TheLadder/tools/story-to-pack/probe/plaintales/README.md

Plain Tales reference set: Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)

A hand-made comparison baseline for the story-to-pack pipeline, a sibling of the Jacobs set in ../jacobs/ and the Bierce set in ../bierce/. Claude read every scene and wrote each summary, predicament, group and option. No local inference was used. Compare the local-model runs against it. Do not treat it as ground truth: it is one careful reading.

File	What it is
corpus/plain-tales-from-the-hills.txt	Project Gutenberg #1858, Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills
split_gutenberg.py	→ stories.json (35 stories, split on the body's upper-case headings and checked against the contents) and chunks.json (287 scenes, same 320-word paragraph rule as ../chunk.py)
claude/batches/sNN.json	per story: {chunk, story, summary, predicament}, the same schema as ../jacobs/claude/batches/
claude/groups_src.py	the groups, options and per-story protagonist standing
claude/build.py	checks everything, then writes claude/records.json and claude/groups.json (unchanged from Jacobs: it resolves paths relative to itself)
claude/page.py	→ claude/REFERENCE.html, the readable page

Rebuild: python3 split_gutenberg.py && cd claude && python3 build.py && python3 page.py.

What is in it

• 287 predicaments: one sentence each (median 21 words, min 16, max 24), written to the redescribe.py rules: no names, jobs, ranks, places or story-only objects, and no race, nationality, caste or religion. The topic_words leak check flags 85 of 287. 82 are role or kin words (wife, rival, husband, newcomer, suitor, guest, patron, host, thief), kept on purpose because the design's cast is roles. The other 3 are "judge" used as a verb and "model" and "patient" used as adjectives. Rank is kept only as relation: someone above you, a superior, a junior, a subordinate, the one at the top, a deputy.
• 29 groups, each a situation that recurs in three or more stories, has at least five scenes, and draws no more than half its members from one story (8 span 3 stories, 14 span 4, 5 span 5, 2 span 6). All 29 pass the catalogue's recurrence rule. Each scene sits in at most one group: 184 are assigned and 103 fit nothing that recurs. 34 of the 35 stories feed at least one group. The Story of Muhammad Din feeds none.
• Options: 3 to 5 per group, 135 in all (19 groups have 5, 10 have 4). 108 come from what someone in a scene did or refused to do (scene:N), 10 are archetypes and 17 fill gaps. 30 scene options cite a scene outside their own group. That is looser than DESIGN.md's "drawn from other scenes in the cluster", and groups.json marks each one in_group: false. As in Bierce, most are the scene just before or after a member, where the character acts.
• Moves: spine paths with a direction only (+, -, risk, set). There are no magnitudes, as the design requires. Relationships are moved 113 times, standing 66, flags 49, the two skills 39 and money only 17. The relationship roles are mostly institutional: superior, the_top, patron, power_broker, company, colleagues, old_hands, mentor, protege and gatekeeper, besides beloved, spouse, family and rival. Flags record what the player did: placed_by_favour, favour_owed, overworked, secret_marriage, kind_lie, cover_story, vendetta, kept_silent, double_life and others.
• Skills proposed for this corpus: tact, for handling people, reading the unwritten rules and keeping a thing quiet, and cunning, reused from Jacobs, for the trick, the lever and the secret put to use. Nerve and wits hardly arise. This book's dangers are social.
• Stage comes from protagonist standing, judged per story, not per scene, in STANDING in groups_src.py. Subalterns, first-post juniors, a signaller, an orphan, an addict and a loafer rank low. Officials of some years' standing, their wives and the narrator rank middle. A colonel's household, the viceroy's circle, the supreme council and a senior department's indispensable expert rank high. The groups come out 15 low, 12 middle and 2 high. Two stories are hard calls, and both are noted in the file. Watches of the Night is judged by the colonel's household, which bears its consequences. The Rout of the White Hussars is judged middle, because its scenes alternate between the colonel and the subaltern who defies him.

