creatures/BESTIARY_ELEVATION_DOCTRINE.md
CANON SUBORDINATION — this document is PROPOSAL-TIER: it serves canon and never outranks it.
The canon: the CVD · the T1 foundation docs · the T0 registries (registries/) · the spine
(docs/spine/CH_*.md) · the region pages (_source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/). Authority order:docs/DOC_MAP.md§ 0.
Canon served (HAND-WIDENED, then scanned from this document's own citations — widen it by hand where it is thin):
CVD §17·CVD §17.1·T0_Boss_Attack_Rail·_source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/flores_island.md·docs/spine/CH_02.md·T0_Boss_Encounter_Registry·T0_Creature_Roster·T0_Familiar_Registry
READ THAT CANON FIRST — open it and derive from it before you build anything from this document.
If this document disagrees with canon, CANON WINS and this document is the defect — fix the
document, never the canon. Nothing here is applied until it is ratified into canon.
STATUS: PROPOSAL-TIER design doctrine (DOC_MAP authority rank 6). It ratifies nothing, edits no
canon row, and mints no numbers. It is the DESIGN PROCEDURE that sits between a creature's canon row
and any generator, and it is the law every bestiary design sheet under docs/proposals/bestiary/ is
written to and critic-gated against.
SCOPE: every entity a player can fight, be threatened by, tame, bond with, or carry — the
T0_Creature_Roster combat-facing rows, every T0_Boss_Encounter_Registry row, humanoid enemy
classes, and the 22 (33 at the Epilogue) T0_Familiar_Registry slots. Ambient fauna that is never
faced and never bonded rides the ordinary asset path and needs no sheet.
REGISTRIES ARE READ-ONLY TO THIS LANE. A design sheet cites canon rows, it never writes them. Where
a sheet's read implies a row should change, it records the implication as a boarded debt and the
change lands through the registry lane with its own gate and baseline.
Josh, verbatim (2026-08-05): "Familiars and creature and bosses and enemies and etc also should
adjusted somehow so that they actually look like something our game will be fighting. Remember
metaphysical and lore and supernatural, etc is real in our game so if were fighting enemies or
creatures etc, needs to be more fun then just hacking a defenseless creature or like a Komodo dragon
that is an exact replica of a real one yet its supposed to be a boss? Or a serpent boss that might
be humanoid or anything I am not sure but this is the floor of the idea... needs massive expansion or
our game wont be fun."
THE DEFECT NAMED. The 3D lane produced a literal Varanus komodoensis and a literal
Malayopython reticulatus for the Chapter-2 guardian pair because no design step existed between
the canon row and the generator. The row says "Komodo dragon"; the generator was asked for
"anatomically accurate, photographic wildlife reference"; the pipeline did exactly what it was told
and delivered a nature documentary where a boss belongs. Nobody in the chain ever asked what the
SUPERNATURAL version of that row looks like, because there was no place in the chain to ask it. This
doctrine is that place.
THE FLOOR AND THE CEILING. Josh named this "the floor of the idea" and ordered massive expansion.
Under the standing law that the rulings are the floor, this doctrine takes the ruling's PRINCIPLE —
a combat-facing creature is a lore being with a real-fauna base, never a species replica — and sweeps
the whole class: bosses, enemies, ambient threats, tamed creatures, familiars, and the legendary
species. A sheet that satisfies the letter of the Komodo example and leaves the class untouched has
failed the ruling.
Vril alters real physics rather than suspending it. Every side wields both. That is the license for
everything below, and it is also the constraint: an elevation must name its MECHANISM the way the
element visual law makes each family name the optical mechanism that produces its light. A creature
that is larger than its species is larger BECAUSE of something, and the sheet says what. An
elevation with no stated mechanism is decoration, and decoration is the thing Josh has now rejected
twice — once as a "breathing cinnamon roll" that moved without reading, once as a documentary lizard
that read without meaning anything.
Monster Hunter Wilds is the armed teacher (harness/qa/comparator_rubrics/monster_feel.json). Its
third mechanism is the one this doctrine is mostly about: the body is the tell, and the tell is a
taxonomy. Every attack's read is a body-shape class, and within one creature a shape maps to exactly
one answer. That rubric's own honest measurement at arming time is the reason this doctrine is
urgent — the part economy is populated on 1 of 284 boss rows, phase_trigger and escalation_vector
are populated on 0 of 284, and the attack rail carries 0 rows against 27 authored columns. The teeth
exist and there is nothing under them. Design sheets are what goes under them.
The element visual law (docs/D1-27_ELEMENT_VISUAL_LAW.md) rules that of the ten base families
exactly three emit — fire by combustion, lightning by ionisation, and the Ether-Crown seat from
inside a body at visible cost. Everything else reads by scattering, wetting-darkening, refraction,
occlusion, silhouette against a light already in the scene, or by what it carries. The law names
glowing eyes on any caster or target as a banned class outright, alongside auras, coronas, rim-light
with no source, floating sigils and particle sparkle with no emitter.
