Seeds and the Focal Quest

Each session has a focal player and a focal quest. These aren’t just context — they’re seed tiles. They collapse first, before anything else, and everything in the settlement propagates from them.

The herbalist wants to find a legendary herb garden rumored to exist near Thornwall. That quest and that player are the seeds. The engine collapses them into the graph, then propagates:

• The herb garden collapses into the settlement layer (it exists, it has a location)
• The Farmers faction gains a post to the herb garden (they know about local plants)
• An NPC collapses in the people layer — someone who tends, guards, or knows about the garden
• That NPC’s faction affiliation constrains which other buildings and people are nearby
• The party’s other members propagate their own constraints — the fighter’s presence means a martial lead exists somewhere, the bard guarantees a social pathway

The settlement grows outward from the seeds, like a crystal forming around a nucleation point.

Party Composition as Variable Input

West Marches parties are ad hoc. The herbalist’s usual group might not be available, so they recruit whoever’s free. Party composition is a variable input, not a fixed one.

Different party compositions produce different collapses of the same settlement. Not different settlements — different realizations of the same constraint graph. Buildings and factions are stable (structural constraints). Which NPCs carry which leads, which paths are richest — that shifts based on who shows up.

The Guild as Background Radiation

Every player character belongs to the Adventurers’ Guild. The guild is a persistent node in the faction layer with weak posts into every player, every settlement, and many quests.

Guild members who aren’t in the current party still exert a weak bias on the collapse. The guild’s rogue, sitting back in town, has a 0.1-weight post into Thornwall’s Thieves faction. Not enough to guarantee that content collapses, but enough to make it more likely. If that rogue visits Thornwall next session, the thieves’ content that was biased into existence is already there — canon, consistent.

Weight model:

• Focal player: 1.0 — seeds the collapse
• Party members: 0.7 — strong constraint propagation
• Guild members (absent): 0.1 — background bias toward future consistency

This solves the West Marches consistency problem without pre-generation. The guild’s collective existence gently shapes every settlement, so different parties encounter a world that feels coherent rather than randomly re-rolled.

Relationship to WH Goals Framework

Seeds aren’t arbitrary — they come from player goals. The focal quest is whatever goal the declaring player posted intent around. The seeded discovery pool is the lightweight version of this same principle operating at the wilderness level.