Agents and model stages

Ghostlight uses three logical model tiers. Fast handles bounded projection, classification, and selection; Balanced handles reconciliation, causal reasoning, and most agentic workbenches; Capable handles the hardest world compilation and numinous elaboration. Deployments may map these aliases to different physical models without changing stage contracts.

“Agentic” means the stage can inspect a bounded workbench, take several typed actions, receive deterministic feedback, and revise on the same snapshot. A one-shot model stage still produces only a proposal.

Session Zero

Stage	Tier	Purpose	Output and downstream gate
session_zero_projector	Fast/configured	Lowers permitted negotiation state into the DM’s private lived context	Projected stream; schema validation only, no state write
session_zero_dm_persona	Balanced/configured	Embodied persistent DM who discusses premise, boundaries, roles, and bargains	Natural speech; owns no accepted changes
session_zero_interpreter	Balanced/configured	Extracts only new typed proposals or one focused counterproposal from DM/player speech	Contract, character, or permission proposal; exact owner acceptance and Session Zero kernel gate

Retrieval and world compilation

Stage	Tier	Purpose	Output and downstream gate
opening_retrieval_plan	Fast	Plans source queries for possible openings	Queries; Vault boundary executes and receipts results
world_openings	Balanced	Suggests grounded starting situations	Suggestions with evidence IDs; deterministic evidence validation
role_retrieval_plan	Fast	Plans source queries for playable roles	Queries; Vault boundary
world_roles	Balanced	Suggests roles, capabilities, and obligations	Suggestions; evidence and duplication checks
custom_retrieval_plan	Fast	Plans queries for a custom campaign brief	Queries only
evidence_relevance	Fast	Separates direct seed evidence from background and excluded material	Classification; deterministic source-lane admission
world_compile	Capable	Compiles the bounded playable seed: topology, cast, populations, institutions, facts, clocks, and civic state	Candidate seed; full structural and semantic validation before registry publication
private_relationship_actor_compile	Balanced	Compiles private player-character state and approved relationship anchors	Private actor proposal; identity, account, and relationship binding checks
agency_compile	Balanced	Profiles local actors, institutions, and populations across the six agency axes	Agency profiles and relations; exact subject coverage validation
global_agency_compile	Fast/configured	Builds the coarse offscreen strategic skeleton	Major powers, regions, channels, and pressures; schema and evidence checks
global_agency_doctrine_synthesis	Balanced	Proposes strategic doctrines from exact global agency anchors	Doctrine candidates; cannot rewrite source anchors
global_agency_doctrine_verification	Balanced	Judges whether synthesized doctrines preserve their anchors	Verdict; deterministic compiler decides admission

Destination, civic, and clock workbenches

Stage	Tier	Purpose	Output and downstream gate
destination_identity_resolution	Fast	Decides whether a requested destination is an existing reachable place or a genuinely new region	Identity proposal; deterministic topology check chooses elaboration versus expansion
destination_retrieval_plan	Fast	Plans exact source queries for a destination	Queries only
destination_compile	Capable	Proposes geography, routes, residents, institutions, political relations, and civic apparatus	Expansion/elaboration candidate; topology, evidence, knowledge, and civic closure checks
destination_reconciliation_agent_action	Balanced, agentic	Repairs an exact rejected destination finding through small transactional edits	Revised private candidate; reruns the existing validators, never writes world state
destination_civic_verification	Balanced	Independently judges whether authority, succession, resources, redress, and resident knowledge are legible	Verdict receipt; kernel rebinds and checks it at admission
gestalt_fission_retrieval_plan	Fast	Plans evidence retrieval for a requested population subdivision	Queries; fission compiler and approval gate
clock_consequence_binding_agent_action	Balanced, agentic	Binds legacy clock consequence text to exact observable subjects and public channels	Binding proposal; deterministic threshold/event validation and kernel commit

Titled world elaborators

All titled workers use world_elaboration_<title>, the common agent harness, one exact frozen assignment, and at most one additive operation. The weighted scheduler controls invocation frequency in proportion to the user’s slider shares.

Agent	Tier	Character of contribution
Patina	Fast	Durable low-stakes texture: objects, nicknames, customs, jokes, and reusable places
Charter	Balanced	Government, offices, law, succession, selection, procedure, and redress
Ledger	Fast	Labor, resources, infrastructure, exchange, scarcity, and class pressure
Hearth	Fast	Kinship, care, neighborhood, obligation, belonging, and private stakes
Tangle	Balanced	Factions, alliances, rivalries, constituencies, leverage, and plots
Veil	Fast	Secrets, rumors, misinformation, taboo, mystery, and disclosure paths
Ember	Fast	Active disputes, hazards, instability, escalation, and urgent pressure
Numen	Capable	Religion, ritual, magic, cosmology, awe, and bounded strangeness

The deterministic elaboration tool checks the operation against the title’s exact assignment and frozen namespace. Wave admission resolves conflicts; an independent semantic verifier reviews the inhabited candidate; WorldKernel alone commits it.

