Spellgrove

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Naming and brand

comms

repo: n/a — this workspace (brand/brand.json, brand/naming.md)

Where this stands (2026-10-19)

Decided: the title is Spellgrove (Kris, 2026-09-11, without the poll that was task 002) and the full title Legend of Rah: Spellgrove (2026-10-10, after the Nintendo/Zelda clearance in brand/naming.md); the studio is CoCreations (Q001, 2026-07-30); the domain is spellgrove.com (Q002, live since 2026-09-03). Every decided value is in brand/brand.json. The Copyright & IP notice is live at /copyright (was task 001). Filed 2026-10-19: two Australian word marks with IP Australia — SPELLGROVE (2706928) and LEGEND OF RAH (2706929), classes 9 and 41, owner CoCreations Australia Pty Ltd, A$1,000; the receipt, IP Australia’s “filed” letters (20 Oct; the numbers are confirmed) and what happens next (examination in about 3–4 months, a two-month opposition window, registration dated from filing) are brand/trademark/, and deliverable 33 reads them. The LOR mark that Q003 began with was not filed — the franchise name is now LEGEND OF RAH. Still Kris’s, in order: the US (intent-to-use or Madrid from this base), a fixed-fee attorney’s once-over before the Kickstarter, the banner lock-up restyle (the sword out of the wordmark). Open, Kris’s — answered by editing this section: the legal read of the copyright notice (jurisdiction, third-party contributors, the AI-art framing, trademark versus copyright framing; was Q004). Open issues: #20 (on the MVP list) — stays open until the marks register. Past task files (to 2026-09-13): workshop/historic-docs/epics/naming-and-brand/tasks/. The question files: workshop/historic-docs/epics/naming-and-brand/questions/.

What this is

Brand decisions for the Lor franchise: the game title (decided — Spellgrove), the app’s store listing name vs. its home-screen label (decided — both Spellgrove), the studio name (decided — CoCreations), the domain (decided — spellgrove.com, live since 2026-09-03), and whether to register a trademark (open, research done). Every decided value lives in brand/brand.json and every surface reads from it — nothing here is hardcoded elsewhere.

The title decision (CLOSED, 2026-09-11) — Spellgrove

The game is Spellgrove. Kris decided it on 2026-09-11 as the store-release work began (“the working title has been The Ten Thousand Things, now its time to change it”) — no poll in the end; the name had been the working title since 2026-08-13, the site has lived at spellgrove.com since 2026-09-03, and the kids had been saying it for a month. brand/brand.json carries title, storeName and appLabel all as “Spellgrove”, titleDecided, and formerTitles for the two names before it. The full record, including the vetting sweep that cleared the name, is brand/naming.md. What the decision changed in the game and on the site, and the store work it opened, is workshop/epics/store-release/.

The previous title (2026-08-05 to 2026-09-11) — kept for the record

The game was “Lor: The Ten Thousand Things.”

2026-08-13: Kris reopened the title question. “Lor: The Ten Thousand Things” remains the incumbent title on all live surfaces (brand/brand.json, the site, all UI — unchanged) but should now be treated as incumbent-under-review, not final. Kris strongly likes the “Land of ___” feel (areas/worlds you explore and create are core to the game) and is open to something with “Rah” in it (avoid the exact phrase “Legend of Rah” — SEO-occupied by N.K. Stouffer’s book “The Legend of Rah and the Muggles”; the family-privacy question in marketing-and-communication/CLAUDE.md applies to any Rah-based public brand). A name-vote-as-mailing-list-builder idea is parked for later (community tooling deliberately deferred 2026-08-13). New candidates surfaced so far — “Spellgarden” (fully vetted and rejected, occupied-name collision) and “World of Witches” (floated, not vetted) — are recorded in brand/naming.md. Working title is now “Spellgrove” (Kris, 2026-08-13); full sweep record and finalist board in brand/naming.md; live surfaces unchanged.

Resolved 2026-10-10: Final title is Legend of Rah: Spellgrove (Kris). See brand/naming.md 2026-10-10 entry for the Nintendo/Zelda clearance analysis. Remaining propagation + filing actions tracked there.

Rationale: “The ten thousand things” (萬物, wànwù) is a phrase from the Laozi/Dao De Jing — the Dao gives birth to the one, the one to the two, the two to the three, the three to the ten thousand things. It names the entire manifold of existence as generated from a small number of fundamentals, which is a literal description of the game’s own combinatorial system: 64 hexagrams, 8 trigrams, a handful of recipes, and everything a player can ever make from them. Nearest parallels in Hindu philosophy — prapañca (the proliferation of phenomena) and nāma-rūpa (name-and-form) — didn’t become the title but are worth keeping in mind for codex/flavour text.

Full candidate record — including “Little Witches,” “Land of Lor,” “Lor Elementals,” and the runner-up “Changing Lines” (kept on file, not dead) — with reasons for rejection, lives in brand/naming.md. Nothing here duplicates that; read it there.

App label vs. store name (CLOSED, re-decided 2026-09-11)

Two different Android/iOS-level fields, easy to conflate:

The record below is the previous title’s reasoning, superseded with it.

Why not “Ten Thousand” as the app label (superseded) (12 chars, fits with zero truncation risk): live search-collision research found an existing App Store app called “Ten Thousand: Share & Win” (by Ten Thousand Me LLC) and another called “Ten Thousand Tsumego.” “10,000 Things” is one character over the safest truncation line but distinguishes cleanly from both and actually completes the thought (“things”) rather than leaving it dangling. Recorded as primary; “Ten Thousand” stays on file as the fallback if “10,000 Things” turns out to truncate badly on a specific device in testing.

