TropeLang

The Guide

The conceptual model

The why of TropeLang, for a reader who wants to understand it before — or while — learning to write it. Hand-authored from the spec suite; the examples throughout are editable.

Read it in order, or jump to whatever's nagging you. Vocabulary links to the glossary; tutorials, when they land, live under Learn.

  1. 01 StoryCraft What good storytelling looks like in TropeLang.
  2. 02 Why TropeLang Describe a story as facts; let a recognition engine find the tropes.
  3. 03 The graph Composition over inheritance. Entities, edges, tags.
  4. 04 Tags & the ontology Facet sigils, and imply — one tag expanding into many.
  5. 05 Tropes as patterns A rule over the graph's shape, not a keyword.
  6. 06 The corpus & its tiers Prelude → concepts → modules → tropes, a ratification ladder.
  7. 07 What characters know Ground truth vs. a possibly-false world-model. The four tiers.
  8. 08 Stories within stories The «…» planes; the player↔character boundary.
  9. 09 The two clocks Story-time vs work-time: flashbacks, shuffled timelines, and a character meeting their own other-time self.
  10. 10 Coverage — drams How richly a story is read: density over coverage.
  11. 11 Literate authoring Start in prose; structure it progressively.
  12. 12 The bigger picture The runtime/game vision and the authoring surface. Roadmap.