M9: a campaign you can actually get back

A campaign could already be exported and imported. What could not survive the
trip was everything that explains it: the state events behind the authoritative
document, the prompt each turn was actually given, the passages it was shown,
the summaries that carry long-story continuity, and which take belonged to which
turn. An imported campaign could be read and could no longer say why it was what
it was — and a manual correction, the one state change no narration explains,
was indistinguishable from something the story had established.

The bundle is now `ai-dnd-adventure-v3`, and the version is the design rather
than a side effect. Everything added here could have been another optional key,
the way persona, Save Points, narrative state and imported knowledge each were.
That mechanism stops working at exactly this addition: a v2 file with no prompt
provenance is ambiguous between "written before M9" and "written by M9 from a
campaign that has none", and those are different facts about a campaign. A
version number is how a recovery file states what it was capable of recording.
v1 and v2 still import, and every seam from pre-active-head onward is tested for
the rule that an older file is never reinterpreted under a newer assumption.

Two categories became three. "Chosen travels, derived is recomputed" was enough
until stored prompts had to be decided: they are derived, and they must travel
anyway. The test that separates evidence from cache is not "could this be
recomputed" but "would a recomputation answer the same question" — a rebuilt
search index answers the same question, a rebuilt prompt says what the turn
would be told *now*, which is the opposite of what the inspector is for.

Also here: a real SQLite backup, through the online backup API rather than a
file copy, taken while the application is running and verified before it is
kept; story cards settled as compatibility-only legacy data and taken out of the
narrator's prompt, because they were the untracked path around knowledge
authority that IMPORTED-KNOWLEDGE-DESIGN §73 already forbade; and no schema
change at all, proved against a database M8's own code wrote.

Three defects, found by running the milestone's own tests rather than by reading
them. Deleting a campaign leaked its FTS index rows, and SQLite then handed the
freed ids to the next source imported into any campaign, which failed with an
integrity error that Reindex could not repair — both ends are closed, and a
database already carrying the damage now repairs itself. An imported node with
no state snapshot was being stamped with the campaign's head state, so an Undo
to turn 2 showed what the story knew at turn 20. And the snapshot relink did not
persist at all, because it mutated a dict in place on a column SQLAlchemy tracks
by assignment: it looked correct in memory and wrote the wrong ids to disk.

Carrying per-turn prompts looked like it would halve the length of campaign that
can be restored. Measured — and after compressing them inside the file —
everything M9 added costs 12% of it: the import ceiling moves from about 318
turns to about 279, against a 100-turn certification target. The dominant cost
is not M9's at all. The per-position narrative state document is 74% of a
bundle, and v2 already carried it.

Backend 1,102 passed / 14 skipped / 0 failed. Frontend 145 passed. Lint,
production build and Docker build clean. Verified across two server processes
with two data directories, and in a real browser against a real narrator.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Qyn3oRd4D6pi72nKBG725B

planning/IMPORTED-KNOWLEDGE-DESIGN.md

@@ -1110,6 +1110,47 @@ Normal imported files are campaign-level source material and need not inherit st
 
 Story Cards may remain as an inherited authored-rule/lore primitive during migration if useful, but they must not become an alternate untracked path around the new knowledge authority/provenance rules.
 
+### Settled in M9 (2026-09-07): compatibility-only, and out of the prompt
+
+M8 removed the Story Card browser editor and left the question open; the M9
+brief asked for it to be decided. The finding was that story cards **were** the
+alternate untracked path the paragraph above forbids, and not in principle: a
+keyword-matched card was injected into the narrator's prompt as
+`World Lore: <entry>`, taking up to 40% of what was left after the imported
+knowledge had been placed, with
+
+- no class, so nothing framed how far the narrator could rely on it;
+- no visibility, so no narrator-only distinction existed;
+- no source, no hash and no lifecycle, so there was nothing to disable;
+- no browser surface after M8, so a reader could neither see nor switch it off;
+- no row in the context inspector, which renders `knowledge` and never rendered
+  `cards`;
+
+and competing with imported Canon for one budget, which is the arrangement M7
+spent a milestone separating.
+
+**The decision, and it is the smallest change that closes it:**
+
+| | |
+| --- | --- |
+| New export | carries them, unchanged, under `storyCards` |
+| Legacy import | accepted, unchanged, from every format version |
+| Normal narration | **no longer reached.** The `world_lore` section is gone |
+| Re-export | carries them again, so a round trip destroys nothing |
+
+Nothing is deleted. The rows stay, the `/api/story-cards` endpoints stay, and
+`memorybank.cast_brief` still reads them as the **summariser's character
+roster** — that names who is on stage so a memory says "Aldric" rather than
+"he", never reaches the narrator, and every memory written from it is
+authority-classified by the application afterwards. The `cards` key stays in the
+context report and is now always empty for a new turn, because M9 made
+historical snapshots portable and an old turn's record must go on saying that
+story cards were included.
+
+A campaign that wants the narrator to know something imports it as Canon,
+Reference or Inspiration, where it is classified, inspectable, disableable and
+attributable — which is what §73 asks for.
+
 ### Retrieval implementation direction
 
 Use: