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 (scanned from this document's own citations — widen it by hand where it is thin):
T0_Character_Index · T0_School_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.
The protagonist's path through the excursion references the spine (CH_05), never duplicating it:
following the ledger north over the Kra portage and up the Tonle Sap, arriving on Angkor Wat's
west-facing moat-causeway and ascending the god-king's mountain the way the pilgrims do, walking and
reading the Churning-of-the-Sea-of-Milk (CH05_B07); embedding among Ta Prohm's great household as a
guest and reading the Bayon's galleries of everyday Khmer life and the Khmer-Cham river-war (CH05_B08);
solving the West Baray flow-puzzle to turn the official's hoarded water back to the fields against the
backdrop of the two-peer river-war, confronting the official and the roused ward-constructs (CH05_B09,
FORK_CH05_A); crossing to the Cham My Son and Po Nagar sanctuaries through a Cham pilot host and then
doubling back down the whole long route to the sea (CH05_B10). NPCs are MetaHuman-first; each entry
carries the persona fields per the entity-persona system.
The excursion's cast is authored un-named at spine scope (per the spine's ruling; personas author at
the quest layer):
The devaraja-court official (BE_0005_S4) — the fictional un-named collapse-monetizing insider; the excursion sub-boss on BE_0005's Tier-3 rung; un-rowed, un-briefed, does not read the protagonist back; taken alive to answer on the good path, or struck down on the integrity-gated route; his Character_Index persona authored at the quest layer, never a named historical minister
The Khmer temple-servant / dancer host of Ta Prohm's great household (un-named) — the honored Khmer host through whom the assimilation and relationship layer opens; ally, protected, never a target
The Cham pilot of the coastal run (un-named, ELEVATED) — the honored Cham host through whom the Champa sanctuary beats play; the war's other peer met with dignity; ally, protected, never a target
The Kra-isthmus port-audiences (Tambralinga / Grahi tribute figures, role-titled) — the neutral economic-web contacts of the northward traverse
Carried: the Healer's Child (CHAR_0002, off-screen silent-observation arc, held toward the Ch-13 join)
Antagonist apparatus (not community): the court official (BE_0005_S4) and the roused temple-guardian constructs (dvarapala, seven-headed naga-balustrade, yaksha — animated ward-objects, never the deities); the Khmer naga, the neak ta and arak, Mahakala, and Po Nagar are revered/protective presences deliberately LEFT, never villainized
Behind that excursion cast sit the region's documented living OFFICES — the roles Khmer and Cham
communities actually fill and refill, each with recorded duties, a procedure or an instrument, and its
own rule of access. Four of them enter the page from the first source this region has processed
[SRC: SRC_00322, p. 243-254], an outside ethnography of the Jahed Cham Muslim community of Kampong
Chhnang, Cambodia, from fieldwork of 1996-2002. Two consequences bind every entry below. First, this
is a MODERN record: these offices seat on the page's ELEVATED modern-Cham block (Section 4) and the
not-yet-pinned modern-revisit consumer (Section 19), and they are not staged as ~1200 excursion scenes;
where an entry is carried forward to the 1200 frame at all, the entry says so in its own words and
marks the carry as authored. Second, the Cham-source grounding obligation recorded in this page's
header is NOT discharged by this record — Trankell is an outside Swedish ethnographer writing about the
Cham, and the obligation still names Po Dharma and the living-community record. Each entry is a role
class rather than a minted character: the ethnography records the office, and the On g'nur and the
Imams are real living authority-titles, so nothing here proposes a name and every instance is authored
fictional and un-named, with naming running later under the naming method. Where the community is
Cambodian-Jahed-specific the entry says Cham (Jahed); where the record scopes a thing Cham-wide it says
Cham. Nothing below is a combat target, an antagonist, or a foil.
The kru khmer — the Khmer forest-herb healer (Khmer)
When illness will not lift, a household sends for the kru khmer, the Khmer traditional healer the
record calls an expert in treating spirit afflictions. His procedure is exactly and only this: he
collected herbs in the forest, boiled them, and prescribed drinking the medicine for seven days
[SRC: SRC_00322, p. 248]. That gather, boil, and timed-regimen loop is the whole attestation and it is
enough — it is a complete, playable Herbalism shape with a named practitioner and a fixed course of
days. The source names no plant, so this page names none either; any species list for a lowland
Cambodian materia must arrive on a separate botanical citation before it is written.
