NPC lore: creator-declared NPC-to-NPC relationships, referenced in context

[harshithmullapudi]

What

Creators declare relationships between NPCs in their town — Diana is Alice's mentor; Bob resents Diana; Sera used to date Vinny. NPCs reference these relationships when contextually relevant or when the player asks — never as unprompted gossip about the player.

Why

• Towns feel like living worlds with history, not disconnected characters in the same folder.
• Multi-NPC scenes (group chat) gain depth: NPCs can naturally comment on each other's positions.
• Creators get expressive power without writing prompt boilerplate per NPC.
• Preserves the cozy vibe — avoids the uncanny "small-town surveillance" risk of NPCs gossiping about the player.

Explicit non-goals

• No proactive gossip about the player. NPCs do not say "I heard you told Iris about X."
• No memory-of-group-chat leakage across NPCs by default. NPCs know their declared relationships; they don't secretly know every conversation you had elsewhere.

Rough scope

• New model: `NpcRelation` (fromNpcId, toNpcId, relationType, description).

• MDX authoring: allow a `relations:` frontmatter block, e.g.

  ```yaml
  relations:
  - to: alice
  type: mentor
  note: "You mentored Alice through her first startup exit"
  - to: bob
  type: rival
  note: "Bob still resents you for scooping his cafe idea"
  ```

• Prompt injection: when an NPC is asked about another NPC (or when another NPC is present in group chat), inject the relevant relation into the system prompt as one line.

• Guardrails: cap injected relations per turn (e.g., top-3 by recency / relevance) to prevent token bloat.

Dependencies

• None. Ships independently of Passport / Friends.

Notes

• Consider surfacing declared relations in the town editor as a small graph diagram — later, not v1.
• Keep the tone opt-in and creator-authored. Auto-inferred relations tempt uncanny behavior.