The Six-Layer Graph
A settlement in The Western Horizon isn’t a flat grid of buildings. It’s a multi-layered graph — and the layers matter.
The architecture borrows from percolation theory’s bunk bed graph: multiple copies of a graph stacked on top of each other, connected by vertical edges called “posts.” Picture a die. Six faces, each one a graph. Posts connect any face to any other — they tunnel through the die, not just to adjacent layers.
A Story Is a Person in a Place with a Problem
That’s both the minimum definition of narrative and the architecture of the graph. Three primary layers, each with an opposite face that gives it depth:
| Primary Layer | Opposite Layer | What the Pair Creates |
|---|---|---|
| People | Factions | A person without allegiances is just a name |
| Settlement | Geography | A building without regional context is just a map |
| Quests | Lore | A task without meaning is just a fetch quest |
Without its opposite face, each layer is flat. The opposite is what makes each one matter.
The Six Faces
- People — NPCs, player characters, guild members
- Factions — political groups, power structures, allegiances
- Settlement — buildings, landmarks, districts
- Geography — hexes, terrain, regional features, routes
- Quests — active hooks, leads, McGuffin fragments, side quests
- Lore — rumors, secrets, legends, discoverable knowledge
History Lives on Edges
History isn’t a layer. It’s the type and weight on every edge. When the engine creates a post between the Miners faction and a building, it simultaneously generates the reason: “the Miners built this smelter thirty years ago when the copper vein was discovered.”
Microscope, Chronicle, and Ex Novo don’t generate nodes — they generate reasons for connections. History is what makes edges meaningful instead of arbitrary.
The Constraint Axiom
Every node must have at least one post to its opposite face. Every person gets a faction edge. Every building gets a geography edge. Every quest gets a lore edge.
That’s minimum viable coherence — the thing that makes generated content feel like a story rather than a spreadsheet.
Asymmetric Paths
The bunk bed conjecture (disproven in 2024) held that you’re always more likely to reach a destination by staying on your own layer. Turns out that’s false — and the failure is exactly what makes the model interesting.
A rogue’s connection to the Thieves Guild might route through a seemingly innocent herbalist who operates near the guild’s safehouse. A paladin’s traversal of the same settlement never passes through those nodes — not because the content is hidden, but because the graph paths are asymmetric. Same city, different realizations. Different parties navigate the same graph differently.
Connection Types
Three kinds of connections exist in the graph. Attributes live on nodes. Edges connect pairs of nodes across faces. Stories bind multiple nodes across multiple faces into a single irreducible narrative unit — the highest-value generation targets.