brink: Instructions file for Claude Code

brink — Claude Context

What This Is

A single-player, cinematic geopolitical roleplay: you are the supreme executive of a great power, taking calls from world leaders and making decisions, in a persistent world grounded in current real-world geopolitics.

Built on a fork of DMCP (an MCP server for LLM-run RPGs), with a rules core ported from the BalanceOfTerror Python engine (source of truth at ~/BalanceOfTerror; the port target is TypeScript — no Python runs here).

REBOOT-DESIGN-AND-REQUIREMENTS.md is the authority. Read it before making design decisions. Section numbers below refer to it.

The division of labor (§2.1)

• The LLM is the Game-Master. It classifies a fuzzy action into which mechanic fires, narrates, and calls tools. It never adjudicates.
• The MCP server is referee + ledger. Authoritative resolution, persistence, and the handful of rules the GM cannot talk its way out of.

Hard rules — violations are bugs, not style opinions

1. Show, don't tell (Pillar 0, §1). The player-facing surface must never state a disposition or a raw value. No DOCTRINE: HAWK, no cohesion 80.0, no hostility: TENSE, no (DOVE advisor). The player deduces state from behavior, dialogue, and consequence — you learn your intel chief is a dove because she's wrong about Korea three times, not from a label.
2. Resolve, then narrate (§2.1a). The GM never narrates an outcome before the server returns it. It calls the resolve tool, receives an authoritative outcome payload carrying an explicit narration constraint, and narrates from that payload. As florid as it likes about the how; it can never lie about the what.
3. No credential in the working tree (§2.4). The GM runs keyless on a Claude subscription. There is no pay-per-token API key in this repo, ever. Development runs against a mock GM backend; the human installs real auth at the end, outside any agent's reach. Specifically: the launcher must assert ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN, and the cloud-provider vars are absent, and fail loudly if present — in non-interactive mode (claude -p) a present key silently wins with no prompt. Never pass --bare.
4. Only three enforced rules (§4.2). These are the only things the GM cannot override. Resist a fourth:
   • Prestige is zero-sum and conserved across the powers.
   • DEFCON is bounded [1–5]; DEFCON 1 is shared-loss nuclear war, no winner.
   • A crisis countdown ticks and lands regardless of the fiction — real state change, not narration.
5. Never pattern-match meaning. No game state is ever derived by matching words, phrases or regexes against natural language — not the player's input, not the GM's narration, not prose this server generated itself. If you have Haiku in your right hand, do not reach for a word list with your left.