Deliverable #17 · 2026-07-16
The world design overview — the first written draft of the reboot
Open the world design overview
Backdated: added to the log on 2026-09-13 for a thing made on 2026-07-16. The original is docs/historic/first-ideas-for-reboot.html; what is embedded is a verbatim copy, with its five diagrams beside it.
What it was
The reboot’s first page. Before there was a repo, an engine, or a name, there was this: a living document that tried to say the whole game in ten commitments, each opening into a section — creation happens inside the game; three tiers of authorship (laws, matter, compositions); one substance, two topologies; four axes as the whole universe; fields; elements are hexagrams; changing lines; recipes and formulas; the budget rule; a world of permission rings. It carried its own glossary and its own list of open questions, and it was written to be handed to a collaborator, human or AI, who had never heard of Lor.
What carried through
More than half of it is still the game. Creation inside the game is the sentence at the top of the repo’s own README. Elements are the 64 hexagrams, keyed by their King Wen number, and every one of them is also a kind of ground. Home space, the commons and the arenas became Areas — a private home for every player, the Village of Lor, Golem Hollow — joined by portals. The three-tier idea, that players author compositions and never physics, is what a spell is today: a recipe, an ordered list of elements that makes one thing.
What did not
The four axes and the fields — the parts of this page that read most like physics — are the parts the design doc has since marked with doubt. “One substance, two topologies” was struck from the current summary. Two days after this was written the physics-first idea was inverted altogether (see deliverable #21, the explainer): the meanings of elements are hand-authored, and the elements are closer to words than to particles. This page is where the doubt started from, which is why it is worth keeping.
Sources & artifacts
Also available as raw markdown.