Terminology Decisions

Confirmed: Velasian (people and culture); Valasia (empire name) Retired: Velarian; Valeria

Velarian was the earlier form. Velasian was adopted for distinctiveness and to avoid the Valerian/Valeria confusion with the empire name. The empire is Velasia; the people are Velasian. These are distinct terms and must not be conflated. All variants commencing "Val-" should be challenged, but assumed to be incorrect.

Confirmed: Skeld (people); Skeldic (adjective); Skald (saga-poets) Retired: Skand; Skands; Skandic

Skand/Skandic was retired to avoid the obvious real-world Scandinavian echo, which was considered too direct. Skeld provides the required cultural distance while remaining phonologically adjacent enough to carry the intended Norse analogue register.

Skald is retained as a distinct term for Skeld saga-speaking poets and storytellers. It is NOT a variant of Skeld. Visual check required on any find-and-replace involving either term.

Confirmed: Hillfolk / Hill Folk Retired: Hellfolk

Hellfolk was a transcription error that propagated through early documents. Hillfolk is correct. The term is Velasian administrative coinage for the Cwym/Bryt/Celt grouping and is used ironically by the peoples it describes.

When spoken in-game or in-rules, "Hillfolk" is terminology of characters and note. For rules and lore that speaks of the Cwym, Bryt and Celt as a separate culture, "Hill Folk" is more appropriate.

"Lord Gwyllim has a low opinion of the Hillfolk in general"

"When considering daily progress in Hill Folk lands, the lack of maintained tracks is a reason to reduce the daily range by 60%"

Confirmed: Open Call Retired: flash-binding; flash-bind

Flash-binding was the earlier term for unmediated oath-binding mechanisms. Open Call was adopted as it describes the category (an attention mechanism) without implying a specific mechanism or the instantaneous connotation of "flash." An Open Call is not a binding mechanism — it does not guarantee acceptance.

Confirmed: The Felafoy (colloquial); Velaþoiāän / Velathoiaan (Imperial Velasian) Rejected: The Ideal Lands; The Far Shore; The Reaches; The Steady Lands

The Felafoy is a significant corruption of the archaic Velasian name Velaþoiāän. The corruption path runs through oral transmission and poor literacy: the initial V shifts to F (a natural labial drift), the thorn collapses, and the diphthong cluster flattens. The result is phonetically warm and aspirational — a place people dream of reaching — while the Velasian origin is entirely obscured. That obscuring is intentional in-world; the identification of Felafoy with Velaþoiāän is plausible and unconfirmed, and discovery of the connection is a meaningful moment in play.

The name is used without "islands" or any geographic qualifier. It stands alone: "crossing to the Felafoy," "the Felafoy shore."

The name implies the site may have been an archaic Velasian outpost or colony — the place-name carries the civilisation’s name within it. The reason for abandonment is unknown.

The Ideal Lands was the original name. It was retired because "Ideal" carries mythic connotation — implying a place that may not exist or is perfected beyond reality.

The Steady Lands succeeded it but has itself now been deprecated. It was entirely practical — steady describes weather, wind, a helm, and works at every social register — but it is not aspirational. "I want to go to the Steady Lands" is weak. "I want to reach the Felafoy" is not.

The Grey Havens connotation ruled out anything with "haven," "shore," "harbour," or "rest" — all of which drift toward the elegiac departure feeling Tolkien owns.

The double-dotted vowels in the archaic form are rendered with macron-umlaut combination (āä). The þ collapses to "th" in modern transcription: Velathoiaan.

Confirmed: Velasia (empire name) Retired: Valeria; Valasia

Valeria and Valasia were the earlier empire names. Retired alongside Velarian (see above) to resolve the Velarian/Valeria confusion. Velasia pairs cleanly with Velasian without creating ambiguity.

Confirmed: Session Journal Retired: Session Retro

Session Retro was the earlier term. Session Journal is the confirmed replacement. The Rutter is the accumulated body of Session Journal entries.

Confirmed: Rutter (accumulated journal); Rutter Keeping (formal name for session-end completion); the Retro (informal equivalent of Rutter Keeping) Keeper of the Rutter — the person who writes a given session’s entry.

