The Guild

Every example on this site is about the same thing.

Five guild halls take contracts from one board. The board says what needs doing, where, how bad it is and what it pays; the roster says who can be sent. That is the whole subject matter, and once you have read this page you never have to read it again — the table on the data-table page, the chart on the analytics page and the nodes in the graph showcase are all this.

The halls

A hall is this world's tenant, and the reason the world is a guild rather than a bakery: a hall has colours, and colours are the thing this library themes.

heraldry is not decoration. The two hexes are a brand and a neutral, which is where a theme author starts — so "the Order of Salt's colours" and "that tenant's theme" are the same sentence. Switching halls is how the white-label story gets told, with no fixture that exists only to demonstrate theming.

The work

A contract passes through five states, in order. Two of them are terminal, which is what lets an example show a row action that is legal on some rows and not others.

Difficulty is a grade from 1 to 5, named as well as numbered — a Rating wants the number and a tooltip wants the word. Reward tracks grade, then travel, so a reward column that sorts wrong is visibly wrong:

The people

Thirty-five members across the five halls. Six roles, each with a duty a rule can actually require — which is why the rule language can say a party this size must carry a cantor and mean something.

Availability is derived from the board, never authored beside it. The first version of this world authored both and they disagreed within the hour: the generator staffed a member marked missing onto a contract that had just been signed. Now being out is computed from who is on a live contract, and only the narrative exceptions — resting, wounded, missing — are written down.

The beasts

Eight, which is not an arbitrary number: eight is how many categorical slots a theme publishes, so a chart coloured by beast is the one place in these docs where the data's cardinality and the scheme's capacity are the same number on purpose.

The archive

The board is what is happening. The archive is what has happened — every contract the halls have closed, going back about eight years.

It exists because of the graph. A network view is only worth a WebGL canvas when things share: the same member turns up on contract after contract, the same beast in region after region, so lassoing a cluster pulls in work you did not know was related. Forty-four contracts cannot do that.

But it is history rather than padding, and this is the part worth knowing if you ever edit the world. Each member's settled count on the roster above used to be a number with no cause. Parties in the archive are drawn against that count as a quota, until the quota is spent — so the archive is the history those numbers were counting, and a test fails if the two ever stop agreeing.

The board

Forty-four contracts. Five pages at ten a page, so pagination is doing something and the last page is not a stub.

The derived half — ids, rewards, dates, parties — comes from one seeded stream, so this is the same board in every browser and every build. Nothing in the world reads the clock: today is 14 September 1312, and a test fails if any fixture calls Date.now(). A reader who sees 1312 in a date field knows immediately that it is the example world talking and not their own data.