This closes the cheapest and worst road to "supernatural." The monster does not glow. It is BUILT
differently, it is MADE of something, it is SCARRED by where it has been, it CARRIES what it does.
That constraint is the reason the elevations below are anatomical rather than atmospheric, and it is
why this doctrine will produce creatures that still read on a matinee-bright Flores afternoon, where
a glow reads as nothing at all.
Every sheet runs these five parts in order. Each part hands the next one its inputs. A sheet that
skips a part is incomplete, and a sheet that runs them out of order invents first and justifies
afterward, which is the failure mode the whole procedure exists to prevent.
Start from a real body. The elevation is a set of DEPARTURES from a stated baseline, and a departure
with no baseline is a shape with no argument.
WHAT THE SHEET DECLARES.
scientific_name,or the named archetype where the being has no single animal base (limbless, quadruped, biped-beast,
winged, aquatic, humanoid, arthropod, composite).
mantis has segmented legs. A naga has a spine. A serpent has a count of vertebrae and the coil is
the bind pose, not a posed accident.
full: solvers and retargets refuse poses outside declared ROM, and the mesh deformation budget is a
constraint to engineer around rather than a reason to shrink the animal's real motion.
answer to these, and because the fight's whole vocabulary of weight comes from them.
THE SUBSTRATE THIS READS. The per-archetype anatomy reference table LANDED at
build/3d/schema/anatomy_reference/ (ANATOMY_REFERENCE.md plus eight archetype JSONs with joint
rosters, cited ROM ranges, and census-row lists naming creature ids). THE INLINE LICENCE THIS
PARAGRAPH USED TO GRANT IS EXPIRED (amended 2026-08-12, the CH_05 sheet wave's critic finding): a
sheet whose row appears in a table bucket's census list, or whose archetype a bucket covers,
DERIVES its skeleton block from that bucket and cites the path — an inline AUTHORIAL_ANATOMY block
on a covered row is now a defect, because an over-declared ROM licenses poses the solver should
refuse. A sheet declares its own inline block ONLY where no bucket covers its archetype, and says
so affirmatively (the mustelid case is the worked example). The 187-row archetype census with its
species-class hard gate lives in the build repo alongside the creature-animation lane, and the
build repo is the authority on its state.
WHY THIS PART IS FIRST. Josh's complaint contains its own solution. A Komodo dragon that is an exact
replica of a real one is a failure BECAUSE the real Komodo is a magnificent starting point that
nobody built on. The real animal is not the problem. Stopping at the real animal is the problem.
A combat-facing creature in this game is a LORE BEING with a real-fauna base. Part two is where the
sheet finds out what the being actually IS, and it is a research step before it is a design step.
WHAT THE SHEET DECLARES.
roster's folklore_behavior_substrate and folklore_attribution_source, the boss row's sources,
the RCM section for the chapter, and the spine node's asset anchors.
SRC_ citation for every claim about what a tradition holds. A lore claim with no citation iseither an error or an invention, and the sheet must say which.
name it is, and never merged with a neighbouring tradition's cognate into one island-wide figure.
AMBIVALENT, LEGENDARY or ORDINARY_FAUNA, and PERMITTED, FOLKLORE_FACED, PROTECTED or NONE. These
are canon and part five reads them; part two only records them.
what vision grounds, per the invention license in part five.
THE ATTESTATION RULE FOR MARKS. A visual mark that the tradition itself attests is USABLE and is
often the single strongest identity the design has. The worked exemplar is the Flores night-form's
mata mbere — the red eye that comes in by night, attested at Rego in West Manggarai alongside the
poti laco and poti mbolang naked forms, cited in the region page at SRC_00469. It reads as one
hard red point at eye height, it is instantly identifying at any distance, and it belongs to the
spirit-form. The rule that makes it usable is the same rule that bounds it: the mark stays on the
spirit-form and is never a physiognomy laid on real living people, which is exactly why the
malevolence in that region seats in the bargain and its sent agent rather than in any villager.
WHY THIS PART IS SECOND. This is where "a serpent boss that might be humanoid" gets answered. The
Chapter-2 python is not a snake with a boss health bar — the Manggarai tradition holds the naga as
GOOD GUARDIANS named for their charge, naga golo and naga beo for a village and naga tana for the
soil, with every village held to keep at least one, so the water-source guardian holds its own
ngoeng-de-tana contract and is appeased rather than slain. That single cited paragraph settles the
encounter's whole shape, and the design sheet that reads it will never again produce a documentary
lizard. Where a tradition's own iconography gives a being a humanoid torso, a many-headed balustrade
form, or a composite body, that form is ATTESTED and is built — it is not the designer taking a
liberty.
This is the expansion Josh ordered. A sheet SELECTS from the menu below, applies two to four axes,
and justifies each selection against parts one and two. Applying all ten produces a chimera, and a
chimera is the blob failure wearing a longer list.
THE GOVERNING LAW OF THIS PART. Every addition joins the skeleton with a named joint chain and a
declared range of motion. A designed monster gets a coherent skeleton, never a blob. An extra limb
pair has shoulders. A second jaw has a hinge. A tail segment count is a number. If the sheet cannot
name where an addition attaches and how far it moves, the addition is not designed yet.