The Rutter is not a single document but an accumulating record — the sum of all Session Journal entries for a campaign. Rutter Keeping is the formal name for the session-end process of completing it. The Retro survives as the informal in-table term for the same process.

Confirmed: BCF — Basic, Competent, Fluent Retired: B/C/M — Basic, Competent, Master

The advancement states for advanceable competencies are Basic, Competent, and Fluent. Master was the earlier third state; Fluent replaces it. The three states are qualitative descriptors of demonstrated capability, not mechanical modifiers to rolls.

Confirmed: Competency Profile Confirmed atomic unit: Competency

The Competency Profile is the umbrella term for all character capabilities beyond Ability Scores: innate background, BCF-tracked, class-derived, and granted. Replaces skills language throughout the corpus. A single item within the profile is a Competency.

Confirmed: Advanceable (competencies that can advance through BCF); Fixed (competencies that do not advance) Retired: Innate/Binary distinction

Fixed replaces the former Innate/Binary distinction for non-advancing competencies. Advanceable and Fixed are the two competency types.

Confirmed: Ability Scores — collective term for STR/INT/WIS/DEX/CON/CHA Notes: Ability Scores in Oath-Bound function as strong indicators, not hard gates. Prime Requisite is excluded from the corpus entirely — do not use or encode.

Confirmed: Roles and Rulings Ahead of Rolls Retired: Roles Before Rolls

Roles Before Rolls was the earlier form. It was retired because, while the alliteration is clean, the phrasing is reductive — it reads as dismissive of mechanical resolution rather than correctly ordering the three elements. The revised form names all three explicitly: character roles, in-the-moment rulings, and dice rolls.

"Rulings" is preferred over "rules" because a ruling is made at the table, collaboratively, in response to fiction. Rules are handed down; rulings are arrived at. The distinction reflects the cooperative, fiction-first spirit of the design. The hierarchy is clear — roles and rulings come first — but rolls are acknowledged as a real and valued part of play.

Confirmed: Agent domains — formal collective term for the four character type categories: Martial, Divine, Arcane, Gray.

Every actor declares one agent domain. The four domains correspond approximately to AD&D class archetypes but the match is not exact and should not be over-specified. The domains are organizational categories for the Oath-Bound system, not a direct mapping from vanilla AD&D.

Confirmed: Actor (any player character or NPC); Exceptional Actor (a PC specifically)

"Actor" is the general term for any participant in the fiction — PC or NPC. "Exceptional Actor" designates a PC: the exceptionalism recognizes that the character is explicitly player-controlled, not that they are more powerful or narratively significant than NPCs.

Confirmed: cast Retired: flavor (in this specific context)

"Flavor" was used informally to describe the qualitative variation of nwyf — the characteristic quality that distinguishes one working from another of the same formal type. It was retired because it implies cosmetic or optional variation, when the cast of a nwyf working is a structural property arising from the friction that produces it.

"Cast" was adopted because it does double duty that no other candidate term manages.

First, it carries the generative sense: as metal takes the cast of a mold, nwyf takes the cast of the practitioner, the method, and the moment. The quality is structural, not decorative — it is the shape given by the process that produced it.

Second, and equally important, "cast" carries a perceptual sense that sits on the same plane as color. When a surface has a cast to it — a bluish cast, a grey cast — you perceive a quality that modifies what you are seeing without being easily isolated or named. You know something is present before you can describe it. This is precisely how nwyf variation presents to observers, including practitioners: it registers before it can be articulated.

Confirmed: fiddlestick

A physical object used in oath administration, broken at the moment of clean instantiation as a marker that the binding has occurred. The fiddlestick does not cause the binding. It marks it. Its failure to break signals that something in the ritual was wrong and the binding did not occur.

The fiddlestick is the final confirmation act of a successful oath administration — "the final stop on the final sentence on the final scroll." In thirty years of practice, a senior Officiating Priest reports it has never failed to break at a clean instantiation.

The fiddlestick is an oath administration element, not a miracle component. It belongs to the vestibulum process and the Officiating Priest’s toolkit. It does not appear in the miracle corpus or the miracle bands documentation.

