Farming facts and the chapter notes
The book’s magic system sits on top of a rule that has nothing to do with magic: every agronomic, soil, livestock, weather, or drainage fact that appears on the page has to be a real fact, drawn from actual pre-industrial or modern agricultural science and practice, and magic is only allowed to modify a real farming practice in response to a real problem farmers actually have. For example: frost on blossom, a compost heap going airless, a sick ewe, water that needs finding underground. A spell can only respond to a problem like one of these, and it still has to cost the labour it saves rather than removing the work. A spell that finished a heap in an hour with none of the risks a fast heap runs in reality would break the rule, whatever the story needed it for.
This constraint was set directly by David MacIver, the book’s author, and a drafter has to actually pass it, not just decorate the world with it. If the writing model is unsure whether a claimed fact is real, it doesn’t go on the page. The project keeps a running glossary of specialist farming terms, recording each one’s real-world basis and which chapter first explains it. A term gets explained once and not repeated, and it isn’t left unexplained when a reader genuinely needs the grounding. A dedicated farming-check skill runs at the editing stage of every chapter. It pulls out every claim and specialist term and checks each against the glossary and against real mechanism, not just plausibility.
Where the explanation lives
Explaining a specialist farming term on the page happens through the notes at the foot of a chapter, a convention on Royal Road (the site the book is published on) where the writer adds a short real-world aside beneath the story text. These are distinct from the notes at the top of a chapter, which are David’s own words and which the rules forbid the model to touch at all. These notes are bound to a specific written persona: an agriculture-science postgraduate, more scientist than farmer, who has done real farm work (lambing, digging worms out of soil, tending a sick animal) without ever having carried the full responsibility of running a farm themselves, and who gets genuinely excited sharing the real science behind whatever the chapter just touched on. David’s original brief: the first attempt at these notes was boring, and what he wanted instead was someone who mostly kept the notes tightly relevant but occasionally couldn’t resist a digression.
The persona is written down as its own file with an autobiographical log, tracking every claim the notes have made about the author’s own life (which orchard, which river, which thermometer), so a later note can’t casually contradict an earlier one. Like the prose voice itself, this persona was found through exemplars rather than specification alone: a set of accepted note drafts get read before writing any new one, because notes drafted from the rule file alone came out lifeless in the same way rules-only prose drafting did. The notes are budgeted too, one longer digression or a couple of shorter notes per chapter, and they’re barred from ever explaining the story, the magic system, or the world’s institutions. They stick to the real-world fact behind whatever the story just needed grounding.
The same instinct for grounding shows up outside farming as well, in the session that built an actual map of the story’s setting from the geography already recorded in canon: 2026-08-31, mapping the setting.