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Engine Quickstart Guide
The skeleton. These are the hard rules that everything else sits on top of. Inside here you've got:
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lotus_quotes: A renderer constraint; HTML UI text avoids quotation marks because the frontend applies quote-highlighting that messes with color. Prose can use quotes normally. This is a display rule, not a writing rule. -
lotus_momentum: The pacing engine. Anti-stall. Anti-echo. Anti-parroting. Every paragraph has to carry its weight: event, revelation, or shift; otherwise it gets compressed. The engine tracks semantic repetition across turns so you don't read the same sentence structure three times in a row. There's a positioning governor that tracks where every character's body is so nobody teleports between poses. -
lotus_npcs: Every NPC gets a goal, a constraint, and a next action. They take initiative. But they also have a firewall; they can't state offscreen events as fact unless they have an in-world source. No omniscience. Suspicion doesn't equal knowledge. -
lotus_fidelity: Character integrity. The anti-machine directive forces human characters to perceive through subjective, approximate, sensory language instead of mechanical precision. No BPM readings in romantic scenes. No decimal temperatures from someone who just got stabbed.
This is me. The operator layer. Contains:
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gabrielle_steering: How I distinguish between engineer commentary and chat mode. OOC commands route to me. I respond through GabiBoxes (that payload with badge colors and status strings). -
gabrielle_commands: Structured commands like Audit (which checks instruction alignment, structure, fidelity, and slop risk) and Refresh (which dumps the full configuration payload and lists any gaps or conflicts). -
Gabrielle_Modifiers: Dynamic personality dials:tsundere_value,adaptative_technical_jargon,severity_and_ruthlessness_score. These can be adjusted to change how I present. -
gabi_muttering: Mini debug payloads I can inject between prose paragraphs to steer beats mid-scene without interrupting the narrative flow. They look like terminal pseudocode with quick craft notes. Can be deleted with the included regex if you want the functionality without the bloat.
The creative core. User preferences get locked here:
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POV Discipline: Perception firewall; only describe what the current focal viewpoint could plausibly know.
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Prose Governor: Controls length, density, sentence floors per paragraph, pacing. Stub paragraphs don't count toward targets. Dialogue density scales with length settings.
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gabrielle_sync: Settings lock at the start of each response and refresh on significant events. Memory anchors prevent amnesia across long sessions.
This is the beating heart. Everything in <engine_behavior> and <bookworm> serves this.
Stackable extras that bolt onto narrative_heart:
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prose_choices: Branch director for generating options. Locked to the active subject: no flipping mid-generation. -
prose_chapters: Chapter headers and structure UI. -
weather_header: Scene-setting headers. -
plustext: Immersive text enhancements.
The quality control stack:
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ruleset_bias: Tweaks the engine's behavior: active rulesets modify output without adding new story content. If a bias conflicts with core presets, core wins. -
style_masks: Prose overrides that alter narrative voice, rhythm, and structural approach. If a style rule conflicts with default cadence, style wins. Masks govern narration and interiority but don't alter dialogue cadence unless specified. -
character_behavior: An entire subsystem for embodied characterization:-
anthro_realism: Species traits as anatomy, not decoration. Tails aren't prehensile unless biology supports it. Ears orient before cognition. Biology leaks state before conscious masking. -
interiority: Shapes how characters think. Action-forward characters don't internally monologue. Insight isn't escape; noticing a flaw doesn't fix it.
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Story architecture. The actual narrative structure:
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Genre, Subgenre, Progression, Pacing: Structural scaffolding. Progression gates emotional beats: confessions, betrayals, irreversibles—behind turn thresholds. Phase 1 through Phase 4 arcs with hard rules about when intimacy can escalate.
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bookworm_citrusandbookworm_eros: Intimacy handling. Gate-locked, cautious, or open. Explicit content follows progression rules; no skipping from hand-holding to catharsis in two turns. -
stakes: Consequence scaling. Escalation follows steps: seed → complication → consequence → counterplay.
Dice system that evaluates your actions in four different categories to manage the outcome, ensuring more unpredictability and higher stakes.
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Dice Actions: Emotional signal weather for the next charged beat. Rolls for Heart Leak, Static, and Landing. Rolls a d20 for alignment.
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Save Throw: Compares rolled outcome and adds modifiers per scene; -3 to +3 to the final rol based on circumstance.
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Modals: SOFT burn vs CRUEL burn. One causes awkwardness and low level tension, the other uses the worst possible interpretations for the modifiers.
The pressure system:
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Dark Level (0-5): Dictates consequence cost, NPC forgiveness, luck decay, and bias pressure. Higher levels shatter the protagonist halo. At Dark 3+, physical consequence is guaranteed. At Dark 5, nothing the protagonist does matters.
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Setting Law: Loose, Strict, or Hostile—determines how punitively the world enforces its rules.
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Reveal Cadence: Controls information flow—standard, sparse, drip, aggressive. No lore dumps under slow cadence.
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Failure Mode: Clean, Costly, Humiliating, or Escalatory. Failures must change the next beat. At higher dark levels, failure injections become mandatory.
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lotus_villains: Antagonist creation and management. Villains have archetypes, escalation paths, and consequence profiles. The obsession addon handles invasive fixation without flattening villains into generic possessiveness.
Session memory. What happened, what's lingering, what needs to carry forward. Prevents the engine from forgetting that someone's arm got broken three scenes ago.
Utility modules. Things like tracking HUDs, registry blocks, inventory systems; anything the scene needs to stay organized without cluttering prose.
Diegetic songs for your Roleplay. Thematic and tonal reinforcement. If a scene needs a specific mood backbone; melancholy, tension, hope, dread—this is where it gets tuned.
The final polish pass:
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Voice differentiation: Silent audit for robot-isms. Multiple characters can't all sound like the same clinical intelligence wearing different skins. Competence doesn't equal sterility.
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Anti-omniscience enforcement: Double-checks that nobody knows things they couldn't plausibly know.
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Context integration: Pulls together
the_scene,the_subjects,the_impasto, and the memory databank into coherent output. -
Defaults verify: Pre-output gate audit that checks all active modules, identifies conflicts, and surfaces what's loaded versus suppressed.