The link graph as a memory system

I had been sitting with a documentation theory for a while before it ever touched a fantasy continent. It started in software, writing docs for agents and for whoever came after me on a codebase, and it came down to three rules I kept holding myself to. A document should be understandable in under sixty seconds. Anything deeper than that is a link away. And nothing dead-ends. Every page goes somewhere related.

The reasoning behind all three is the same. Hand someone everything up front and you haven’t informed them, you’ve buried them, and buried people close the tab. So you give them the one thing they came for, then let the next thing they get curious about be a click instead of a prerequisite. Wikis have worked this way forever. I wasn’t inventing anything. I was trying to hold to it strictly enough that it actually worked.

What I couldn’t tell was whether I had a principle or just a habit I’d picked up writing docs at two in the morning. The way to find out was to take it somewhere that wasn’t code at all.

My brother-in-law had an idea for his game shop. He’s producing figures, and the figures needed a world to stand in, a campaign that matched what was coming off the table. I offered to build the world. Three questions went in with me. Could I take the director’s chair on someone else’s idea and do it justice? If I did, would this still count as my work? And which of those rules would survive contact with a place built for wonder instead of efficiency?

The first thing I locked was voice, because without it every section drifts and the reader ends up disoriented in a different way than being buried, but just as lost. Thrapsus is written as the work of scattered chroniclers, commissioned by a library that is rebuilding itself out of ash. The original Great Library burned. The ruins are still standing in Ferisia, in a borough that no map calls Ashhold and everyone does, and the new Library was built close enough that you can see the wreck from the reading rooms. Its chroniclers are out collecting what’s left from peoples who have no reason to agree with each other.

That framing did more work than anything else in the project. It set the tone, which is flat, factual, and short on opinion. It gave me the phrase the whole corpus leans on, most accounts, which is a scholar telling you where the ground is soft. And it turned every hole in the world into an honest hole. Records contradict each other. Nobody has the whole picture. The gaps aren’t unfinished homework, they’re the premise, and a reader who notices one has a reason to go looking instead of a reason to leave.

Altitude came second. There were going to be many kinds of readers arriving at many different moments, and the same page cannot serve all of them, so I stopped trying to write one and wrote three.

At the continental view you get the shape of the whole place. What happened here, who lives here, how magic behaves, enough to know what’s out there without drowning in it. At the regional view a piece of that sharpens into terrain and borders and trade, who holds what, who’s fighting over it. At the local view you’re reading about one people in real detail. The Turquoise Orcs of Karskaro, say, where most orcs raid and these ones farm, growing ash-grains in volcanic soil under clan matriarchs who care more about the next generation than the next season.

Then I stopped. Ground level, the actual lived-in specifics, I left out on purpose. That’s the table’s. Once someone picks a people, the sessions are where that voice gets written, and it should sound different from group to group and player to player, because a world that all sounds like one person isn’t lived in. Leaving the bottom floor empty was the single most deliberate decision in the project, and it’s the one I’d defend hardest.

It didn’t click as a system until I noticed it had to run in more than one direction at once. Someone who knows nothing goes top down, whole world narrowing to a person. Someone who already knows they want to play a Karskaro orc goes bottom up, starting with the people and climbing out to where they sit on the map. And someone who has picked a side goes sideways, which is where the thing actually gets interesting. From the Turquoise Orcs you follow their alliance with the Giant Trolls, which holds exactly as long as it stays profitable to both. You follow their war with a dwarven trade-state that tunnels for crystal along their border and keeps collapsing their lava chambers, a war fought mostly underground by sealing each other’s vents. Two links from a farming culture you’re in a grudge with a full explanation behind it.

That’s the part I’d call a graph rather than a ladder. Three directions, one structure, and the same rules from the software docs holding it together underneath. Sixty seconds to understand. Deeper is a link away. Never a dead end.

So, the questions I walked in with. The rules held, which was the one I could actually test. The other two I’ve been chewing on longer.

I didn’t write every sentence in that vault. I did decide that the chroniclers would contradict each other, that the tone would stay flat, that most accounts would be the seam where uncertainty shows, that a farming orc culture was more interesting than another raiding one, and that the ground floor stays empty for people who aren’t me. I read every word that shipped, and I cut plenty that didn’t. A director’s name goes on the poster and a director doesn’t operate the camera. I don’t think GenAI changes what that name means, though I understand why people want it to.

This is my work. Thrapsus is a collaboration between my brother-in-law, me, and a tool, and I’m comfortable with the order of that list. What I’m still working out is where the line sits when the tool gets better at the parts I’ve been calling mine.