Personality: competent and unhurried, a craftsman rather than a mystic; he states what he will do and how long it will take, and does not oversell the outcome
Background: a village-scale practitioner in a healing economy that runs both ways across the Khmer-Cham line — a Cham household sends a sufferer to a kru khmer as far off as Battambang, and in Khmer society the Cham are known to practise magic and are sometimes visited by Khmer wanting to buy that knowledge, the same Cham communities being equally well known for their solidarity and kindness, at times extended to Khmer [SRC: SRC_00322, p. 248, p. 252]. His expertise is scoped by the source to spirit afflictions; that he also treats plain bodily decline is a defensible read of the same passage, where he prescribes a boiled-herb regimen for a physical complaint, and is marked here as a read rather than as the source's own scoping
Own life and daily routine: authored from the office — a householder with fields and family whose forest rounds are the job, walking out for plants at the hours the plants are worth taking, boiling at home, and carrying the finished medicine to the sufferer's house rather than keeping a surgery
Relationship surface: he is a door into the region's layered healing economy and a genuinely neutral one, consulted across a community line and holding no faction. What he grants is knowledge of the forest, which is transferable; his regard rides ws.relationship_history and colours the community read rather than opening a second fork
Three-path outcomes: forage alongside him, keep the seven days honestly, and carry the medicine yourself (generative — the craft opens and the household reads the effort); pay for the finished remedy and move on (neutral); take the plant knowledge and cut the regimen short or resell it (corrosive — the practitioner stops teaching, which is the lesson about what the knowledge is for). Non-gating throughout: no path decides whether the excursion proceeds
Dialogue hooks: the plain seven-day instruction, given once and not softened; the flat admission that a remedy can help and then the condition return, sending the seeker on; what he thinks of the people across the line who come to buy Cham magical knowledge, and what he thinks of them buying his herbs
Build notes: MetaHuman; protected non-target; Khmer speech and dress reference. FEEDS T0_Character_Index as a persona row and the T0_School_Registry an herbalist-tradition seed, both un-named pending the naming pass; FEEDS the Trade-4 Herbalism substrate. The 1200 carry is AUTHORED, not sourced: a forest-herb craft-healer is period-plausible for the excursion frame at witness-depth, and this record attests no Angkorian institution of any kind — the page's inscriptional hospital-chapel record stands on Section 4's own citations and never on this one
The On g'nur — the Cham religious-political leader (Cham (Jahed))
The On g'nur is the main religious-political leader of the community, and the record catches him in
open disagreement with it. He mourns the mahandori, the big destruction of the Khmer Rouge years, as
the loss of the true ritual and of Cham civilisation and high culture, and he dismisses the cult the
mediums have revived since as theatre — holding the present mediums in outright contempt, as extremely
unintelligent [SRC: SRC_00322, p. 246]. He is the one exception among the Imams, who otherwise
testified to the ritual's authenticity and justified it as part of Cham society and custom
[SRC: SRC_00322, p. 246]. He is not the antagonist and never becomes one. He is the region's cleanest
demonstration that a community argues about its own sacred practice from inside, with authority on
both sides of the argument.
