# 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 /workshop for how it's actually getting built, and this workspace's own [CLAUDE.md](https://github.com/krisrandall/land-of-lor/blob/master/workshop/CLAUDE.md) for the two attempts that came before.

# Why

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.