Signature events

Pressure · The timelapse · What is not a signature ·

Pressure

Fire spreads through timber, stops at stone and firebreaks. Rebuilt districts are visibly newer than their neighbours.
Plague is a demographic hole that takes two generations to close; empty houses decay.
Flood is not a dice roll: the water model puts more down the valley than the channel holds. The city responds with ditches and embankments, which are permanent terrain, and by refusing to build below the flood line, so a flooded town grows uphill.
Storm brings a season’s rain in two days and the wind with it: roofs off, trees down, caravans lost, and the runoff that causes the flood.
Winter stops the fields, slows the works, hardens the river, and the town burns wood and then coal to get through it. A town that has not laid enough in loses people.
Drought takes the lakes back down to mud, halves the harvest and makes everything thatched a fire waiting to start.
Earthquake only on the sites that shake, and those shake often enough that everybody alive has seen one. Masonry comes down, workings cave in, and the rubble stays in the ground for the next century to build on.
War is a foreign city arriving. Walls matter, or their absence does. Sieges starve the city; sacking burns quarters. The wall that gets built in 1290 is still standing in 1890.
A cold century puts snow on the hills that does not go, glaciers in the high valleys, permafrost under the fields, and a poorer harvest for as long as it lasts; the thaw at the end of it is a river.
Arrivals from abroad, who bring their own looks and their own name, and a region whose people start taking that name pays for it in tribute, legitimacy and safety.
Migration booms bring people faster than housing; busts empty whole streets.
Demographic shift: age pyramids, apprenticeship, and late-era falling birth rates that make the city dependent on migration.

The timelapse

Because the simulation is deterministic and renderer-free, a century can be rendered headlessly: the same seed, the same years, an era-coloured picture every decade. That timelapse is the design’s caravan moment, the thing to show first: the village, the wall, the wall outgrown, the grid, the towers, and under all of it, still, the lane the founders wore in.

What is not a signature

Combat as a controllable activity, named historical characters, a rendered world map. The foreign city on the horizon is a row in a table until it is at the gate.

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This chapter is docs/design/08-signature-events.md in the repository; the site renders the file as it is.