At latent-world scale, the same titled sessions also receive world-complexity-<title>-fission or world-complexity-<title>-individuate assignments. Each call may subdivide one active Gestalt or promote one grounded consequential person. A fission worker returns only the partition delta—child identities and partition values plus exact member/resource assignments. The deterministic tool attaches the frozen world binding and inherited population state, avoiding repeated constitutions in model output. An individuation worker similarly supplies the member delta while the tool owns parent version and location. Deterministic validation and the existing kernel commands remain the only admission owners. A rejected fission returns the complete deterministic mismatch set to the same agentic turn, rather than hiding several repairable defects behind one generic error. Its action schema exposes the exact frozen resource and dormant-member IDs as required assignment keys, while leaving their destination children to the writer. After every productive round, world-elaborator-<title>-session-compaction distills that title’s frontier in the assigned realm jurisdiction and its unresolved leads while the harness reattaches exact commit ancestry. The title-by-realm key prevents unrelated political frontiers from becoming one global transcript. Compacted memory can guide later proposals but cannot create subjects or facts.

Foreground perception, response, and action

Stage	Tier	Purpose	Output and downstream gate
speech_address_resolver	Fast	Selects exact co-present direct addressees for player speech	Addressee IDs; presence and response-duty validation
projector	Fast/configured	Projects one actor’s permitted typed state and visible event into lived narrative	Private context; never canonical truth
persona	Balanced/configured	Appraises the event and produces natural response from one actor’s perspective	Speech, deliberate silence, private appraisal, or action intent
interpreter	Capable/configured, agentic	Negotiates natural intent into the closed action algebra	Typed action proposal; authority and semantic validation
assessment_mutation_scope	Fast/Balanced	Selects the smallest mutation lanes that could realize an attempted effect	Upper-bound scope or precise denial; deterministic lane checks
action_assessment	Balanced	Sets possibility, DC, stakes, outcome bands, and effect ceiling	Assessment; canonical DC/reference validation and player risk acceptance
assessment_effect_verifier	Balanced	Checks that a proposed outcome mutation is caused by the exact attempted means	Verdict; invalid effects cannot reach the kernel
gestalt_presence_planner	Fast/configured	Promotes an earned existing member, admits one speech-authorized first identity, or folds an irrelevant member	Presence plan; exact lineage, location, version, and identity checks

Strategic simulation

Stage	Tier	Purpose	Output and downstream gate
resolution_demand	Fast	Weights current causal relevance across geography, ideology, authority, economy, species/body, and information	Demand weights and focal IDs; deterministic connected partitioner owns the cover
nemesis_attention_agent_action	Balanced, agentic	Searches committed causal anchors and decides which autonomous subjects genuinely need a response window now	Anchor/responder assignments or none; exact subject/anchor validation, no action authority
cell_projector	Fast/configured	Projects a cell’s exact constituents and required perspective owners without merging private state	Cell lived context
cell_persona	Balanced/configured	Lets each required actor, institution, population, or named member appraise and choose independently	Attributed natural decisions; arenas never speak as synthetic actors
cell_interpreter	Capable/configured, agentic	Translates each selected strategic decision into one or more typed attempts	Attributed action proposals; graph, target, location, and effect validation
cell_effect_verifier	Balanced/configured	Checks that each strategic attempt uses only its own constituent’s authority and knowledge	Ordered verdicts; correction may reuse the same bounded workbench
strategic_outcome_resolver	Balanced	Resolves opposition and proposes one durable result per admitted action	Outcome bundle; exact handles and action digests must match
strategic_outcome_verifier	Fast/Balanced	Independently checks high-risk custody, relation, knowledge, and member-specific consequences	Selective semantic verdict; ordinary structural effects remain deterministic
strategic_individuation_selector	Fast	Names at most one person when selected Gestalt action creates political work that cannot remain anonymous	Member proposal or none; shared individuation validator and kernel admission

Newspaper

Stage	Tier	Purpose	Output and downstream gate
newspaper_narrative_selection_agent_action	Balanced, agentic	Assignment editor queries the frozen ledger, chooses issue shape and throughline, assigns recurring reporters, and binds evidence	Immutable agenda checkpoint; exact record, reporter, lead, and conflict-axis validation
newspaper_journalist_agent_action	Balanced, agentic	One embodied journalist writes one assigned story through their recurring beat, voice, biases, and source habits	Article copy plus citations; no factual admission authority
newspaper_copy_desk	Balanced	Performs the single hard factual review over the assembled page	Complete finding checklist; cannot rewrite or publish
newspaper_night_editor_close_agent_action	Balanced, agentic	Repairs the copy desk checklist once while preserving narrative and closes at deadline	Final page; deterministic press witness checks structure and lineage

Post-press grounding review is audit, not another same-edition rewrite loop. Supported corrections become later-edition memory.

Deterministic stages that deliberately use no model

The WorldKernel, mutation reducer, resolution partitioner, dice roller, identity/version checks, topology and custody validation, information-scope checks, checkpoint recovery, provenance hashing, archive verification, and Eve projection lowering are deterministic. Keeping these outside model prompts is what lets agents negotiate with the engine instead of impersonating it.