Keepers' notes

A file beside a lesson where everything not yet settled is written down, each with a recommended answer.

The lesson itself carries only what is settled and true today. Everything else — the sources it rests on, what changed from the last version and why, every open decision with the answer its maker would give, credits that need a named person's yes, and anything cut that someone may want back — lives in the notes beside it.

It is load-bearing because it is how a page can be honest without being cluttered. A reader who meets "proposal", "working word", "open question" or a note to stewards on a public page learns that the page is not finished and stops trusting it. A maker who has nowhere to put the unsettled thing either buries it or blurts it onto the page. The notes give it a home, and the recommendation attached to each one means the next keeper inherits a decision rather than a shrug.

A Player+ rarely reads them; a keeper always does. When a lesson is handed on, the notes travel with it, and whoever takes it up starts where the last hand stopped rather than rediscovering the same three questions.

The recommended answer is the load-bearing part of the form. An open question recorded without one invites the next keeper to reopen everything; an open question with a recommendation invites them to agree, disagree, or improve, which is a far smaller and far likelier act.

The habit generalises. Any living page can carry its open questions beside it with a recommended answer each, and a body that keeps that file is a body whose unfinished business is visible rather than remembered.

Also called: — Stands on: Module · The Deck Standard · Keepers Of The Way Opens onto: Second reader · Player+ Modules · Provenance · Attribution · Look-back · Proposal In play: beyond Sources: Player+ Modules, How a Module Lives, The Deck Standard · The DNA of Heaven, Part XIII (provenance never thins). Open: none found.