Confirmed: essence
Retired: soul (in this cosmological context)

"Soul" imports real-world religious connotation that Oath-Bound does not share and cannot control. "Essence" carries the required meaning without the baggage: the intrinsic thing that makes a person who they are, that takes oaths, that belongs in the covenant model, that moves on at death and should not be retained on the prime material plane.

Essence is the correct term in all registers — GM Bible, lore, player-facing, UO — when referring to this concept. "Soul" may appear in legacy documents; replace on any active editing pass.

Derivative constructions confirmed for use:

Confirmed: xenos
No prior term — new coinage from Velasian vocabulary

Xenos describes any being formed outside the prime material, in a place where wyrd — and therefore the oath economy — does not exist. The term is Velasian in origin, preserved in Foundation theological writing and arcane institutional usage. It is not common vocabulary.

The term is relational, not geographical. Xenos does not describe where a being comes from in any spatial sense. It describes a category of relationship to wyrd: constitutively outside the oath economy, not equipped for covenant participation, not native to the nwyf-substrate of the prime material.

Cosmological alienness is the descriptor for the condition itself — a xenos being’s constitutive foreignness to the prime material. This is a categorical difference, not a position on a continuum.

Register restriction: divine actors, arcane practitioners, and obscure academics only. Common usage describes the same beings by appearance or reputation without the cosmological framework. A speaker who uses "xenos" correctly is marking formal theological or arcane education.

Confirmed: oikos
No prior term — new coinage from Velasian vocabulary

Oikos is the counterpart to xenos: beings whose essence-structure is native to the prime material, who can participate in the oath economy, who are constitutively of this plane. The term is Velasian in origin, same provenance and register restrictions as xenos.

Oikos and xenos are a paired system. Every being in the setting can be assessed: xenos or oikos. The answer determines their relationship to the oath economy, to wyrd, and to the work of divine and arcane actors.

Note: oikos is the root of "economy" — the beings of the oikos are those for whom the covenant model, the oath economy, was built. This resonance is not coincidental but need not be explained in-text.

Register restriction: as xenos above.

Confirmed: purchase density (as a descriptor for the nwyf threshold at which arcane workings gain traction on xenos beings)

Low-band arcane workings pass through xenos beings without interaction — the nwyf concentration is insufficient to find purchase on something not natively embedded in the oikos nwyf-substrate. This is non-interaction, not resistance. At sufficient nwyf density — upper bands, realistically Major Workings and above — the concentration reaches purchase density and the working has traction.

The threshold is environmental in effect. A working dense enough to affect a xenos being affects everything present in the space. These are not precision instruments.

Confirmed: cooperative casting
Confirmed constraint: multiplicative effect requires matched cast and same spell

Two or more arcane practitioners working the same spell simultaneously produce a multiplicative nwyf output when their cast is matched. Mismatched cast does not multiply and may interfere or produce unpredictable results.

The same-spell requirement is the practical expression of cast-matching: the spell structure shapes the nwyf, and two practitioners working the same structure are more likely to produce compatible cast nwyf than those working different ones.

Cooperative casting is rare. The conditions required — matched cast, coordination, mutual trust — mean it is historically notable when it occurs. It is not a routine tactical option.

Confirmed framework: wyrd as a bundle of threads, each thread a cosmic possibility with intimate interactions with adjacent threads, following complex trajectories not bound by space or time.

Spatial cosmological models — adjacent planes, layered structures, mapped borders — are oikic category errors. Xenos and oikos are relational categories, not locations. Planar boundaries are wyrd intersection points, not spatial borders; the intersection creates distortion that xenos beings can perceive and oikic beings cannot meaningfully frame.

Divine manipulation of wyrd works by teasing individual threads from the skein and acting on them, producing systemic trajectory change. This is skilled craft, not force. The momentum of the skein is immense; major trajectory changes require working against compounded wyrd momentum, which is why significant miracles — including resurrection of major figures — are immensely difficult and carry unpredictable downstream consequences.

This framework is GM Bible and design-side register. Player-facing content describes the same phenomena through the language of divine action, divine favor, and what the gods notice.