The three tiers
The Seed · the Kit · the corpus. Each complete in itself; a house takes units one at a time, in whatever order its own play asks for.
Tier one is The Golden Seed: the smallest text from which the whole can be regrown, read in an evening. Tier two is The Kit — the Seed plus the working instruments: the Playbook, the Operating System, the cards, and the agent line that can carry them. Tier three is the corpus itself, the millions of words behind all of it. Nothing in a higher tier is required to use a lower one, and nothing in a lower tier is a teaser for what is above it.
The structure is load-bearing because it is how something this large is offered without becoming a demand. A person, a Cell, or a whole house can take one unit, use it, and stop — and what they took still works. That is the same claim the rings make about resolution and the Volumes make about timing, expressed as portions rather than as depth or sequence. It is also the practical form of no enclosure: if each tier is complete, no tier can be held back as leverage.
Its second function is honest interoperability. A body that adopts only the Seed and a body that adopts the whole corpus can still play together, because what makes instances one body is the pattern rather than the paperwork. The Minimum standards of interoperability are the floor that makes that true in practice: the same card shape, the same week and the same turnings, the same words on line one, an address for every player, the same meaning behind the numbers, proposals as the way shared things change, and a word given kept or a gap learned from.
In the Game the tiers are what someone holding the door chooses between. Hand the Seed to the person who has an evening; hand the Kit to the Cell that is about to start a season; point to the corpus when a real question arrives that needs it.
Also called: The Seed · The Kit · The canon Stands on: The Golden Seed · The Kit · Instantiation · Kit of Parts Opens onto: Minimum standards of interoperability · Player+ Modules · The Sacred Codex · The Rings · Knowledge as commons · The LIØNSBERG Operating System In play: door · table · Home Sources: the seed text The DNA of Heaven, Part XV as cited by the field (the three tiers are stated in the Seed rather than in the wiki) · Player+ Modules Lexicon (the Kit) — ØSphera, CC BY-SA 4.0. Open: The concept is the seed text's and has no wiki page; the field's citation points at a section number in an earlier seed edition, and the current seed text carries the three tiers in its own Part on the Plan and the Kit. Cited as a draft.