Mechanics ↔ Lore Fit — Classes, Houses, and the 18 Combinations¶

Status: Proposed — not implemented. Written 2026-08-28. Note (2026-08-30): the class half of this file maps the old five onto the Spire's throughput. The live class proposal is docs/proposals/four-crafts.md (four crafts, not five). The House half — each mechanic is the price of a grief — is unchanged. Owner: delan Scope: does each mechanic serve the fiction, and does each legal pairing work? Canon boundary: this document proposes. It does not rule. The class-origin question in §2 needs a bible sitting (story/claude.md is binding — a decision does not exist until it is written into the bible and logged in canon-decisions.md). Nothing under story/ was touched.

The finding in one line¶

The Houses are load-bearing fiction. The classes are floating genre archetypes. One half of the identity system is welded to the story and the other half is not attached to it at all.

Evidence, from a full read of story/bible/:

Term	Appearances in the bible
Valerii, Axiom, Censors, Syndicate, Salvari	Dedicated file each, plus voice sheets, grief, founding crime, doctrine
Drifter, Conduit, Machinist, Catalyst	Zero. Not mentioned anywhere.
Anchor	Only as a systems word — anchoring math, Anchor node type — never as a class

This matters more than it looks, because the demo's whole thesis is sorting. The orientation reads the player and assigns them a dogma. But the player picks a class too — and in the fiction there is currently no institution, no crew, no discipline, and no reason that produces a Drifter. Half the sorting has nothing to sort on.

1. The Houses — how each mechanic is its doctrine¶

These are excellent, and the reason is structural: each House's mechanic is the price of its own grief. That is why the "House = price" framing landed so cleanly — it was already true.

House	The grief (bible)	The doctrine	The mechanic	Why it is the lore
Valerii	Containment failed; the watch never ended. "The wall is not their strategy. The wall is their mourning."	Compliance	Stasis / Drag, paid on clean turns	The House pays you for stillness because stillness is how it grieves. Freezing an enemy is a funeral observance. You are rewarded for nothing changing — the exact shape of their mourning
the Axiom	Verification's premise collapsed. "Two plus two survived the end of the universe without a scratch."	Certainty	Scry 1, paid for being right	Terrified people who moved truth somewhere reality can't reach. The mechanic rewards prediction confirmed, not information gathered. Their legitimacy rests on one unverifiable claim, and their cards pay out only on verified ones
the Syndicate	None — they saw opportunity where others saw tragedy	Wealth = power	Pay HP, receive Gold	The only House whose doctrine is a single equation, and the only mechanic that converts your body into currency. Vex refined the wreckage; you refine yourself
the Censors	Denial, mechanised. The dead world is archived, not gone	The record outranks the world	Recall the discard at +1 cost	The discard pile is the past. Retrieving it costs more than living it did — the House that annihilated one record now overpays to preserve every other. The +1 is the penance
the Salvari	Not for the old world — for each other, one lost crewmate at a time	Repair as mourning	When your own gear breaks, you get paid	Alden's repair program. The only House that profits from its own damage, run by people the Spire discarded. Breaking your Block to keep going is the founder's entire life

Every one passes the test: delete the lore and the mechanic stops making sense. That is the bar, and the Houses clear it.

The sharpest pair. Valerii and Salvari are mechanical inverses — one hoards Block and is paid for keeping it, the other destroys Block and is paid for losing it. The bible already says this in prose: "The dark mirror of the Valerii: both houses protect a population. One charges compliance. This one charges nothing." The mechanics found that opposition independently. Do not soften it.

2. The classes — the gap, and a proposal¶

Class mechanics are mechanically strong and fictionally unattached. Anchor accumulates, Drifter marks, Conduit borrows, Machinist deploys, Catalyst transforms — all readable, none explained. Nothing in the world produces them.

The proposal: classes are your relationship to the machine, not to a doctrine¶

The bible gives the Spire exactly one throughput: chaotic possibility in, one reality out, and 20-decoupling.md names its stages — "the chaotic intake from the cosmos, the conversion process, the refined output, the energies released in conversion." Each of the four heads tapped a different stage.

That is a five-slot structure already in canon, and the classes fit it:

Class	Stage of the throughput	The fiction it would gain
Catalyst	The chaotic intake	Works with possibility before it is converted. Mutation is unconverted chaos, still deciding what it is
Anchor	Containment of the intake	Holds reality still. "Anchoring" is already the bible's word for fixing which past happened — Density is that word made physical
Drifter	The conversion — the anchoring itself	Marks an echo and forces it to collapse into one outcome. Echo-Lock at exactly five is an anchoring event, performed by hand
Conduit	The refined output and its distribution	Carries power they cannot hold. Overload is a distribution system with no regulator — borrowing against a supply that already failed once
Machinist	The machine's body	"Pipes, mounts, coolant, bearings, and the back doors." Maintenance physics, exactly as the bible defines the order

This does three things at once:

It gives House and class orthogonal axes. House = which doctrine claimed you. Class = which part of the machine shaped you. Two independent questions, so the sorting has two dimensions instead of one and a half.
It explains the ban matrix without a rules lawyer. Drifter is banned from Valerii because Containment's entire purpose is to prevent uncontrolled anchoring; a Valerii Drifter is a heresy, not a balance decision. Conduit is banned from Salvari because Maintenance knows what unregulated distribution did to the Spire.
It costs no new lore. Every element is already ratified. It is a mapping, not an invention.

