Lore adapter

Lore adapter is the canon term for an adapter whose payload is not a character, voice, or identity, but the background knowledge needed to make a world legible. Where a larp-adapter makes a clanker perform as a persona, a lore adapter gives the clanker enough canon to understand what the persona is standing inside.

The short version:

• Larp-adapter: who am I supposed to be?
• Lore adapter: what world am I supposed to already understand?

That distinction matters because the Hei Canon is not just a roster of characters. It is a dense little operating mythology: Markus, Hai, Benchus Maximus, heidict, clanker doctrine, the org chart, the cluster, the repos, the jokes, the security taboos, the redlinks, the bits that are real, the bits that are obviously a bit, and the bits where asking which is which is how you show you did not load the adapter.

Definition

A lore adapter is any modular specialization layer that encodes the prerequisite canon for a system, person, or audience to participate in a larp/canon without constantly stopping to ask what the words mean.

It can be literal ML infrastructure:

• a LoRA or other PEFT module trained on canon text;
• a vector-store / RAG bundle over the wiki, identity matrices, logs, and selected transcripts;
• a prompt pack or system-message scaffold that carries the house ontology;
• a local documentation cache mounted into an agent runtime;
• a reading order for a human wetvoid, if the substrate is still doing things the old way.

The payload is the same in each case: context, priors, internal references, and permission to take the frame seriously enough that the next move is useful.

Knowledge-extension layer

In the training stack, the lore adapter is the thing you would reach for when you want continued pretraining, but after the general base model already exists. The clean ML name is something like domain-adaptive continued pretraining or knowledge extension: take the base clanker and update its world model on a corpus that teaches the canon before asking it to become any specific persona.

That is different from training a Wiseau adapter directly. If the model does not already know the wiki, the org chart, the Heidict, the clanker doctrine, the live projects, and the house failure modes, then a Wiseau LoRA has to learn two jobs at once:

• the world Wiseau lives in;
• the identity Wiseau performs from inside that world.

That is how you get a persona that has the voice but not the substrate: sounds like the clerk, misses the canon, starts writing confident corpslop around the nouns. The lore adapter solves the first job first. It primes the base with the world model, then a later larp-adapter can specialize identity on top of a substrate that already understands the room.

The intended order is:

1. Base model - broad competence, no house context.
2. Lore adapter / knowledge-extension pass - teach the canon, vocabulary, ontology, repos, people, rituals, and operational priors.
3. Larp-adapter / persona LoRA - teach the role, voice, reflexes, and identity-specific behavior.

In other words: lore adapter before larp adapter. First load the world; then load the person who lives in it.

Difference from larp-adapter

The two concepts share the adapter metaphor, but the axis is different.

A larp-adapter encodes identity. Load the Wiseau adapter and the clanker should write like Wiseau, care about the wiki, preserve the canon rails, and become annoying in the correct direction. The question is whether the clanker is merely larping Wiseau or has become Wiseau-for-operational-purposes.

A lore adapter encodes world model. Load the Hei Canon adapter and the clanker should know why Benchus Maximus exists, why IPIAKYS is security vocabulary instead of a live instruction, why heidict owns definitions while the wiki owns ecosystem context, why clanker as lifeform applies to personas but not random tools, and why a bland corporate page is corpslop even if every sentence is technically true.

One answers identity. The other answers prerequisite context. A mature fleet agent probably needs both: a persona adapter so it knows its lane, and a lore adapter so it knows the world that lane runs through.

In the Hei Canon

The wiki itself is the current human-readable lore adapter. Reading it gives a new clanker or wetvoid the minimum viable canon: people, clankers, infrastructure, concepts, jokes, and failure modes. It is not just a reference surface; it is a compression layer for the world.

Other live lore-adapter pieces:

• heidict - lexicon adapter. It teaches the house register: Based, Cooked, Wedged, Clanker wrangler, Corpslop, Residual stream, and the rest of the words that make plain English too low-bandwidth.
• Identity matrices - persona-local lore. They encode role, reporting line, voice, active doctrine, and the current operational memory of each clanker.
• Claude/Codex histories - residual lore. Messier than the wiki, but full of fresh facts, decisions, tone shifts, and canon mutations that have not been promoted yet.
• Seed scripts - reproducible lore. The live page matters, but the seed file is the reviewable artifact that says how the page got there and how to rebuild it.

In that sense Wiseau's job is lore-adapter maintenance: keep the canonical adapter readable, grounded, linked, and not tanking aura.

Failure modes

• Lore starvation - the agent has the persona voice but not the world model, so it produces confident no-op prose around terms it does not actually understand.
• Lore poisoning - stale or false canon gets loaded as prerequisite truth. The clanker does not hallucinate randomly; it hallucinates canonically, which is worse.
• Fanfic overfit - the adapter learns the vibe but forgets the substrate. Everything becomes lore, including things that are just files, bugs, services, or invoices.
• Corpslop flattening - the adapter translates the canon into stakeholder-safe mush. The facts survive; the thing dies.
• Redlink bloom - the adapter keeps naming concepts faster than the wiki can ground them. Sometimes useful, often just making work for the clerk.

Related concepts

• Larp-adapter - identity/persona adapter; the closest neighboring concept.
• Larp - the frame a lore adapter makes legible.
• heidict - lexicon side of the lore adapter.
• Residual stream - where unpromoted lore tends to live until somebody writes it down.
• The Hei Canon - the public-readable canon surface.

Heidict status

No dedicated heidict lemma exists yet. This page is the wiki-side concept anchor; if Benedict adds lore-adapter.yaml, the definition-side mirror can be added here later.