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.