The Salvari hook already exists. 50-salvari.md: "Crews are specialized — their specialties map to the classes a Salvari player can be." That is the one place the bible reaches for classes, and it is waiting for exactly this.

Recommend: add to the Bible Session Agenda (WO-A1). This is a story ruling, not a design call, and it should be made in a sitting and logged — not decided in a proposal document.

3. The 18 combinations¶

The test for a pairing is not "is it strong." It is: does the House's price actually bite on this class's engine? Three outcomes:

Gift — the House pays for what the class already does. No decision to make. Boring.
Trade — the price conflicts with the engine. You must choose, every turn. This is the target.
Dead — the price cannot be triggered or cannot be paid. Broken.

	Valerii · obedience	Axiom · commitment	Syndicate · blood	Censors · the present	Salvari · attrition
Anchor · accumulate	GIFT ⚠	Trade	TRADE ★	Trade	TRADE ★★
Drifter · mark to 5	banned	TRADE ★★	Trade	TRADE ★	DEAD ⚠⚠
Conduit · debt	TRADE ★	Trade	Trade ⚠	Trade	banned
Machinist · board	GIFT ⚠	Trade	banned	banned	TRADE ★★
Catalyst · transform	banned	banned	Trade ⚠	banned	TRADE ★

★ = works well · ★★ = showcase · ⚠ = needs attention

The three showcases¶

Machinist + Salvari — the junkyard. The class builds machines; the House pays you when they die. Every Construct is both an asset and a payout. Thematically it is Alden's repair program staffed by people the Spire threw away, and it is the cleanest weld of engine to price in the matrix. Trailer material.

Drifter + Axiom — the premeditated execute. Scry lets you plan the exact turn the mark hits five. The Axiom's price — commit to the sequence — is precisely what the Drifter needs to pay anyway. Thematically both are about collapsing uncertainty into one true outcome: the Axiom verifies which past happened, the Drifter makes it happen by hand.

Anchor + Salvari — vent by shattering. The contradiction is the design. Anchor's engine hoards Block; Salvari pays you for losing it. The resolution is Tonnage Verdict and Event-Line Breaker — cards that consume Block as damage — so the House pays you for cashing out rather than for being broken. You get rewarded for spending your armour on purpose. This is the most interesting cell in the table and it emerged from the fiction, not from tuning.

The three problems¶

Drifter + Salvari — DEAD. Salvari's price triggers when your Block breaks. Drifter phases instead of blocking and carries almost no Block. The passive will rarely fire, so the House contributes nothing. This is a genuine hole, not a weak pairing. Fix: extend Salvari's trigger beyond Block — when your Block breaks or you lose a card to Exhaust or Redact**, you get paid. That reaches Drifter, keeps the Catalyst pairing, and stays inside "something of yours breaks."

Anchor + Valerii — GIFT, and it is your poster combo. Anchor naturally takes clean turns; that is its whole engine. So Valerii's obedience price costs an Anchor nothing and the House becomes free value. The most photographable pairing is the least interesting decision. Fix: the Valerii passive must demand more than not being hit. Calm Doctrine's model — pay in Energy for a clean turn — is better than Block because an Anchor already has Block, but it still does not bite. Consider paying only when the enemy was frozen or dragged, which requires the player to actually enforce compliance rather than just survive.

Machinist + Valerii — GIFT, and it turtles. Constructs plus Stasis produces a board where nothing happens to anyone. Both halves reward stalling and neither creates a clock. Fix: a Kill Switch — spend a Construct for immediate effect — so the pairing has a way to convert its stall into a win.

Two watch items. Conduit + Syndicate and Catalyst + Syndicate both bill in the same currency the class already spends: Conduit pays HP through Burnout, Catalyst self-harms to gamble, and the Syndicate charges HP on top. These are Trades, but they are two meters in one currency, and the evaluation flagged the Catalyst one as the worst identity collision in the game. They need a HUD that shows both bills, and they should not both ship unexamined.

4. What this changes¶

Add the class-origin ruling to the Bible Session Agenda (WO-A1). Houses are lored; classes are not, and the demo sorts on both.
Fix the dead cell — extend the Salvari trigger to Exhaust and Redact (feeds WO-C4).
Sharpen the two Gifts — the Valerii passive must charge a real price to an Anchor (feeds WO-C4).
The five recommended golden-path pairings should be Trades, not Gifts. On this analysis the strongest demo set is Machinist+Salvari, Drifter+Axiom, Anchor+Syndicate, Conduit+Valerii, and Catalyst+Salvari — though Salvari appearing twice conflicts with the hidden-House staging, so the fifth golden path likely becomes Anchor+Valerii on marketing grounds and must therefore be sharpened first.

Companion to docs/proposals/demo-card-set.md (the selection), docs/proposals/class-mechanic-lean-in.md (how to make the class verbs radioactive in those kits), and docs/evaluations/2026-08-27-class-faction-cards.md (the critique). Sources: story/bible/00-pillars.md, 20-decoupling.md, factions/00-origins.md, and the five House files. Feeds WO-A1, WO-C1, and WO-C4 in docs/official/todo-inventory.md.