skills/ai-film-pipeline-master/references/phase-01-story-generation/secondary-world.md

# The secondary world — an invented world drawn from a real culture

3 cards, all `world.*`.

**This is not the same job as fiction set in a real period.** A novel set in documented Mesopotamia
with invented characters is governed by the canon, which stays open and acts as the floor under the
invention — see
[`../phase-07-image-prompt-engineering/mesopotamia-canon/canon-rules.md`](../phase-07-image-prompt-engineering/mesopotamia-canon/canon-rules.md).
**A wholly invented world that borrows a real culture's visual and material language is a different
piece of work**: there is no period to be accurate to, and the canon stays shut.

**The research gate closes here, correctly, and these cards do not reopen it.** Its own wording
already covers this case — research *"closes in two lines only when the piece is genuinely inventing
— a fiction with no real place, institution, person or claim in it"* — and that is exactly a
secondary world. Nothing below asks anyone to verify an invented thing. What these cards govern is
the opposite risk: an invented world drifting close enough to a real one that the audience starts
reading it as a claim.

---

## The line between borrowing and claiming

### Invent Every Name

**Also called:** the naming discipline, no borrowed proper nouns, the not-list
**What it is:** The rule that makes a secondary world legible as invention: **every proper noun in the piece is invented — every city, river, god, ruler, people, creature and festival — and each invented name is checked against the real name it is deliberately not.** One real proper noun is enough to reframe the whole piece: the moment a real king or a real city appears, the audience stops reading a fantasy and starts reading a claim about history, and every invented thing around it inherits that reading.
**Effect on the audience:** They relax. A world that owns its names is asking to be taken on its own terms, and an audience that knows it is not being told about the real past will follow invention much further. The inverse is the damage: an audience that suspects it is being told something about the real past will fact-check the film instead of watching it.
**Used for and where it works best:** Any invented world drawn from a real culture, and it is cheapest when done once at the brief. **Keep the not-list in writing** — a two-column table, invented name against the real name it is near — because it is the artefact that catches the drift, and the drift is always toward the real name, never away from it. A name that is one letter off a real one is worse than a real one: it reads as a mistake rather than as a choice. **Invent by pattern, not by sound-alike.** Take the *shape* of the real language's names — how a theophoric name is built, how a place-name compounds — and generate new ones inside it, rather than lightly disguising names that exist. The result sounds native and is not a near-miss. **A pattern that is genuinely useful:** invent the name first and then search it, because the failure mode is inventing something real by accident.
**Best in:** formats: Animated Series, Animation Feature, Feature Film, Short Film, Game Narrative, Interactive Fiction, Vertical Micro-Drama, Comics, Novel, Vertical Short-Form (Reels, Shorts, TikTok) | genres: Fantasy and Epic, Myth, Science Fiction, Adventure, Action, Heritage (civilisation-focused)
**Avoid when:** The piece is set in the real world and real names are the point — a documentary, a historical drama, a biopic. There the discipline inverts: names are researched, not invented, and inventing one is the failure.
**Example:**
> *The not-list, from a real production:*
> | In the film | Deliberately not |
> | :--- | :--- |
> | the city of Ashkarum | not Ur, Uruk, Nineveh, Babylon, Kish, Assur |
> | the rivers Enkar and Talu | not the Tigris, Euphrates, Diyala, Karun |
> | the goddess Irzalla | not Inanna, Ishtar, Nammu, Ereshkigal |
> | the Mashur | not a lamassu, not Humbaba, not Anzu |
**Yields to:** The Mesopotamia canon, canon-rules.md section 3b (an authority written in words, not a card id) — A piece set in the real documented period, where names are researched.  
`world.invent_every_name`

