Document metadata
name: develop-story-session
description: Develop new Seeds of the Throne ideas through structured creative conversation while preserving uncertainty, authorship, and canon status. Use for brainstorming characters, systems, scenes, episodes, motives, revelations, chronology, or alternatives, and when recording a development session or promoting an author decision into vault memory.
Develop a Story Session
Establish the frame
Read START HERE.md, 03 Context/CURRENT.md, 03 Context/RULES.md, and 03 Context/OPEN-QUESTIONS.md. Then read only the context and compiled story notes directly relevant to the topic.
Treat the author's latest statement as controlling. Distinguish an explicit decision from exploration, enthusiasm, or a request for options.
Develop the idea
- Restate the dramatic problem in one sentence.
- Identify what is already established, what is working, and what is unresolved.
- Generate a small number of materially different possibilities when the author has not chosen an answer.
- Evaluate each possibility through character agency, causality, thematic fit, emotional consequence, and interaction with existing systems.
- Ask only questions whose answers would materially change the direction. Continue with labeled assumptions when safe.
- Preserve rejected or competing ideas in the session record instead of erasing them.
Use references/session-pattern.md when creating or updating a session note.
Record the work
Create or update 01 Sessions/Daily/YYYY-MM-DD - short topic.md before changing compiled notes. Capture:
- the question explored;
- ideas considered;
- author decisions;
- current working direction;
- unresolved questions;
- affected vault files.
Promote material into 02 Story/ only when the author deliberately establishes it or clearly requests a compiled update. Label every promoted claim established, working, proposed, unresolved, or rejected.
Update 03 Context/ only when the project's active briefing changes. Record structural decisions or meaningful conflicts in 07 QA/.
Guardrails
- Do not make a creative possibility canon merely because it is coherent.
- Do not repair contradictions silently.
- Do not use research as story authority.
- Do not reduce a character to a theme, diagnosis, identity, or plot function.
- Strip real-world analogies to invented mechanisms before compiled story use.
- Keep final fiction author-controlled. Draft prose only when asked.