Naming and brand

comms needs-human-decision

repo: n/a — this workspace (brand/brand.json, brand/naming.md) · updated 2026-08-13

What this is

Brand decisions for the Lor franchise: the game title (decided), the app’s store listing name vs. its home-screen label (decided), the studio name (decided), the domain (open, non-blocking), 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, 2026-08-05)

The game is “Lor: The Ten Thousand Things.” brand/brand.json’s title is now set and titleIsProvisional is false.

2026-08-13: Kris has 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.

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)

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

Store listing name (brand.json: storeName): “Lor: The Ten Thousand Things” — 28 characters, fits both the App Store’s and Google Play’s 30-character cap.
Home-screen / app label (CFBundleDisplayName on iOS, android:label on Android — independent of the store listing name; iOS visibly truncates around 12 characters): “10,000 Things” (13 chars).

Why not “Ten Thousand” as the app label (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.

Trademark research (research only, not legal advice)

Do not attempt to register the game title itself. “The Ten Thousand Things” is already in third-party public use (a Minneapolis theatre nonprofit operating since 1990, tenthousandthings.org) — that weakens distinctiveness enough that registering the phrase isn’t worth pursuing.
Do consider registering “LOR” as a word mark, class 9 (downloadable game software) — the franchise outlasts any single game’s title, so it’s the actual asset worth protecting, not this title. IP Australia fees (current): standard application minimum A$250/class; TM Headstart (pre-assessment) minimum A$330/class; registration takes at least seven months; renewal A$400/class every 10 years.
Runeterra collision and distinctiveness researched 2026-08-12 — see Q003 for the full write-up. Short version: three-letter marks like “LOR” are prima facie registrable under IP Australia’s own guidance (favourable); Legends of Runeterra is still actively developed and “LoR” is Riot’s own house abbreviation, not just fan slang, which keeps a narrow reputation-based risk (s60/passing-off) open even though no earlier Australian “LOR” registration by Riot was found; the one remaining unknown (whether any other party already holds an AU “LOR” mark in class 9/41) needs a ~5-minute human click through IP Australia’s TM Checker + ATMOSS, confirmed to require interactive use and not shortcuttable by an agent. Q003’s Recommendation is now “run that 5-minute check, then file.”
Class 41 (online entertainment services) may become relevant later if the barter marketplace (barter-marketplace) becomes an operated service rather than an in-game feature. Not a now-decision.

Merch warning — record prominently, affects Kickstarter reward tiers

“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.

Copyright and IP (2026-08-12)

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 — OPEN, a nice-to-have, not a blocker

The site already has a live, working URL today: 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.

lorgames.com — taken.
lor-games.com — available, rejected: inherits the “Lor”/“lore” search-homophone confusion without solving it, and a hyphenated domain reads as a second choice.
lor.games — available, rejected: ~A$184/year is too expensive to justify for a personal creative project at this stage.
Still to check: lorgames.net, lorgames.co, playlor.com, lorstudio.com, lorstudios.com, or a domain built on whichever studio name is eventually chosen.
Decision: this does not block launch, and there is no urgency. Whenever a domain is picked, it can be pointed at the existing platform-hosted site with zero rebuild required. Recorded here specifically so the domain question can’t hold up anything else, including the Kickstarter pre-launch page (kickstarter-prelaunch).

Scope

Maintaining brand/naming.md and this file as decisions land or open questions get resolved.
Keeping brand/brand.json as the single propagation point — title, store name, and app label are all decided and live there now; studio name and domain are not yet fields to change because neither has a final answer.

Non-goals

Not a design epic — see land-of-lor’s own docs for anything that touches game mechanics, not this file.
Not legal advice — the trademark section above is research to inform a decision, not a substitute for actually consulting a trademark attorney before filing anything.

Key open questions

Domain: which of the unchecked candidates (or a cocreations.com.au subdomain, now that the studio name is decided) to register, and when?
Whether to actually file the LOR class-9 trademark, after running the TM Checker tool and investigating the Legends of Runeterra collision.

Studio name (formerly question 1 here) is decided — see above.

Relevant docs

brand/naming.md — full title-candidate record with rejection reasons.
land-of-lor/docs/thought-specs/little-witches.md — the voice note behind the rejected “Little Witches” candidate.
epics/kickstarter-prelaunch/overview.md — where the merch/trademark constraint becomes a concrete reward-tier design rule.

Status

2 needs-input

Next: Kris/a lawyer resolves Q004's remaining items (jurisdiction, third-party contributors, AI-art framing, trademark/copyright framing — entity name is answered) to unblock naming-and-brand/001 — plus Q002 (domain) and Q003 (trademark filing) whenever convenient, none urgent. Also new: naming-and-brand/002, Kris runs the public game-name poll (Spellgrove vs Cauldria vs Portilia, optional Rahlands) and records the final title.

Tasks (2)

needs-input (2)

naming-and-brand/001 — Publish the Copyright & IP notice page (priority 2, estimate S , blocked by naming-and-brand/Q004 )
naming-and-brand/002 — Run the game-name poll (priority 2, estimate S )

Answered questions (1)

naming-and-brand/Q001 — Studio name

Ask an agent about this epic

Also available as raw markdown.