The Artisanal-to-Automatic Spectrum

The Pandemonium Engine runs at any point on a spectrum from fully manual to fully algorithmic. The output is structurally identical regardless of mode — the same constraint rules power every mode.

The Five Modes

Artisanal

Humans place everything. Run Beak, Feather & Bone at the table. Play Street Magic. Use Chronicle for history. Every tile pinned by collaborative play. The engine has nothing to do — players and GM have already done all the collapsing.

When to use: Session zero. Emotionally important locations. When the table wants the full collaborative worldbuilding experience.

This is the Session Zero full generation mode.

Highlight

The engine identifies the most constrained uncollapsed tile and lists its constraints. The human fills it freely with whatever satisfies those constraints.

Example: “Tile 14 is adjacent to forest, river, and a faction stronghold. It must connect the river to the south edge. Valid terrain types: forested riverbank, ford, bridge site, mill site.”

The GM fills it with a troll bridge, a waterfall shrine, a burned-out ford — whatever has soul. The engine doesn’t care which valid option, only that it’s structurally coherent.

When to use: GM prep. Focused creative work on the tile that matters most. The entropy heatmap made practical — spend your prep time where narrative weight is highest.

This chains naturally into focal quest seeding. The engine collapses from the seed, identifies which uncollapsed tiles are now most constrained, and presents them ranked by narrative weight.

Jigsaw

The engine collapses most of the patch, then presents the remaining ambiguous tiles as a puzzle: n tiles, each with m valid choices. Humans pick. The constraints guarantee coherence no matter what they choose.

Design knobs:

• n (tiles left open) — scales creative input. Low n = mostly pre-collapsed, a couple decisions. High n = a real worldbuilding session. Can tie to region development: well-traveled areas have fewer open tiles because prior play has pinned more.
• m (choices per tile) — scales decision complexity. m=2 is “this or that,” fast and low-stakes. m=4+ is a real creative exercise.

When to use: Collaborative sessions with guardrails. Player-facing worldbuilding where you want creative freedom without coherence risk. Mid-session generation when the table wants input but not full BF&B.

Roll Tables

Same as Jigsaw, but dice select from the m choices instead of human judgment. The constraint rules are the roll tables — they just happen to also be machine-readable.

The continuity weights become dice probabilities. Weight 5:2:1 maps to: “Roll d8. 1-5: terrain continues. 6-7: gradual transition. 8: surprise.”

When to use: Solo GM prep. Fast generation with controlled randomness. When you want surprises but not incoherence.

Automatic

Input party composition, focal player’s goal, and active quest. The engine collapses the entire patch with no manual input.

When to use: Background regions players might pass through. Time-pressured prep. Digital tool mode. This is Quick generation.

Why They’re the Same Operation

Collaborative games, player declarations, dice rolls, and algorithmic generation are all performing the same action: collapsing a tile and propagating constraints.

When BF&B has you define a building’s faction and three-layer description, you’re setting node attributes and creating edges — the same thing the algorithm does. When a player says “I know a guy”, they’re pinning a node — the same thing a collaborative game does when the GM draws a card. When a GM rolls on a terrain table filtered by neighbor constraints, they’re doing WFC by hand.

The spectrum isn’t “real generation” vs. “algorithm.” It’s a sliding scale of who’s doing the collapsing. The constraint rules are the invariant.

Collaborative Games as Pre-Pinned Tiles

Every tool in the WH system feeds the engine:

Source	What It Contributes
Chronicle	Pre-pinned historical edges with narrative metadata
Beak, Feather & Bone	Pre-pinned settlement nodes with faction relationships
Street Magic	Pre-pinned people nodes with sensory detail
Claw Atlas	Pre-pinned quest nodes (threats with goals)
Ex Novo	Pre-pinned founding constraints and faction paradigms
Microscope	Pre-pinned lore nodes across deep history

The engine takes all inputs — from any source, in any combination — and collapses everything else into coherent existence around them.