Merch warning — record prominently, affects Kickstarter reward tiers

Moot for the title since 2026-09-11 (the game is Spellgrove, and “ten thousand” is no longer in its name); kept because the constraint still applies to any merch that quotes the old phrase or the Daoist line.

“TEN THOUSAND” is a live, registered US trademark in class 25 (athletic apparel: shirts, pants, jackets, sweatshirts, hats and caps), owned by Ten Thousand Inc., a well-funded New York activewear brand. Any physical apparel backer reward must carry the full title (“Lor: The Ten Thousand Things”) or the Lor mark — never the bare short form “Ten Thousand.” This directly constrains reward-tier design in kickstarter-prelaunch; flag it there too, not just here.

A public Copyright & Intellectual Property notice for the site has been drafted — see naming-and-brand/001 for the implementation/publish task and Q004 for the legal-review items blocking it. The draft asserts CoCreations Australia Pty Ltd’s ownership over the project’s names and marks (Lor, LOR, “Lor: The Ten Thousand Things,” “10,000 Things,” The Legend of Rah, Land of Lor, Lor Elementals, CoCreations), its original systems (the 64-element/hexagram table, the trigram-axis model, changing lines, the recipe/formula system, and more), its characters (Rah, Willow, Robby, Eliza, Papa, Angel, Wisp) and world-building, and its creative/technical works — plus a broad catch-all for present and future material, an all-rights-reserved statement, a no-licence-by-access statement, and a notice addressed specifically to AI agents and scrapers about training/reproduction use. It explicitly carves out the site’s third-party-licensed fonts rather than overclaiming them. Nothing is built or pushed live yet — that’s gated on the legal-review question above, same as any other public-facing claim from this epic.

Rights-holding entity confirmed (2026-08-12). Kris verified via ABN Lookup that CoCreations Australia Pty Ltd (ABN 86 632 857 277, ACN 632 857 277) owns all the IP — brand/brand.json now carries studioAbn/studioAcn alongside studioLegalName, and every notice surface identifies the holder as “CoCreations Australia Pty Ltd (ABN 86 632 857 277)”. This resolves item 1 of Q004; its other four items (jurisdiction, third-party contributors, AI-art copyright framing, trademark/copyright framing) are still open. Bot-discovery plumbing — a sitemap entry for /copyright (via the site’s existing @astrojs/sitemap integration), /.well-known/tdmrep.json (TDM Reservation Protocol), and noai/noimageai robots meta tags — is also drafted now, unbuilt/unpushed like the rest of this work.

No pre-existing task about applying for copyright registration was found anywhere in the repo (only the unrelated, already-tracked Q003 — a trademark filing question, already living in this epic). If such a task exists somewhere outside this repo, it needs to be created here from scratch rather than moved.

Studio name — DECIDED (2026-07-30)

The studio is CoCreations (Kris’s existing company, CoCreations Australia Pty Ltd). brand.json’s studio field is now "CoCreations", with studioLegalName holding the full entity name for footer/legal use. Q001 is answered; see its Decision section for the full record.

Kris’s actual first choice, “Pinewood Studios” (his home/office is on Pinewood Circuit, and he already calls it that affectionately), was never usable: Pinewood Group’s own terms of use register “PINEWOOD,” “PINEWOOD SHEPPERTON,” “PINEWOOD STUDIOS,” and “SHEPPERTON STUDIOS” as trademarks in major jurisdictions worldwide, they operate internationally in entertainment, and app stores act quickly on trademark complaints. This should not be revisited by mistake — the name itself was the problem, not the enthusiasm behind it. The Pinewood-derived alternatives considered along the way (Pine Circuit Games, Pinewood Circuit, Circuit Studios) are superseded by this decision, not live options — kept here for the record only. “Lor Games,” the placeholder this section previously recommended keeping, is likewise superseded.

Domain — DECIDED: spellgrove.com (live since 2026-09-03)

The site is spellgrove.com, served from the game droplet (see epics/PICKUP.md step 8 for how it builds). Mail for the domain is Namecheap’s forwarding (the MX records point at eforward*.registrar-servers.com), which is where hello@spellgrove.com — the support and privacy contact brand.json names — has to be set up as a forward to Kris’s inbox (store-release/ checklist). cocreations.com.au publishes a null MX, so no address there receives mail. The earlier research, kept:

The site had a live, working URL before the domain: https://lor.kris.ai-task-runner.com, served directly by the AI Task Runner platform (no deploy step, no DNS to configure). A custom domain is purely an upgrade for later — nothing is waiting on it.

Scope

Non-goals

Key open questions

  1. Whether to actually file the LOR class-9 trademark, after running the TM Checker tool and investigating the Legends of Runeterra collision — and now whether “SPELLGROVE” is the mark worth filing instead of, or as well as, “LOR”. Filed 2026-10-19: SPELLGROVE and LEGEND OF RAH, classes 9 and 41 (brand/trademark/). LOR itself was not filed.
  2. The copyright notice’s remaining legal-review items (Q004).

Studio name, title and domain are decided — see above.

Relevant docs

Deliverables (1)

Work on this epic

The granular work is GitHub Issues, one label per epic: epic:naming-and-brand (private repository — sign-in required). The dated Where this stands section above names the open ones. The task files that carried this epic until 2026-09-13 are kept in the repo: task files to 2026-09-13 .

Ask an agent about this epic

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