---

### How Far the Borrowing Goes

**Also called:** the borrowed material culture, inspired-by limits, the claim line
**What it is:** The judgement about how much of a real culture's *look* an invented world can take before the piece starts reading as a statement about that culture. The useful division is not between much and little: it is between the **material** — reed, mud, bronze, black stone, river light, a stepped mass, seals rolled into wet clay — and the **assertions** — who ruled, what they believed, what happened, what a thing was called and what it meant.
**Effect on the audience:** Taken well, borrowed material reads as a world with a real weight behind it, and it is the single cheapest way to make an invented setting feel inhabited rather than designed. Taken badly, it reads as a real place with the names changed, which invites exactly the scrutiny the invention was supposed to escape.
**Used for and where it works best:** **Take the materials, the light, the mass, the palette and the craft. Invent every proper noun, every deity, every event, every date, and every institution.** That line holds up under pressure and it is easy to apply in a room. Two refinements earn their keep. **A specific real monument is an assertion, not a material** — a recognisable building, relief or object carries its own identity into the frame whatever you call it, so the invented world designs its own and borrows the *construction*, not the landmark. And **the commonest wrong element is still wrong here**: a shape the audience half-remembers, that the real culture never built, is not made acceptable by the world being invented — it is somebody else's mistake arriving by default, and it makes an invented world look researched-badly rather than imagined.
**Best in:** formats: Animated Series, Animation Feature, Feature Film, Short Film, Game Narrative, Comics, Vertical Micro-Drama, Novel | genres: Fantasy and Epic, Myth, Science Fiction, Adventure, Action, Heritage (civilisation-focused)
**Avoid when:** The culture being borrowed from is a living one with a community that reads the work. There the question stops being craft and becomes a question about who is telling it and with whom, which is out of this package's scope per [`../../SKILL.md`](../../SKILL.md) §0 — name it and get the people it is about into the room.
**Yields to:** `world.invent_every_name` — where borrowing a name would carry the look. The material may be borrowed; the noun may not.
`world.borrowed_material_culture`

---

### Keeping It Coherent Past One Piece

**Also called:** the world bible, series consistency, invented-system upkeep
**What it is:** The discipline of holding an invented pantheon, calendar, script, hierarchy and geography stable across more than one piece. A single short film can carry its world in one head. A second piece cannot, and the failure is never a contradiction anybody notices at the time — it is a slow drift where a god acquires a new domain, a month changes length and a rank changes meaning, until the world has no rules and the audience stops believing any of them.
**Effect on the audience:** Consistency is what an invented world has instead of authority. A real setting survives an error because it exists anyway; an invented one is only as solid as its own internal agreement, and a contradiction costs it more than the same contradiction would cost a real setting.
**Used for and where it works best:** From the second piece onward, and it is worth starting on the first. **Write down only what has appeared on screen**, plus the rules that decided it — a bible of everything you *might* use is abandoned by episode three, and a bible of what is already load-bearing is maintained because it is short. Fix these five and the rest follows: what the gods are for, how time is counted, what the script looks like and what it is written on, who outranks whom, and where things are relative to each other. **State the rules of any invented system in the fewest possible words and then obey them without exception** — an audience forgives a strange rule and does not forgive an inconsistent one. And **record what was deliberately left undecided**, because that is what the next writer will invent over.
**Best in:** formats: Animated Series, Web Series and Serialised Short-Form, Game Narrative, Interactive Fiction, Comics, Novel, Documentary Series, Vertical Micro-Drama | genres: Fantasy and Epic, Myth, Science Fiction, Adventure, Action
**Avoid when:** The piece is a one-off with no continuation planned and no world to maintain. Building a bible for it is work that pays out to nobody.
`world.series_coherence`

---

## Coverage

Three cards: what may not be borrowed (`world.invent_every_name`), what may
(`world.borrowed_material_culture`), and how to keep it standing across a series
(`world.series_coherence`).

**Not here, because it lives elsewhere.** Fiction set *inside* the real documented period is
[`canon-rules.md`](../phase-07-image-prompt-engineering/mesopotamia-canon/canon-rules.md) §3b, not
this file. Delivering a world's rules to an audience without stopping the story
is `expo.implication_worldbuilding` and `expo.offscreen_world`. Designing an invented writing system
so it cannot be read as a real one is `textimg.invented_script` in Phase 7.