Against the catalogue

The catalogue has 82 entries (../catalogue/v2/catalogue_v2_src.py). The mapping rule is the catalogue's own: a group joins an entry when it is the same predicament seen from the same side.

Fifteen groups match an existing entry. Four of them sharpen it:

• G01 A word from someone powerful → patron. The v1 entry is about being seen with the great. Kipling makes it about who gets the post. The place goes to whoever has someone influential speaking for them: a shiftless nephew's job, an appointment won through a society woman, an accountant foisted on a bank by a politician and about to be replaced by a director's nominee.
• G06 Good work that counts for nothing → overlooked (the v2 widening "good work that goes unrecognised"). Kipling adds the edge: work that shows up your seniors is resented, not merely unseen.
• G09 The rules nobody tells you and G10 Sent out young, with nobody watching → newcomer. Both are the newcomer's predicament, split in two. G09 is the clash with unwritten rules: the know-all junior, the lecturing accountant, the ragged recruit. G10 is the young man ruined by his first posting, going wrong far from home while nobody who sees it says a word. That is how Kipling sharpens the entry, so it is not treated as a new one.
• G20 Swallowing it from someone above → power_over_you. It is sharpened by Miss Youghal's Sais, where a man in disguise must take insults from people he outranks.

The other eleven map directly: G12 → family_against_your_path (the arranged-match side of it), G13 → rival, G15 → wrongly_judged, G17 → revenge, G23 → promised_elsewhere, G25 → too_late, G26 → sign, G27 → dread, G28 → home_unseen and G29 → self_betrayal. G17 is a new register for revenge: cold, comic and bloodless. The weapon is a hoax, a wager or the bureaucracy itself, and never a blow.

Fourteen are new situation types. Each names its nearest neighbour, so a reviewer can merge it if it is judged a near-duplicate:

• Career politics: G02 the power behind the title (the real decider has no title: a colonel's wife who breaks marriages, a society woman who can have a man gazetted on leave, a private secretary who runs the viceroy; neighbour patron). G03 one chance to be heard at the top (reaching the one person who can decide; neighbour patron). G04 a change imposed by someone who does not know the ground (a new colonel sells the drum-horse, a council drafts a tenancy rule nobody asked for; neighbour orders_without_reasons). G05 knowing what goes on below (knowledge nobody above has asked for, used to settle a matter; neighbour despised).
• Work and strain: G07 work nobody sees (neighbour dead_end). G08 the strain gives way, the breakdown that makes it visible (neighbour courage_doubted for the jockey only).
• Marriage and prospects: G11 the marriage or the career (a match that would sink your prospects, or prospects that forbid the match; neighbour duty_against_love, but the pull here is ambition, not duty).
• Reputation: G14 everyone will hear of it (containing the talk in a place where everyone knows everyone; neighbours caught_out, cover_up_spiral). G16 a lie to spare them (neighbour their_secret). G18 it fell into your hands (a misdelivered secret, an overheard story, a quirk of the ground, used for advantage; neighbour seen_too_much, but the decision is opportunity, not danger).
• Onlookers and outsiders: G19 saving them from themselves, which is Kipling's "playing Providence" (neighbour losing_them, but the meddler acts behind the other's back). G21 seeing it, and saying nothing (neighbour safe_while_others_suffer). G22 belonging to neither side (neighbours station, outside_looking_in). G24 devoted to someone who does not care (neighbour used).

The brief's eight targets, and where each landed:

Target	Found as	Strength
a post decided by patronage	G01, G03	strong: 5 stories
a young man ruined by his first posting	G10 (and In the Pride of His Youth, whose scenes run through G06, G07, G08, G10, G11 and G25)	strong
gossip that decides a career	G14, G15	partial: gossip decides reputation, and only The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case ties it to a career outright
a superior's wife who wields his power	G02	thin: only Watches of the Night is literally that, so G02 generalises to unofficial power
a clever junior who outwits the system	G03, G17, G18	strong, but split by method: forcing a hearing, a hoax, a found secret
overwork nobody sees	G07, G08	strong: 6 stories
a career sacrificed for a marriage, or the reverse	G11	strong: 4 stories, both directions
a newcomer who does not know the unwritten rules	G09	strong

How this corpus differs from Jacobs and Bierce

It has the most stories of any reference set, 35, but they are short: 5 to 13 scenes each, 287 in all. So the bar was kept at three stories per group, and 29 groups cleared it.

