Kaysser Kayyali
50d8deab55
Research into Cognee's actual API (docs.cognee.ai) confirmed the docs made a load-bearing false claim: that the Lore Engine 'inherits and generalizes' a Contradiction node, get_contradictions tool, 8 inherited MCP tools, and neo4j-init.cypher from the substrate. Cognee ships NONE of that. Cognee provides DataPoint + custom graph models + remember/recall + a Cypher/APOC graph-rule pattern. So: - Slice 2 (consistency) is a from-scratch BUILD, not a generalization - Categories A/B/D (Contradiction/Anachronism/Orphan) are ours - Category C (declarative OntologyRule) rides Cognee's Cypher pattern - '8 inherited tools' -> '8 base tools' (one wraps cognee.recall) - '7 inherited labels' -> '7 base types' (Lore Engine originals on DataPoint) Fixed across 04-consistency, 01-ontology, 05-mcp-tools, 00-overview, 09-roadmap, 15-related-work, 16-comparison. Historical GraphMCP comparisons left intact. Added CONTEXT.md (glossary) — the grill-with-docs skill mandates it and 6 ADRs' worth of resolved terms (Lineage/Faction/Region/Plane/ LoreSource/extraction+source confidence/disputed edge/retcon/Setting/ ConsistencyRun/Cognee) had no single home. New readers no longer mine ADR prose for the vocabulary. Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Lore Engine
A Neo4j-backed world ontology and modular MCP tool surface that lets an LLM reason about a high-fantasy world with historical accuracy, temporal consistency, and macro↔micro association.
Built on top of the existing GraphMCP-Example stack (Neo4j + Redis Streams + Go MCP server), with extensions for the things a world needs that a message archive does not.
v1.2 (current): adds first-class Plane and Setting graph nodes with REFLECTS / LAYER_OF / ADJACENT_TO / ACCESSIBLE_VIA relations. Replaces the v1.1 flat world_id strings with the model from 17-planes.md. The v1.1 extension model (DomainEntity, multi-store) is unchanged.
v1.1: adds polymorphic DomainEntity extension model, multi-store storage strategy, and a microservice decomposition plan. See 11-extensibility.md, 12-storage-strategy.md, 13-microservice-decomposition.md, 14-examples.md.
Read in this order
| # | Doc | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| 00 | Overview | Goals, design philosophy, what we inherit vs. what we add |
| 01 | Ontology | Node labels, edge types, properties — the full world model |
| 02 | Time Model | Eras, calendars, temporal validity, "was X true at time T?" |
| 03 | Macro↔Micro Association | How lineage chains, location hierarchies, and faction membership bind micro details to macro context |
| 04 | Consistency Engine | Rules, anachronism detection, contradiction pattern extensions |
| 05 | MCP Tool Catalog | One section per tool — purpose, signature, returns, when to use |
| 06 | Ingestion Pipelines | How to ingest structured lore (timelines, family trees, gazetteers, bestiary) and free prose |
| 07 | Reasoning Harness | LLM prompt patterns + tool-chaining recipes for the most important question types |
| 08 | Architecture | System diagram, data flow, service layout |
| 09 | Roadmap | Phased build plan — MVP first, then layers |
| 10 | Critique | Self-pressure-test: what could break, where this could fail |
| 11 | Extensibility | v1.1 — polymorphic DomainEntity + TypeTemplate model. New domains as YAML, not code. |
| 12 | Storage Strategy | v1.1 — which data goes in Neo4j, Postgres, pgvector, Redis, S3. Why and when. |
| 13 | Microservice Decomposition | v1.1 — split the mcp-server monolith. Macro/micro iteration speeds. |
| 14 | Worked Examples | v1.1 — three end-to-end examples: thieves-guild missions, war campaigns, black-market economy. |
| 15 | Related Work | Survey of GraphRAG, Cognee, LightRAG, Generative Agents, IVIE, WikiChat, TKG methods, CoK. With stars, citations, and direct quotes from abstracts. |
| 16 | Comparison & Critical Thinking | Head-to-head with GraphRAG, Cognee, Generative Agents. Honest assessment of where the Lore Engine is worse. Strategic recommendation. |
| 17 | Planes of Existence | v1.2 — first-class Setting and Plane graph nodes, the plane taxonomy (material / reflection / transit / outer / demiplane / etc.), the four plane-relation edge types, and the migration from the v1.1 world_id string. |
The 30-second pitch
A Lore Engine has four jobs, and only four:
- Remember. Capture the world as a typed, temporal, source-attributed graph — not a bag of facts.
- Scope. When the LLM asks about Aldric, it gets Aldric's context — not the world's. When it asks about Aldric-in-340-TA, it gets the right slice of his life.
- Reason. Provide tools that compose:
was_allied_with+at_time+as_far_as= "Were House Vyr and the Crimson Pact allied in 340 TA?" - Verify. Flag anachronisms, contradictions, and missing lineages before the LLM hallucinates around them.
Everything else is implementation detail.
Status
Design phase. No code yet. This repo is the design contract — read it, red-team it, then we build.
The underlying graph infrastructure (Neo4j, Redis, MCP transport) is already production in GraphMCP-Example. The Lore Engine adds ontology, time model, consistency rules, and ~12 new MCP tools on top of that substrate.