Size is a band with a reason, never a multiplier applied for boss-ness. The bands: TRUE_SCALE (the
real animal's size, with the elevation living entirely on other axes), HALF_AGAIN, DOUBLE, ARENA
(the body sets the arena's scale), and LANDMARK (the body is part of the terrain and the arena is on
it). Every band above TRUE_SCALE states what carries the extra mass — thicker limb bone, a changed
gait, a slower turn radius, a wider stance, a longer telegraph — because the square-cube law is real
physics and vril alters real physics rather than exempting a body from it. The reward for stating it
is a fight that feels heavy, which is the whole point of the band.
Additional articulated segments, added limb pairs, additional heads or jaws, a doubled spine chain.
Each addition carries its own joint chain, its own ROM, and — critically — its own TELL, because a
seven-necked body that telegraphs with one neck has six pieces of decoration. This axis is the
strongest answer to "might be humanoid or anything": a serpent guardian whose forebody has raised
into a torso with arms is a different creature to fight than a serpent, and the tradition's own
balustrade iconography frequently arrives there first.
Plates, keels, ossified scutes, shell, dermal armor, horn sheaths, a bone crest. This is the axis
that gives the fight its part economy, and real fauna supplies the precedent freely — crocodilian
osteoderms, pangolin scale, the armored heads of monitor lizards. The design requirement that makes
it a part economy rather than a texture: each region gets a break threshold, a break EVENT, and the
three currencies the monster-feel rubric demands — a permanent subtraction from the live moveset, a
legibility gain so the remaining tells read easier, and a material the economy wants.
One anatomical system taken far past its species baseline while another is let go. This is the single
strongest non-glow elevation available and it is the one that directly answers the Komodo complaint.
The real Komodo already carries serrated ziphodont teeth and a genuine venom-gland apparatus with
anticoagulant and hypotensive action; a guardian-scale elevation makes that apparatus STRUCTURAL and
VISIBLE — the gland swollen into a readable jaw architecture, the drool a fight mechanic with a
ground state, the throat and neck musculature built to carry it. The real reticulated python already
constricts by a measurable, staged tightening; the elevation makes the constriction musculature a
visible machine with a wind, a lock, and a breakable segment. Nothing here is invented against the
animal. Everything here is the animal's own most frightening fact, engineered up until it reads at
combat distance.
The same body at a life stage the real animal never reaches, and the place written on it. Healed-over
breaks, scarring with a history, epiphytic overgrowth (moss, root, coral, encrusting shell), mineral
accretion from the water it guards, pigment loss, worn-blunt claws, a leucistic morph where the canon
row already carries one as folklore substrate. This axis is nearly free, it is entirely light-law
compliant, and it does more for "this thing existed before the quest and will after" than any other
single choice. It also gives the corruption register its home: a corrupted or hollowed being wears
its corruption as a material and structural change, not as a colour filter.
The creature's relationship with vril reads through: the MATERIAL its body carries (wet, rimed,
ash-crusted, iron-scaled, salt-bloomed), its MOTION signature, the WORLD's response in a radius
around it (the ground it stands on, the litter it displaces, the air it moves, the water it pulls),
and OCCLUSION and silhouette against light already in the scene. Emission is available only when the
creature's element is one of the three emitting families and only by that family's named mechanism —
combustion with visible fuel and a colour that tracks temperature and cools to dark, ionisation as a
brief path on a visible conductor leaving an afterimage rather than a lingering shine, or the Crown
seat's emission that begins inside a body and costs the body visibly. Every other creature reads
bright by being LIT, never by being self-lit. The vril_substrate_response and
integrity_visible_aesthetic_shift columns on the creature roster are this axis's existing data
home.
Humanoid torso on an animal body, animal head on a humanoid frame, a body assembled from more than
one animal's grammar, a form that changes between phases. Where the tradition attests the hybrid,
part two already supplied it and this axis only builds it. Where the tradition does not, this axis is
an invention and is declared as one. The articulation law is at its strictest here, because a
composite is precisely where an unarticulated seam hides: the junction between the two grammars gets
its own named joint chain and its own ROM, and the sheet says how the creature's weight passes
through it.
The body made of something other than flesh — stone-grown, wood-grown, water-bodied, ash-bodied,
shell-and-coral, bound cord and offering-cloth. Constrained twice: by the anatomy law, because it
still articulates and the substitution has to admit joints; and by the light law, because stone,
water, soil and plant matter never self-light, and a water-bodied creature reads by refraction,
surface tension, wetting-darkening and what it carries, which is a richer read than a glow was ever
going to be.
One high-contrast, instantly readable identifying feature, attested where attestation exists. One is
the number. The mata mbere is the exemplar: a single hard red point at eye height on a night-form,
which identifies the being across a dark clearing at any distance and needs no second mark to help
it. A creature carrying three marks carries none.
The absent thing that reads. A hollow where a chest should be, a wrong count, a limb that does not
cast, a silhouette with a piece missing, a gait with a beat missing. Cheap, powerful, entirely
light-free, and the natural register for hollowed and vital-force-drained beings whose whole canon
meaning is subtraction.