It is one small institutional world. Where Bierce recurs on fear and duty, Kipling recurs on posts, patronage, reputation and marriage prospects. The moves show it: relationships and standing dominate, money is light again (17 moves), and the proposed skills are social (tact, cunning) rather than physical. The predicaments transplant readily. "Someone set over you is imposing a change on something they do not understand" is as true of a freight yard as of a cavalry regiment.

A recurring cast inflates recurrence. Mrs Hauksbee appears in four stories, and Mrs Reiver and Strickland each appear in two and are mentioned in a third. A group drawn largely from one recurring character is partly story identity under another name. The groups were checked for this. G02 and G19 each have two Hauksbee stories, but G02 has two other stories and G19 three that have nothing to do with her. G05 has two Strickland stories and two without him. A tool should still track characters who cross stories, as well as the stories themselves.

The narrator's essays open many stories. Kipling often begins with a general reflection: the sheltered boy (14), the creed that nothing matters (16), the rottenness of racing (148), the earnestness that governments reward (197), every man thinking his work the pivot (262). Some become group members, because they name the situation the story then dramatises. Others stay unassigned. They are the scenes a summariser is most likely to turn into topics.

Unassigned (103) is mostly plot mechanics with no second instance: Golightly's ride through the rain (118-121), the opium den's inventory (239-249), the regimental field day (209), the love-charm's history. It also includes three verse-only epigraph scenes (126, 147, 225) and the whole of The Story of Muhammad Din, a quiet sketch of a friendship with a servant's child that recurs nowhere.

How the colonial material was handled

Kipling writes British India with the racial and imperial assumptions of 1888. Several stories turn on them: a convert returning to her people (Lispeth), a mixed-descent signaller whose courage the narrator credits to "white blood" (His Chance in Life), an "impossible" match with a girl of mixed descent (Kidnapped), a love affair across the colour line (Beyond the Pale), and men who have "gone native" (To Be Held for Reference, The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows). The rules applied:

• Predicaments name no race, nationality, caste or religion, and never use them as a role word. They carry the human situation. The signaller is "a lowly junior who takes command of a crisis himself". The impossible match is "someone his whole circle considers impossible". The tenants in Tod's Amendment are "the people affected".
• Groups are formed on that human situation, so these stories sit beside stories with no colonial content. Beyond the Pale shares G23 with a young man in love with a married woman. Kidnapped shares G11 with Miss Youghal's Sais and His Chance in Life.
• Summaries describe the plot plainly and do not adopt the narrator's framing. Where the narration itself carries the prejudice, the summary says so ("the narrator describes, with the prejudice of his day...", scene 70). Epigraphs labelled as proverbs of one faith or people were read as part of the first scene and did not drive any predicament.
• Two groups are the most shaped by the source, and a reviewer should look at them first. G05 "knowing what goes on below" is Kipling's recurring figure of the Englishman who knows the natives, here Strickland. G22 "belonging to neither side" is his anxiety about crossing over. Both are kept because the abstract situation is real and portable: the manager who knows the shop floor, the person who has left their class. But they are where the 1888 framing is closest to the surface.

Known defects

• Scenes 126, 147 and 225 are verse epigraphs only. Scene 183 is a 55-word transition. All four were summarised anyway, and none of them is in a group.
• G23 and G27 each draw exactly half their members from one story (On the Strength of a Likeness and The House of Suddhoo), which is on the recurrence rule's limit.
• The standing of Watches of the Night and The Rout of the White Hussars is a judgement call (see STANDING). Moving Watches to middle changes the stage of G02 and G15, and moving it to low changes G02 and G14. Moving White Hussars changes G14, and G04 as well if it is moved up.