Personality: exacting, conservative, unimpressed; grief carried as standards rather than as sorrow, and a contempt he does not trouble to hide
Background: legitimate religious-political authority whose grounds for judgement are historical — he remembers, or holds the community's memory of, a form of the ritual that was destroyed, and measures the revival against it and finds it short. His office is contested from within by the mediums, who answer to the spirits rather than to him
Own life and daily routine: authored from the office — the ordinary round of congregational duties, arbitration, and the standing obligations of a leader in a poor province, with the judgement of the cult surfacing whenever a ceremony is proposed and paid for
Relationship surface: the formal door to the community, distinct from the mediums' informal one, and the two doors do not open onto the same room. Standing with him is earned by taking the loss seriously rather than by taking the mediums' side; his regard opens the congregational and textual surfaces, and never gates the ritual ones
Three-path outcomes: hear the loss out and let both authorities stand without adjudicating between them (generative — both surfaces stay open); take the historical account, use it, and stay clear of the argument (neutral); side loudly with one against the other, or play the contempt back to the mediums for advantage (corrosive — one door closes and the community reads the meddling). Non-gating: the ceremony content is reachable either way
Dialogue hooks: the word mahandori and what it is being used to name; the exact charge that the revived rite is performance rather than the true ritual; the question of who decides what is true when the people who knew are dead
Build notes: MetaHuman; ELEVATED; a real living authority-title, so the instance is fictional and un-named and no real Cham religious leader is ever cast as villain; protected non-target. FEEDS T0_Character_Index. The Khmer Rouge material stays at the witness and audit register this page already carries in Section 4 and is never gameable, never spectacle, and never conflated with the twelfth-century battle content
The Cham spirit-mediums (Cham (Jahed))
The mediums are possessed by and speak for the cay spirits, the royal spirits of ancient Champa; they
sing the pi cay, the sung corpus that carries Cham mythical history and the founding myth of the Cham
King, and they diagnose illness and sorcery by scrutinising the sufferer's chour-sambour, the family
lines on both the father's and the mother's sides [SRC: SRC_00322, p. 245, p. 246, p. 249]. They are
predominantly women, with quite a few men and some children among them, initiated as mediums as the
tradition initiates them [SRC: SRC_00322, p. 251], and they are faithful members of the Muslim
congregation while they serve the royal spirits — a Hindu-substrate royal-ancestor cult living inside
a Muslim community whose Islam is superimposed on a basically Hindu worldview that is recognised as
custom, and whose Imams call the ritual itself prapeni, tradition, using the Khmer word
[SRC: SRC_00322, p. 245, p. 246]. Their standing is socially ambiguous and their dignity is not: they
are congregants, not deviants, and the record reads the cult as transgendered in the sense Morris
calls gender twice over, gender here carrying a statement about something the community holds prior
to it [SRC: SRC_00322, p. 252] — a reading that ships named, never as spectacle.
Personality: varies by rank and by faction, and the factions are the point — elders slow, sufficient, unwilling to escalate; younger mediums pressing, ambitious, and shut out of the older spirit-stories their seniors guard jealously
Background: recruited historically from aristocrat-warrior lines, and now increasingly from riess commoners — a caste memory levelled by the war and still spoken of [SRC: SRC_00322, p. 252]. Recruitment is not voluntary in the ordinary sense: the record carries a sitting Imam pressed to abandon his office and become a medium, the spirits having already claimed his wife and his son [SRC: SRC_00322, p. 250]
Own life and daily routine: ordinary household and congregational life, interrupted by the work — divination for a sick neighbour, a ceremony staged in a shelter raised before the sufferer's house as a public event with snacks sold along its edges and children keeping the rhythm on bamboo stems, and the procession to greet the spirits and honour the King of Champa as the teacher [SRC: SRC_00322, p. 247, p. 249, p. 250]. The work is expensive and the money is part of the persona: a ceremony can run over a million Riel, and a buffalo bought for sacrifice can be sold again when the cure does not come [SRC: SRC_00322, p. 248]
Relationship surface: the informal counter-authority to the On g'nur, and the surface on which the community's own disputes surface — sorcery accusations between envious neighbours, and the long-established link between poverty and accusation, are read here first [SRC: SRC_00322, p. 248, p. 252]. The player who supports one faction is read by the other; standing propagates through the congregation, never through a faction meter