Two to four axes per creature, and the sheet ranks them: one PRIMARY axis that carries the identity
and produces the creature's one-line silhouette read, and one to three SUPPORTING axes. The primary
axis is what a player would name if asked what the thing was. If the sheet cannot write that one
line, the elevation has not resolved yet.
Parts one through three produce a body. Part four is where the body becomes a FIGHT, and it is the
part that fails silently because a still image cannot show it. The lesson is already paid for: the
serpent's first animation pass was measurably real motion — background drift at zero, silhouette
deformation at plus sixty-one percent, phase structure matching the recorded windows exactly — and it
still read as a breathing cinnamon roll with no head, no neck rear and no reach, because thirty-seven
pixels vacating on a lunge is not a telegraph at gameplay distance. Correct data, invisible fight.
WHAT THE SHEET DECLARES, per attack in the creature's own encounter verbs.
chain loads, which mass shifts and where it goes. The tell shape class on the attack rail is a
string; this is the thing the string is supposed to describe.
behind one shape is a coin flip rather than difficulty. A shape reused across creatures with a
different answer is the intended cross-creature lesson and the sheet names which lesson it is
teaching.
dodge-only attack originates from a whole-body commitment the player can see the creature give
itself to. A parry-only attack presents a contact surface — a limb, a horn, a plated forearm — that
the player can see is meetable. An elemental-neutralize attack shows the element being GATHERED on
the body first, which is the element visual law's source-in-frame rule applied to a creature:
the material has a visible source, and a gather with no source in frame has failed the beat.
is not whether the part exists in the mesh; it is whether its break is visible without a HUD from
the shipped combat camera.
names — posture, breath, vocalization, and a new opener — so a player can NAME the state change
before any meter confirms it. This is what makes a phase change feel like a creature deciding
instead of a script firing, and it is the fix for a boss roster where the escalation and phase-voice
columns are empty on every row.
built as recognizable VARIANTS of that root — same body origin, longer wind, wider arc, added
follow-up. Teaching order is a design field, not an emergent property.
but the creature shows chain progress in posture and breath so the player can feel the chain
building without looking away from the fight.
leaves, and what it does to the arena on the way, because a boss bolted to one room is a set piece
and a boss that walks out is a resident.
THE ENCOUNTER VERBS ARE THE CREATURE'S OWN. Every design sheet ties its fight grammar to that
creature's declared verbs on its own boss row — primary_verb, secondary_verb, counters,
signature_counters, composure_nodes, win_condition, win_shape, has_nonkill_path,
pip_count, pip_reveal_threshold and hitzone_parts — never to a generic boss template. The
Chapter-2 guardian's verbs are evade and strike with a constriction lane to step and a breath rhythm
to attune; the hollowed stalker's are dodge and strike against a lunge-feint with a torch-lit expose;
the vital-force theft's are refuse and strike against an escalating offer. Three encounters, three
grammars, and a sheet that hands all three the same telegraph set has not read the rows.
THE FINDING, AND IT IS A DOCTRINE AMENDMENT RATHER THAN A SCHEMA NOTE. Axis A3 and this part both
assume breakable regions on a BODY. Across Ch 2-9 the lane authored a part economy for every
combat-facing row and found the parts living somewhere else on most of them — and the registry's
hitzone_parts column was EMPTY on all eleven, carrying seven unrelated realities and an absence
under one name, with no way for a gate to tell any of them apart. The doctrine's answer is to
ENUMERATE the homes, so that a sheet declares which one it is using and a gate can eventually check
it. The three currencies never change: a permanent subtraction from the live moveset, a legibility
gain, and a material the economy wants.
doctrine's original assumption, and still the commonest.
ARENA rather than of the creature (BE_0008's escort dhows and rigging; the Ch 33 caravel and the
Ch 55 vessels inherit it).
part (BE_0009_S1's cable, drums, anchors and cradle). See §3B.
gear (BE_0008_S2, BE_0009_S2). The crew sub-case's native home.
body: lamps, locks, custody chests, doors (BE_0009).
(BE_0009_S3). See §3C.
BETTER after each one (BE_0008_S1). The inverted case, and the one most likely to be built
backwards by a lane that reads the column name literally.
the block thin (BE_0005_S3, BE_0006_S2, BE_0006_S3, BE_0007).
A SHEET DECLARES ITS HOME BY NAME in the fight_grammar block. A row whose parts are not on a body
is not a row with a missing part economy — it is a row whose economy the schema cannot yet see, and
the difference matters because one of those is a design gap and the other is a data gap.
The care read runs LAST, on a finished design, and its job is to check the design against the care
doctrine — not to pre-emptively shrink it. Running care first is how the pipeline arrived at
abstractions and constructs in the first place, and the golden-standard mandate exists because that
posture systematically routed around real, grounded, playable content.
