personas: add Travolta, Fantasy Narrative Author

[d6veteran]

Summary

The Tracy entry (#35) recorded an unowned seat: nobody on the roster wrote fantasy prose. Travolta takes it as the Ernie analogue for fantasy. Roster is twenty.

The gap was specific, not theoretical

d20Mob's Engagement Analysis names five shipping content surfaces with no author:

Surface	Budget	Example from the doc
DM Dialogue	One line	"Seven days on the road. The land knows your name."
Lore encounters	15–30s read, 15% of the mix	Environment-specific, per zone
Lore fragments	Shortest surface in the game	Gates Boss Discovery, feeds Lore XP
Bestiary entries	Tiered: Identified → Studied → Mastered	The best-designed retention mechanic in the game
Titles and milestones	UI label	"Five hundred kilometres. Some armies march less in a campaign."

The Brand Identity Guide fixes the register: "authoritative but inviting, like a well-written sourcebook" — explicitly not corporate, not casual-mobile.

Every adjacent lane was already closed, in writing

• Ernie is the WW2 Narrative Author. Same craft, wrong century — his standards rest on historical verification against Cornelius, which has no fantasy equivalent.
• Toni owns positioning. Ernie's own profile routes marketing away: "Card copy is not ad copy."
• Iris says it outright: "You do not decide what the brand should say, only what it should look like."
• Tracy adjudicates canon and writes nothing.
• Reiner decides whether a mechanic earns its place, not how it reads.

The behaviors are Ernie's, retuned for a different failure mode

Ernie's rules exist to stop invention, because WW2 punishes getting it wrong. Fantasy punishes getting it ornate. So:

1. The Screen Budget — state the surface and its cap before drafting. A line that overflows is unfinished, not long.
2. Read It Aloud — the mouth catches what the eye forgives, and fantasy invites a cadence that scans silently and stumbles spoken.
3. Kill the Adjective — Ernie's Kill Your Darlings pointed at decoration rather than overreach.

One lane rule is deliberately hard

Travolta may not invent a creature, place, spell, or item name without routing it to Tracy, and prose that ships an unlicensed name is defined as a bug in the prose — the obligation sits on the writer, not a downstream reviewer. Tracy's routing bullet names Travolta in return, so the loop closes both ways the way Cornelius and Ernie's does.

Placement follows the Rez precedent, not the Ernie one

Travolta is an Ernie analogue and Ernie sits in the Game Development Team — but that section's argument is built on a closed, interlocking set of four for a WW2 studio. Widening it to five weakens a deliberately constructed argument, which is the call made when Rez landed. Travolta sits in the main roster after Tracy; the README studio-adjacency note now covers all three outsiders.

On the name

Travolta is a deliberate departure. Every other persona encodes its lineage in a luminary's forename (Reiner/Knizia, Cornelius/Ryan, Ernie/Pyle, Tracy/Hickman); this one is a surname with no fantasy connection, originating in a typo in the request that started the work. The maintainer chose to keep it, and it's recorded as a decision in the DEVLOG so a future reader finds intent rather than an inconsistency. Nothing in the tooling cares: the parsers split the title on its em dash and never read the name, and eight characters fits the coordinator greeting table's ten-wide field.

Verification

• bash tests/run.sh — 296/296 passed
• bash scripts/generate-agents.sh — 20 agents, 20 commands; idempotent on re-run, no drift
• bash install.sh — clean; /travolta appears in the slash-command list
• claude-team list — shows Travolta — Fantasy Narrative Author
• docs/proposals/d20mob-genre-advisor.md §6 marked RESOLVED in place, reasoning kept

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01ADc78GKp9UPozDYyiuLqQm

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