Glossary

37 words this site uses in a way that is not obvious from English. Where a term has a page behind it, the page is linked.

Action kind: The engine-level verb behind a room's action. Two rooms can name and price the same kind differently; only the kind has behaviour. Rooms are data
Beat: The unit of slow time: fifteen seconds, twenty or twenty-four to a party. Heat cools, energy returns, trust drifts and the room decides, only ever on a beat. Beats
Betrayal bar: The probability above which an alliance dies. 0.42 in the pair rooms, 0.45 in the crew room, both measured against the exact wording used. The betrayal bar
Bloc: A two-person alliance: shared heat, mutual cover, split odds on the prize. Only forms if the other person already trusts you. Blocs and crews
Brain: Whatever answers the nine questions: the model, the deterministic house brain, or the chaos brain in village testing. The house brain
Brain board: The full-detail panel showing each of the nine answers with its distribution, plus anything the code overruled.
Cadence: How often one character consults their gut, roughly five seconds for the impulsive and eleven for the patient. A personality output, not a scheduler setting. Two clocks
Chaos brain: A village test brain that answers every question at random. If two villages cannot survive three years of it, a real model will kill them. The chaos brain
Class: What a character is allowed to do. Paired with a rig, it is the whole of their personality. Personality rigs
Coercion: The pass that decides whether the model's answer survives the rules: forbidden moves, gates, confidence floors, empty tanks. Every override is shown. Coercion
Confidence: The probability mass on the move a character picked. A measurement, not a self-report. Distributions
Count: One of three moments in The Syndicate when the cage pays the biggest crew and splits it evenly. The last count pays everything left. How a room decides
Crew: An alliance of any size in The Syndicate. The only route to being paid, and capped at one clear of the field. The crew cap
Crew cap: A crew may only grow to one clear of the field, so recruiting stops at a lead of two. Without it the room settles into eleven people and ten chips each. The crew cap
Detail: The watch mode. Basic is the party; full detail puts the machine on screen beside it. Remembered per browser.
Evaluation model: A model that answers typed questions about one shared state in a single call, each answer a probability distribution. Evaluation models
Focus: The last loud public thing. Heads turn toward it, a ring runs across the floor, and the camera eases onto it until you touch anything. Presentation-only 3D
Heat: How much of the room's attention is on you. On the rooftop it is how the host notices you; in the writers' room it is how you get named. Trust, heat, standing
House brain: A deterministic personality heuristic that answers the same nine questions with synthesised distributions, so the site runs with no key at all. The house brain
Jev: typesafe-ai/jev, the evaluation model Parlour runs on. Billed on input tokens only. Jev
Mask: The face a character wears while acting: warm, sharp, mysterious, useful, wounded. A room declares its own set.
Notable: A villager whose judgement moves other people's days (the reeve, the priest, the constable, the masters), and therefore one the model is asked about on a cadence. A budgeted brain
Objective: The room's rules in plain English, carried in the RoomSpec. The engine never reads it; the UI reads nothing else. Rooms are data
Party file: One JSON document holding the whole night, world plus complete event log, that reads as a transcript and can be resumed. Party files
Pose: The gesture a body makes for an action kind: an open hand for an offer, a hand at the mouth for a rumour. One per kind, exhaustively. Presentation-only 3D
Rig: A character's arithmetic: prices halved or raised, moves forbidden, gates by beat, a confidence floor. Never a paragraph of description. Personality rigs
RoomSpec: A room as plain data: cast, rigs, locations, action menu, two room questions, ticker templates. Rooms are data
Selection: How a room chooses. Tap (positive, from outside), ballot (negative, from inside), or count (payment by coalition size). How a room decides
Skim: The fourteen chips walking out takes off the people you leave. Worth most on the beat before a count. Walking out
Stand-off: How far back people stand in a zone with furniture in the middle. Without it the room stands on the card table. Presentation-only 3D
Standing: What the room thinks of you. Lost per witness when you are turned down in public. Refusals
Tap: The host's choice of somebody for the afterparty, at beats 10, 16 and 20. Positive selection from outside the politics. How a room decides
Ticker: The line-by-line account of the night. Templates filled by the engine, never written by the model.
Tie: One number recording how well two villagers know each other, written at midnight by the day's company and never sent in frames. Ties
Trust: A private, pairwise, asymmetric quantity. The only road to an alliance. Below 0.25 a relationship is functionally over. Trust, heat, standing
Village day: Eight real minutes. Three days to a season, twelve to a year, so winter comes every twelve days. The economy
Yard: The village's building crew. Mends ruins first, then doubled-up families, then upgrades, and must never treat an unbuilt site as a ruin. Land and houses

The long version is at how it works.