WHAT THE SHEET DECLARES.
community from being cast as villain, defamed, or exterminated. It does not make an individual
antagonist, combatant, or monster who belongs to that culture unkillable, and it does not protect a
tradition's own condemned being from being a boss. The narrow floor is unchanged and absolute — no
genocide or slaughter of an entire living culture as an encouraged or enabled goal, no real-world
targeted hate, no sexual violence, no child harm, and the section 17 hard lines.
named evil and is rendered exactly as that tradition condemns it, never softened and never
Hollywood-monstered. A SACRED being is honored, and where it is faced at all it is faced as a
guardian test rather than as prey. An AMBIVALENT being keeps its ambivalence, including its
menacing edge. ORDINARY_FAUNA carries no collective claim at all — hunting a game animal touches
nothing of the collective protection, and a lane must not re-apply collective protection to game
animals.
construction and never raw generation with negative prompts as the control. A designed mythic being
routed through a photographic-wildlife template is a WRONG ROUTE finding rather than a care
exclusion: the being is still built and still a boss where canon says boss, and it is built by
attended design because that is the route its subject needs.
reframe. Removal is not the tool. The Flores exemplar is the whole method in one move: the record
carries modern accusation and lethal mob violence against accused neighbours, so the malevolence
seats in the BARGAIN and its SENT AGENT — the enemy is the spirit-evil and the harm it does, the
game never offers an accused villager as a target, and the red-eye stigma stays on the spirit-form.
Nothing was removed. The aim was moved.
it runs a devil's-advocate pass calibrated against over-conservatism and records the result.
never passing it off as the tradition's claim.
entries, barks, and item text. The antagonist family name is dark in player-facing prose until its
sanctioned Chapter-38 reveal and the patriarch's personal name until the Chapter-74 recognition;
the design layer may state the truth, the player surfaces may not. A leak on a player surface is
strictly worse than the same words in a design block.
THE CALIBRATION, QUOTED, because this is the part that drifts. From the project's standing law:
"Care-tier INFLATION is a defect; the timid option is usually the wrong one." And: "erring toward
omission is the more costly error, not the safer one." And Josh, ruling the class directly: "if
you're protecting a sea monster you have far over crossed the line into trying to be teletubbies
rated-G instead of a rated R-17 AAA FRPG." And the invention license, verbatim: "this is a fantasy
aarpg and our own video game; this is our fun and engaging take on the cultures around the world and
their traditions and superstitions and metaphysical and beliefs etc. - we won't be blatantly
disrespectful or lie and that goes both ways. invent when we need to to keep things fun."
THE DEFANG TELL, restated for this doctrine because it hides in staging rather than in content: when
a design makes a climactic opponent PASSIVE, that is a defang. A guardian test is not a passive
encounter — it is a HARDER encounter, because the ruled non-kill path requires a chain of five to
nine correct reads in a row and any mistake wipes the chain. Bold register with timid staging is the
same failure as timid register, and it is harder to see.
Familiars and tamed creatures run all five parts. Three things change.
seen at every moment of play must read instantly and repeatedly rather than reward study. Scale
bands above HALF_AGAIN and heavy armored-region work belong to bosses; hypertrophy, age-state,
material and mark axes carry familiars beautifully.
read what their familiar is about to do, from a follow camera, at small screen size, without taking
attention off the enemy. A familiar's ability tells are as much a design obligation as a boss's,
and they are harder because the budget is sixty pixels of silhouette.
comparators for this register are the Pokemon line — one strong idea per creature, silhouette-first
identity that survives icon size, a face that carries expression where the anatomy allows one — and
the Chao register for bond expression, where the creature visibly CHANGES as the relationship
deepens. Appeal never means flattening cultural authenticity; it means the same care applied to
charm that the character lane applies to faces.
block.
luminous reads that way by carrying something, by wetting, by iridescent structural colour, or by
catching a light already in the scene.
companion is a claim of ownership over the thing bonded and a sacred being of a living tradition is
not a pet. The existing rows already model this: the arc's one sustained-bond legacy slot sits on an
animal that carries no living-tradition claim, and the bond forms through a named practice that
belongs to the character who teaches it.
T0_Creature_Roster already carries integrity_visible_aesthetic_shift and the familiar registry
carries loyalty_condition and bond_formation_beat_ref. The familiar sheet declares what the
creature LOOKS LIKE at each band of that relationship — coat, carriage, proximity, the way it holds
its head, what it has picked up and carries. This is the axis that makes a familiar feel earned, and
it is entirely material and postural, which means it costs no light and passes every de-slop check by
construction.
RATIFIED FROM THE LANE'S OWN EVIDENCE (Ch 2-9). This register was drafted on BE_0002_rangku_wera.md
§ 4, boarded there as an amendment, and built out across seven rows before landing here. Josh's
ruling covers "bosses and enemies and etc," and a doctrine with a creature register and a familiar
register and nothing for human enemies was answering two thirds of it.
A human enemy runs all five parts of the grammar, and three things change.
Distorting a human body is the horror-monster road, and on a member of a living tradition's
community it is worse than that. What a human enemy gets instead is EQUIPMENT, CRAFT and STATE,
and those three carry everything the ten axes carry on a creature.
telegraph budget lives in posture, weapon carriage, footwork and breath. That is harder than a
creature and it is where the design work goes.
community is exactly what §17.1 protects that community from being represented BY.
