Status: Phase 0 complete; architecture selected; planning revision ready for review.
Production coding: Not yet authorized. Review this package before preparing the first implementation prompt.

This package contains the current product requirements, final Phase 0 architecture decisions, detailed subsystem designs, acceptance tests, research evidence, and the production milestone plan for the local-only interactive-story project.

Current Decision

Phase 0A static research and Phase 0B local validation are complete.

The production starting point is:

Fork AI-DnD at upstream commit d72f7c1bda0f34fccd84afb7a25c34eb01c901de.

The selection is based on measured Phase 0B behavior, not feature count. AI-DnD already contains the highest-value structural machinery: browser UI, FastAPI service boundary, SQLite persistence, parent-linked story history, alternate takes, branch-aware state snapshots, local Ollama operation, branch-scoped memory, prompt/context inspection, streaming, export/import, and a substantial automated test suite.

The selected composition of ideas is:

AI-DnD production base
  + ai-adventure state/event/commit/checkpoint/privacy patterns
  + Open Dungeon story-reading and future-media UX patterns
  + Chronicler memory-authority concepts
  + Interactive Fiction Framework canon/validation concepts
  + Gamentic provider-neutral media concepts

This is not a repository merge. AI-DnD is the ownership center. Other projects are implementation references only unless a later milestone explicitly reimplements a compatible idea.

Phase 0B Findings That Changed the Plan

Phase 0B confirmed the fork choice while correcting several Phase 0A assumptions:

AI-DnD's shipped Undo was destructive and had no Redo.
A disposable spike proved non-destructive head-cursor Undo/Redo in three backend files while preserving branch-scoped memory isolation.
A new continuation written after Undo can fork from the moved-back head while retaining the abandoned future.
AI-DnD's current relative-delta world-state protocol can produce semantically wrong state under realistic context even when the proposal is syntactically valid.
Production narrative state will therefore use explicit typed events/absolute assignments inspired by ai-adventure rather than AI-DnD's relative-delta protocol.
AI-DnD requires offline hardening: tiktoken attempts a first-use CDN fetch and the SPA requests Google Fonts at runtime.
AI-DnD's export format must preserve the active head position; otherwise export/import can silently redo an undone story.
AI-DnD Story Cards are not a sufficient imported-knowledge store because they are not designed for the required classification, provenance, chunking, and lineage semantics.
Open Dungeon remains useful for UX/media ideas but is no longer a serious production-fork candidate.
ai-adventure is not the production base but is the strongest implementation reference for authoritative typed state events, head movement, checkpoints, replay, and narrow local-only behavior.

See PHASE-0B-RECOMMENDATION.md for the coding agent's evidence. That report is retained as research evidence; the planning documents in this package record the decisions made after reviewing it.

Document Authority

Use the documents in this order when requirements appear to conflict:

SPECIFICATION.md — product requirements and required behavior.
Detailed behavior/design documents:
- STORY-BRANCH-SEMANTICS.md
- CONTEXT-AND-MEMORY.md
- IMPORTED-KNOWLEDGE-DESIGN.md
- SECURITY-THREAT-MODEL.md
- MEDIA-EXTENSION-CONTRACT.md
- BROWSER-UX-SPEC.md
- DATA-MODEL.md
V1-ACCEPTANCE-TESTS.md — observable pass/fail contract.
TECHNICAL-DESIGN.md — selected implementation architecture.
Foundational ADRs (001-...md through the current ADR set).
BUILD-MILESTONES.md — implementation sequence; it does not override product behavior.
Phase 0 research reports — evidence and historical findings.

Candidate repositories and research reports are not specifications. In particular, ai-adventure is an implementation reference for selected patterns; its behavior does not override this package.

Foundational Decisions

The following are settled for v1:

browser-first UI,
local-only runtime across user-controlled local infrastructure,
Ollama inference with same-host loopback as default and explicitly configured trusted-LAN inference supported,
single-user deployment,
AI-DnD production base at the pinned Phase 0B commit,
application-owned authoritative state,
complete retained transcript/history,
simple user-facing Undo/Redo/Retry/Save Point semantics,
non-destructive head-cursor history internally,
new write after moving backward creates a new continuation while retaining the old future,
abandoned history is retained and marked disposable; no automatic cleanup is required in v1,
named checkpoints remain until explicitly deleted,
genre-agnostic core state,
explicit typed narrative-state events/absolute assignments rather than ambiguous relative deltas,
hybrid state model: validated events plus state snapshots/cache,
branch/lineage-safe summaries and memories,
imported knowledge is a separate first-class subsystem rather than an extension of AI-DnD Story Cards,
knowledge classes: Canon / Reference / Inspiration,
local lexical retrieval plus local semantic retrieval where practical,
prompt/context provenance and inspection,
export/import must preserve active branch and active head position, including an undone position,
no cloud/Internet inference, telemetry, automatic web retrieval, remote runtime assets, shell/MCP/general plugin execution,
LAN inference is distinct from LAN exposure of the storyteller UI/API; the latter is not required for v1,
future local image/video/audio/TTS/STT support remains optional and decoupled from the story engine.

Phase 0 Status

Complete

candidate discovery and triage,
static architecture/privacy/licensing review,
local clone/build/test validation,
real Ollama testing,
offline/network observation,
AI-DnD strip-down/entanglement checks,
Open Dungeon history-retrofit analysis,
ai-adventure Ollama/service-boundary checks,
AI-DnD non-destructive Undo/Redo spike,
referee/state-protocol follow-up,
export/import head-position follow-up,
Story Card lineage review,
Postgres removability review,
production fork decision,
production architecture decision.

Deferred to implementation/release validation

These do not block the architecture decision:

comparative recommendation of narrator/state models for real users,
multi-hour/100-turn long-run behavior,
detailed concurrency behavior beyond the single-user turn lock,
actual future image/video/TTS/STT provider integration,
abandoned-history cleanup UI/policy (not required in v1).

Workflow From Here

Phase 0 research and spikes         COMPLETE
        |
        v
Architecture/fork decision         COMPLETE
        |
        v
Planning package revision          CURRENT REVIEW
        |
        v
Approve planning package
        |
        v
Prepare one implementation prompt
for Production Milestone 1
        |
        v
Implement and review milestone-by-milestone

Stop Rule

Do not begin production coding from this package yet.

The current action is to review the planning changes. No replacement Codex prompt has been prepared in this revision.

README.md

Adventure Storyteller Planning Package