Dialogue was already plain text, so the gap was never the .yarn files. It was
that the character material a writing session needs was either missing or stored
somewhere a writer could not comfortably work.
Three things were wrong. The writing handbook was not in the repo and was cited
by SC101.yarn as though it were. The best voice material — register, verbal tics,
success/failure/passive samples — was a \n-escaped string inside a JSON field.
The named NPCs had no sheets at all, existing only as their Yarn lines.
writing/ now holds the dialogue-facing layer, at the repo root so it gets no
.meta files and is not a Unity asset:
STYLE.md register, the five tone moves, the ban list, branching
shapes, the Wrong Truth rule, flag families, candidate rules
YARN-PRIMER.md the one page of syntax needed to write a scene
GLOSSARY.md in-world and project vocabulary
voices/ the eleven skill voices, one readable sheet each
characters/ Bartender, Chevalier Cassian Thal, Bradford Kane
scenes/ SC-101's brief: intent, beats, checks, constraints
lore/ the three identity readings and the rules that bind them
STYLE.md is a digest of the Mystery Writing Handbook in the Obsidian vault, with
pointers rather than copies. The vault stays the authoring home for design work,
and Ground Truth — the solution document — deliberately stays out of this repo.
The voice sheets are generated from skill_bible.json but are the source of truth
for the prose. tools/writing/sync_voices.py folds edits back; voicelib.py
guarantees notes -> dict -> notes is identity for all eleven, so --to-json on
unchanged sheets is byte-identical. VoiceSheetSyncTests fails the build on drift
in either direction, and was verified to fail on real drift rather than merely
to pass.
SC101.yarn's header is trimmed from prose rationale to the six rules that bind
while editing that file, with the reasoning moved to the scene brief.
EditMode 42/42. YarnCheck compiles 9 files / 35 nodes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2.6 KiB
id, name, chr, yarn_file, status, scenes
| id | name | chr | yarn_file | status | scenes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| bradford-kane | Bradford Kane | — | Assets/Dialogue/Characters/Bradford Kane.yarn | planned |
|
Bradford Kane
Effectively unwritten.
Bradford_Kane_Talkcontains one line —<<set $spoke_to_bradford_kane = true>>— and nothing else. The chair menu already offers him as an option in every variation, so a player can introduce themselves to him and receive silence. This is the most visible gap in SC-101.
Who they are
Unwritten. What exists: he is the gentleman on the protagonist's right at the table, the one seated further from the head than Chevalier Cassian Thal. That is the whole of it.
The structural role is available and worth taking deliberately: the chair scene currently has
one talker and one silence, and the menu variations (Left_Not_Right, Right_Not_Left, Both)
are already built to track both conversations independently. The architecture is waiting for him.
How they speak
Unwritten. One constraint worth honouring: he should not be a second Chevalier. Cassian Thal is courteous, archaic and institutional. If Kane is also old money at ease, the table has one voice twice. The name reads American against Thal's continental title — that contrast is free and probably should be used.
Verbal tics
Unwritten. Maximum two.
What they never say or do
Unwritten.
What they know
| They know | True? | Reveals when | Records |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | — | $spoke_to_bradford_kane (set, currently unused by any branch) |
The candidate registry lists testimony clues as Planned for all three candidates, with no
sceneId. Kane is the obvious carrier for at least one: he is already placed, already
reachable, and already has a flag recording that the player met him.
What they are wrong about
Unwritten.
Their read on the protagonist
Unwritten. Note the design constraint before choosing one: Chevalier Cassian Thal already implements the "mirror the leading lean back at the player" mechanic. Kane should not repeat it. A contrast would be stronger — a figure who reads the protagonist as one specific thing and does not update, or one who declines to guess at all.
One line that is 100% them
Unwritten. Write this first — it is the cheapest way to find out who he is.
Open threads
Everything. Before drafting, fill the vault character sheet ([[Character Sheet Handbook]]) —
§1 placement and §2 the two truths — because he does not yet have a faction row, and writing him
before that is exactly the failure mode that document exists to prevent.