The register's whole design surface is a man's relationship to his own corruption, and the lane has
now built every pole of it. A sheet names its pole in the elevation block.
BE_0002. Something was taken from him by a bargain he did notunderstand. The elevation is equipment, craft, state, and A10 NEGATIVE SPACE on the body, because
his meaning is subtraction.
BE_0007. An honourable adversary who refused the offer. The elevation is equipment,craft and carriage only, and the encounter's difficulty is that he is simply good.
BE_0008. He knows exactly what he serves and chose it. This is the polethe doctrine did not anticipate: nothing was taken from him, so an elevation grammar built for
bodies has nothing to grip, and the read moves onto THE WORLD'S BEHAVIOUR AROUND a body rather than
onto anything on it.
BE_0009. He has a coherent account of himself and he believes it.Its design law is checkable: THE CORRUPTION MAY NOT BE VISIBLE ON HIS FACE, the elevation lands on
the ABSENCE of an occupational mark rather than the presence of a sinister one, and the encounter
must let him make his case out loud. A man who looks corrupt has been let off. This is the most
reusable pole in the register, because the arc's institutional antagonists are nearly all this one.
A boss row whose subject is a GROUP. No individual carries the identity, the elevation lands on
formation, equipment and arena, the part economy is TOOLS, and the four escalation channels attach to
the group's collective behaviour — work-calls, visible fatigue, the decision to stop working, the
moment the relay chain breaks and men start shouting past each other. Every dock crew, quarry gang,
poaching crew, extraction detail and press-gang in the arc inherits it.
THE HEADED/HEADLESS CLAUSE, ruled from the pair BE_0008_S2 and BE_0009_S2 and argued from §17.1
rather than from taste. A crew is left WITHOUT a named antagonist when a memorable face would
displace the protected subject — a charismatic villain standing on the threshold of a living people's
sacred ground becomes, in a player's memory, the thing that ground is FOR. A crew is GIVEN a face
when the protected subject cannot be displaced by one: animals, a mountain, a monument. Both variants
are built and both are correct; the test is what the player will remember the place FOR.
The care read binds hardest here. §17.1 protection is COLLECTIVE: it protects the community from
being cast as villain, defamed or exterminated, and it makes no individual antagonist unkillable.
Human antagonists in this register are fully killable without qualification and nothing about them is
softened. Where an encounter's routing could put a living community in the target position, the
routing moves — to the broker, the state, the institution, the outside crew — and the sheet says so.
DECLARED FROM BE_0009_S1 and marked PROVISIONAL because it has one instance. An encounter whose
body is a MECHANISM: an extraction rig, a siege engine, a mill, a pump, a press, a vessel.
transposes onto a machine more literally than onto any animal, and the reason it works is that a
machine has NO REDUNDANCY — cut the cable and the load does not move, and no amount of courage on
the crew's part restores it.
limits, and the one degree of freedom the encounter is actually about.
is which way the detail is facing; breath is theirs; the voice channel is the work-call chain and
its escalation is the chain BREAKING.
under a stone that was not there an hour ago.
DECLARED FROM BE_0009_S3 and marked PROVISIONAL because it has one instance. A being whose primary
evidence is an IMAGE rather than a description, and whose body is therefore made of the medium that
depicts it.
own articulation points — for a flat frontal-and-profile devotional register, six.
not admit. A pose outside the register is the exact equivalent of a joint outside declared ROM.
boundary. A smooth glide is a 3D creature pretending to be flat; a hard substitution is a flat
thing being flat, and it reads as wrong without a single particle or distortion.
at a time, each with a permanent subtraction from its live moveset.
two — which is an escalation a player can NAME before any meter confirms it.
THAT tradition's pictorial register and never in a western horror one, no real devotional object is
reproduced as an asset, and the sheet declares its drawing as the game's own rather than as the
tradition's.
RATIFIED 2026-08-12 from six built instances (CR_0142, CR_0143, CR_0144, CR_0145, CR_0146, CR_0147
with CR_0005 and CR_0003 as the lane's earlier precedent), on the converged finding of two
independent fresh-context critics: the ruled demand table orders sheets for rows whose HONEST
design answer is the real animal, built as itself — ORDINARY_FAUNA rows with empty folklore
columns, no staged supernatural claim, and a chapter framing that depends on the mundane world
reading as real (a supernatural macaque in a chapter whose care architecture rests on the naga
being the only mythologically-stylized water-serpent is the mirror-image of the Komodo defect).
Before this register existed, every honest sheet on such a row landed failing a replica test it
was structurally unable to pass, or elevating against canon to pass it. Both are defects.
