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Spec 00 — overview

De Lore Is (DLI) is a continuity engine for fictional worlds. It records structured claims about characters, places, events, rules, and changing states, together with their provenance and the rulings that support or defeat them. Authors and agents can check those claims, ask why they hold, and explore alternatives without rewriting the established record.

DLI checks the structured lore it is given; it does not read a manuscript and discover every plot hole. It does not call a model or decide who may make a ruling. A consuming application supplies attribution, decisions, and its own review policy. DLI checks the integrity of references and derives the result from committed inputs, so the same inputs yield the same answer.

The lorestore holds immutable, content-addressed fact objects. Their schemars-derived schemas and canonical JSON bytes define the stored form. The .dli language provides a readable text surface for authoring and inspection. The decision ledger (../decisions.md) outranks this overview and the other specification files.

Working with lore

  • Check continuity. Declare the rules a world needs, such as a single-valued home for a character, and check claims against them. A contradiction between ruled claims prevents a commit and identifies its support.
  • Explain and revise. Query whether a claim is certain, possible, or dead, and inspect its support. A retcon records a defeat rather than erasing the earlier claim; subsequent rulings can change the result again.
  • Explore alternatives. Fork a world and compare the consequences of hypothetical assumptions without changing the committed record.
  • Model time and rules. Eras and events form a partial chronology, while fluents describe states that change. Practices express declared rules and proof obligations; the language layer can check names and registers.
  • Integrate. The command line, JSON server, and MCP authoring tools expose these operations to people and to applications working with agents. Exports provide one-way projections for other tools.

See semantics for claims and standing, time for chronology and fluents, practices for rules and proofs, language for names and registers, reasoning for derivation and explanation, exports for projections, and serving and agent authoring for the interfaces. The charter (../charter.md) states the project’s principles; ../PLAN.md records implementation status.