Glossary

A verb you trigger in a sim — a shout, a dash, a rite. The only type that competes for a gamepad slot.

A parsed, valid mod whose dependencies are loadable. Active means eligible for adapters; it does not make reserved content types live.

The narrow runtime bridge that validates mod data, builds a known Resource, and installs it in one owned registry.

Power entangled with the Mark; its cost is never confirmed (canon-ambiguous). Rare by design — capstones only.

Attribute — potential, and the ceiling it sets on related skills.

Author Truth is what the world knows and no narrator may hand you; you find it or you do not.

Black Market — a clandestine exchange network, and not automatically a Gathering.

An author declaration that the mod intends to respect Bonemark canon. It is not an official endorsement or automatic certification.

Chronicle is the remembered record of one run.

Claim is what someone says the evidence means.

Codex is the protagonist's discovered knowledge, which may remain incomplete or disputed.

The Codex is what your protagonist has personally found out.

Companion is an autonomous travelling relationship, never a permanent personal lieutenant.

Companions are classless too.

Applies to your whole band, not just you. A company is the people, supplies and decisions that travel under one banner; you level the company, not a captain.

Two loadable mods declare the same override target. Both remain loadable; deterministic application order decides the result.

Consciousness is a non-allocatable run state recording an honest and constructive relation to yourself and to other people.

A named data family such as goods or npc_definitions. Recognition in mod.json is separate from runtime support.

A loose package containing declarative JSON or CSV and no executable behaviour.

Another mod that must be present and loadable. Dependency version constraints are not enforced by the current foundation.

Elves are mortal: two or three human lifetimes, very few children, and a slow recovery from any loss at all.

Evidence is an observation or record with provenance.

the runtime path exists, but formats or semantics may change without migration support.

A deterministic record derived from the active mod manifest. Every save records the fingerprints of the mods active at the time, and the load compares them and reports what changed. It warns and never blocks, so it detects a difference rather than guaranteeing the save still means the same thing. See section 2.5.

Focus — a scarce commitment that raises how deep one chosen skill can go.

Gathering — an observable concentration of armed or desperate people whose real organisation may not be clear.

A Gathering is a concentration of armed men and desperate people, large enough that outsiders have started to notice it.

Runtime-live content whose contract is still deliberately restricted or unstable.

the runtime path exists, but its contract or downstream behaviour is still being stabilized.

Headquarters — a mature command and logistics site, not simply a bigger fight.

Hideout — a concealed base that has lasted, because people and supplies reach it.

House is one of six durable political institutions.

Insight is the attribute.

Insight is the trainable Soul attribute that sets how well the protagonist can read a motive, including his own.

Introspection is the skill that grows when you use it.

Introspection is the Soul skill that grows through authored self-reckoning and evidence-bound reflection.

The Keeping of the Circle teaches that life continues through limits and reciprocity: bury the dead, keep the memory, and do not reach for mastery over other people.

Keldrans are human. Their institutions are the extended family and the assembly, and their memory is spoken aloud rather than filed away.

The mod.json file that identifies a mod and declares its types, dependencies, order, overrides, and canon intent.

A word the realm uses and does not agree on. Nothing detects it, nothing marks the guilty, and no ordinary run settles what it is.

Mark Affinity is a non-allocatable run state recording how far you have deliberately walked toward the Mark.

Milestone — a point on a skill track where you are offered a perk choice.

The modid: prefix that gives new content globally stable ids without colliding with vanilla content or other mods.

Neglect is failure to answer while others continue without knowing your position.

Old Seat is the realm's politically central contested city.

An explicit declaration that a mod intends to replace an existing id.

An always-on stat or rule change. No button, no trigger — the reliable backbone of a build.

Perk — a specialisation you keep: an ability, a permission, or a change in how a system treats you.

design direction only; the game does not load it.

Read-only validation of the discovered mod set before treating it as suitable for testing.

Implemented for internal/private-beta use, but not yet promised as a stable public API.

a validated runtime path exists and is available for internal/private-beta testing. It is not yet a stable public API.

Provenance — where a thing came from, and whose hands it passed through.

Refusal is an explicit decision not to act under the offered terms.

Reliability is the current reason to trust a source.

Recognized vocabulary with no public runtime mapper.

the manifest vocabulary is reserved for future use; there is no public runtime mapper.

Response means accepting involvement or communicating a course of action.

Ring — Body, Mind or Soul.

Run is one generated campaign with its own state and private discoveries.

Seed is the input used to reproduce procedural choices.

Skill — demonstrated practice in a discipline.

Changes what the world produces around you: new events, new reputations, branches that were not there before. What you built decides what happens next.

Rewrites a rule of a living sim — economy, morale, the Wasting's spread. Passive, but it changes how the world works.

Accepted by offline tooling but not installed into the running game.

the offline validator recognizes the data, but this build does not install it into a live game registry.

The Wasting is a named pressure on land and life: a spreading deterioration that changes what settlements can grow, trade, and survive.