(TRUE_TO_LIFE)`, with one line stating why elevation is refused (empty folklore columns, the
chapter's care framing, or the row's own canon).
silhouette-first discrimination against every confusable neighbor in the same chapter, stated
identically on every sheet in the set) PLUS a STATE LADDER (worked states, age states, regional
forms, sign ladders, carried evidence — the states a photograph of the species-typical animal
does not contain, even where a photograph of SOME individual might). A sheet claiming this
register with neither contract nor ladder fails the test outright.
reveal, route. The register changes what "not a replica" means; it loosens nothing else.
the register's natural spend; A1-A4, A6-A8 and A10-on-the-body signal the sheet is in the wrong
register and should be a CREATURE sheet.
cell, a staged supernatural claim, or a boss row, the sheet re-derives under the full grammar.
One sheet per creature, at docs/proposals/bestiary/sheets/<ID>_<slug>.md, where <ID> is the
canon CR_, BE_ or FAM_ id. Every sheet carries these blocks in this order, and a critic reads
them in this order.
| Block | What it carries | Fails when |
|---|---|---|
identity | Canon id, canon name, chapter, region, ontology class, combat permission, care tier, the row paths it was read from | An id that does not resolve to a live canon row |
base_species | Binomial or archetype, skeleton block (joints, segments, limb pairs, spine chain), declared ROM, mass, stance, gait, resting silhouette | A skeleton with an unnamed chain or an undeclared ROM |
lore_source | The tradition quoted with SRC_ citations, the being's own name under its own people's name, the attested forms, the attested marks | A lore claim with no citation and no invention declaration |
elevation | The primary axis plus one to three supporting axes, each with its stated mechanism, and the one-line silhouette read | Fewer than two axes, more than four, or an axis with no mechanism |
articulation_delta | Every added structure with its attachment point, joint chain, ROM, and how weight passes through it | An addition that cannot say where it attaches |
fight_grammar | Per encounter verb: body origin, tell shape, one answer, counter class worn on the body, breakable parts with silhouette fractions, escalation on four channels, opener and its variants, relocation | A shape carrying two answers, or a part with no silhouette fraction |
care_read | Collective read, ontology routing, generation route, rename-reframe resolution where used, the recorded anti-timid pass, invention declarations, the reveal read on player-facing strings | A reduction with no recorded anti-timid pass |
plate_brief | The concept-plate subject lines this sheet dispatches, written affirmatively, naming what IS in frame | A negation-carrying prompt line, which inverts on a graph that zeroes negative conditioning |
boarded_debts | Registry implications this sheet found and did not write, each with its target row and column | A registry write attempted from this lane |
THE SHEET IS A CONCEPT BRIEF, and its destination is the concept-first law: no identity-bearing asset
generates without a picked, judged concept plate as its conditioning input, and the plates program is
the front door of the 3D program. The plate_brief block is therefore the sheet's payload, and it is
written affirmatively because the art graph zeroes its negative conditioning — a prompt that names
what to leave out feeds the model the very nouns it meant to exclude, which is a measured defect on
this repo's own generations, not a theoretical risk.
Each test states its pass condition. A sheet that fails any test returns for repair rather than
landing with a caveat.
answer is no — when at least one elevation axis produces a structure or state that no photograph of
the base species contains. This is Josh's Komodo, stated as a ruler.
passes when the answer is yes for every addition without exception.
or the creature's element is one of the three emitting families and the emission names its
mechanism, its fuel or conductor, and its visible cost.
passes when the wind-up pose is distinguishable from the idle pose in silhouette alone, and when
every breakable part occupies enough silhouette that its break is visible without a HUD.
when every shape maps to exactly one answer, which is the same rule the counter-class coverage gate
enforces on the attack rail once rows exist.
space it owns, a state it escalates into? It passes when the answer is yes, and it fails on exactly
the thing Josh named: hacking a defenseless creature.
was reduced, or the reduction carries a recorded devil's-advocate pass calibrated against
over-conservatism.
SRC_ id, and does everyuncited element carry an invention declaration? It passes when both hold, with a positive control
proving the citation search can match.
sanctioned chapter? It passes when they do not, checked on the same rulers the reveal-discipline
gate uses for player-string lanes.
route to attended design or reference-built, designed mythic beings never route through a
photographic-wildlife template, and identity-bearing subjects carry a concept plate as conditioning.
These are ILLUSTRATIVE READS showing the procedure, not ratified designs. The sheets themselves come
from the bestiary design lane and are critic-gated individually. They are included here because a
procedure with no worked example is read as advice rather than as law.
Part one gives two magnificent real bodies: a three-metre monitor with ziphodont dentition and a
genuine venom apparatus, and a coiling constrictor whose bind pose is the coil and whose measured
body is a 4.8-metre animal folded into a 1.5-metre disc. Part two changes everything the pipeline
assumed: the canon rows do not describe two animals, they describe the wae guardian pair holding a
ngoeng-de-tana contract, in a tradition where naga are good guardians named for their charge and
every village keeps at least one, appeased rather than slain. Part three therefore reaches for the
axes that read as CONTRACT and AGE rather than as menace — the age-and-state axis so the pair wear
the water source's own accumulated time, hypertrophy on the apparatus each animal already owns, and
where the tradition's iconography supports it the composite axis for a raised forebody that meets a
supplicant at eye height. Part four is already written for it in canon: the encounter's verbs are
evade and strike, its counters are stepping the constriction lane on the tell and attuning the breath
to open a withdrawal, and its pips are visible from the first second because this is a TEST rather
than a fight-first boss — so the constriction lane must be a visible anatomical fact and the breath
must be a readable body state, or the encounter has no fight at all. Part five records that this is
ORDINARY_FAUNA carrying a SACRED framing: the collective protection is untouched by fighting animals,
the framing governs staging rather than player agency, the win never requires a kill, and it never
hardens into an animal that cannot be killed.