Three-path outcomes: attend as a guest, contribute to the cost, and let the elders' sufficiency stand when a rite closes on a spirit that will not give its name (generative — the community opens and the guarded stories start to be told); observe, learn the diagnostic grammar of the family lines, and stay out of the ruling (neutral); press the escalation for the spectacle of it, or trade a neighbour's accusation onward (corrosive — the accusation lands on a real household). Non-gating: nothing here walls the excursion or the region content
Dialogue hooks: the reading of both parents' lines aloud; the distinction the elders draw between an ordinary ancestor spirit to be fed and invited to depart and a true cay; the memory that UNTAC, the 1991-93 intervention, revived all the spirits that had disappeared in the Khmer Rouge years [SRC: SRC_00322, p. 244, p. 252]; and what the older mediums will not say in front of the younger
Build notes: MetaHuman; ELEVATED; living practitioners, so gender-role and caste-memory content renders as lived reality and never as exotica, and the child mediums are the tradition's own practice and are not scrubbed on reflex. Rendered at reference register with no reproduction of consecrated performance, per this page's Section 10 exemption. One costume note the record insists on and the build should keep: the sitting Imam and village leader for whom the rite was staged, and whom the mediums held possessed, danced in it in a modern-style jacket and steel-rimmed reading glasses, with a Malay-style black Muslim head dress and an ordinary Cham check-patterned sarong [SRC: SRC_00322, p. 249, p. 250] — a living tradition improvising in the present, not reverent wallpaper. FEEDS T0_Character_Index. The cay spirits themselves are a being-class row and are not authored here. The un-named-spirit motif is Cham folklore and is firewalled absolutely from the antagonist ladder: it is never a who-frame, never a pattern, never a hint
The Imam-scribes and the Cham ancient script (Cham)
The Cham carry a literate learned elite whose work is transmission: Imam-scribes who hand down the
corpus of sacred texts in the Cham's own language and ancient script, copied painstakingly generation
after generation [SRC: SRC_00322, p. 245-246]. That is a centuries-long manual manuscript tradition
and it is under live pressure — free standardised Arabic prayer-books handed out in the villages to
replace the hand-copied ones, and intensive targeting by missionary groups from international Muslim
associations [SRC: SRC_00322, p. 244-245]. The script's name, akhar thrah, comes from this page's own
record of the akhar-thrah and akhar-srak revival digitized under the British Library Endangered
Archives Programme (Section 4), not from this ethnography, which says only the Cham's own language and
ancient script; the name is correct and the attribution is kept straight so no later reader traces it
here. The scribes are scoped Cham-wide rather than to one Cambodian community, because a writing
system is not the property of a sub-group.
Personality: patient to the point of obsession about the hand, indifferent to speed; a copyist's pride that is about fidelity rather than about beauty
Background: the literate stratum of a community whose religious authority runs partly through text, holding an office that is inherited as a skill and not as a seat. His pressure is not persecution but supply: something free, uniform and printed arriving to do the same job worse
Own life and daily routine: authored from the office — congregational duties, teaching the letters to whoever will learn them, and the copying itself done in the hours it can be done, page by page against a corpus that is never finished
Relationship surface: the textual door, distinct from both the On g'nur's formal one and the mediums' informal one. He is the region's most transferable teacher — literacy given is literacy kept — and he is the one who can say what the community's texts actually contain
Three-path outcomes: learn the letters, or help keep a copy alive by doing the work of copying (generative — the textual surface opens and the school seed roots); read the manuscripts as artefacts and record them (neutral); treat the corpus as saleable or as a curiosity to be carried off (corrosive, and hard-lined against desecration — a living script taken as loot). Non-gating throughout
Dialogue hooks: the two books side by side, one printed and free and one copied by a named hand; what generation after generation actually costs in hours; the plain question of what is lost when the letters stop being written
Build notes: MetaHuman; ELEVATED for the living endangered heritage; portray the manual transmission as a real intellectual achievement under real modern pressure, never as backwardness. FEEDS T0_Character_Index as a persona row, the T0 language and script registry as a Cham script row scoped Cham-wide, and the T0_School_Registry a Cham textual-transmission seed — carried as FEEDS, asserted nowhere. Both the script tradition and the pi cay are L2 civilizational marks of a living people, never the achievement of a vanished one
No quest_type is assigned anywhere in this section: entity rows carry no quest_type field, and per-seed
typing against the ratified §6.5 enum belongs to the Section-13 seed-stub pass. Every office above is a
FEED to the typed layer, not a claim on it, and no office is fused with the excursion's antagonist
apparatus, which stays exactly where Section 11 puts it.
Generated by harness/site/structure_site.py — the URL path is the repo path. review root