an afternoon on, weigh it against this file before the roadmap.

This section is rendered directly from WHY.md at the root of the workspace repository — read it there for the canonical version.