Part one routes to the humanoid archetype and the retarget path, which the creature-animation program
already assigns. Part two is the discipline case: authentic living Nage oral tradition of hairy
hominoids of ambiguous status, denied by their own tradition to be spirits, explicitly NOT a western
cryptozoology construct — and the canon row's care register additionally rules that the Homo
floresiensis resonance is authorial echo only, never a player-facing debunk, and that the villagers'
cave-burning is never replayed. Part three keeps the elevation modest and physical, because the
tradition's own account is of a PEOPLE rather than a monster: the register is recognition and depth,
held mythic, at the restored ambivalent-to-menacing edge the row names. Part four faces them as the
tradition frames them, as a lingering ambient threat in the deep cave layers rather than as a loot
monster. Part five is where the anti-timid pass earns its place: AMBIVALENT means the menacing edge
stays, and the row itself carries the restoration of that edge as canon, so a sheet that renders them
harmless has failed the row and not protected anyone.
Part two supplies everything. The Nage account holds that an ata polo is not a separate species but a
person whose soul, mae, has been displaced by a harmful essence, wa, taken on through an illicit
pact; the Manggarai bargain carries a body of its own, the wina wa or rona wa, the bound spirit that
lives in the practitioner, leaves the sleeping body at night to hunt, and can be sent ahead of its
owner as a forerunner; and its night-shapes attested at Rego are poti laco and poti mbolang, the
naked forms, and poti ngeping with its mata mbere, the red eye that comes in by night. Part three
therefore needs almost no invention: the mark axis carries the whole identity as one hard red point
at eye height, and the negative-space axis carries the rest, because a being whose canon meaning is
subtraction reads best as a body with something missing. Part five is the exemplar this doctrine
quotes twice: the mark is attested and therefore usable, it stays on the spirit-form, the malevolence
seats in the bargain and its sent agent so the enemy is the spirit-evil and the harm it does, and the
game never offers an accused villager as a target. The design that results is more frightening than
the sanitized alternative and safer than it too, which is the care doctrine's whole argument in one
subject.
the tuning firewall and belong to the instruments that declare their own bands.
disagreement lands as a boarded debt for the registry lane.
devil's-advocate pass. It gives all three something specific to judge.
docs/FACTORY_CONTINUATION.md under "JOSH RULES THE BESTIARY ELEVATION".
docs/FACTORY_CONTINUATION.md — anatomicalcorrectness per species, declared ROM per joint with solvers refusing out-of-range poses, and
physical profiles on every object.
docs/D1-27_ELEMENT_VISUAL_LAW.md — the light law (three of tenbase families emit; the seven banned glow classes; the closed mechanism vocabulary) and the
four-beat cast grammar whose source-in-frame rule this doctrine applies to creature gathers.
rated-r-aaa-dont-defang-monsters — a myth's own monster is aBOSS; the defang tell hides in staging; lean bolder.
violence-allowed-r17-no-genocide — lethal violence against humans iscore; section 17.1 protection is COLLECTIVE; the narrow floor is genocide-as-goal.
invent-when-needed-fun-calibration — no blatantdisrespect AND no lying, both ways; invent to keep it fun; inventions are named as ours.
golden-standard-cultural-enrichment —represent each culture's real malevolent beings and lore as the fantasy-real beings they are, with
the anti-fringe guardrail.
vril-altered-physics-real-physics-and-magic — magic altersreal physics; every elevation names its mechanism.
docs/proposals/CARE_DOCTRINE_DRAFT.md) plus the delegated-bolder calibration in CLAUDE.md — care means weight and authenticity, never omission;
rename and reframe rather than remove; care-tier inflation is a defect.
CLAUDE.md — no genocide as an enabled goal, no real-worldtargeted hate, no sexual violence, no child harm.
puzzle-boss-chain-meter-design — three counter classes, thefive-to-nine chain with a wiping pip meter, per-boss non-kill paths with reveal thresholds.
harness/qa/comparator_rubrics/monster_feel.json — the thirteenMHWilds mechanisms and the fourteen checks this doctrine's part four is written to satisfy.
harness/check_reveal_discipline.py — no antagonist pattern tokens onplayer-facing surfaces before their sanctioned chapters.
docs/FACTORY_CONTINUATION.md pipeline v2 —identity-bearing assets generate only from picked judged concept plates; sacred human forms are
REFERENCE_BUILT.
docs/FACTORY_CONTINUATION.md — appeal is a ship requirement andnever means flattening cultural authenticity; the familiar register inherits it.
CLAUDE.md — every comment encodes a principle,and the principle sweeps the whole class.