Atlas Game Pillar
A history larger than one life
A House in The City of Gold is not a guild tag, a cosmetic surname, or a temporary party. It is the durable identity through which Characters belong to a family, carry a shared name, preserve lineage, record leadership, and connect one generation to the next. Characters are mortal; Accounts and dynastic history continue. Houses give that passage a public structure the world can remember.
The system is deliberately concerned with continuity. It records who founded a House, who joined it, who led it, how members departed, which Marriages changed its future, where Cadet branches began, and whether living continuity ultimately ended. The result is not a private family spreadsheet. It is public social history shaped by authoritative choices and preserved even when the people who made them are gone.
A House is the promise that a player’s story can accumulate meaning across Characters without pretending those Characters are the same person.
Names with distinct owners
Your Community Handle identifies you across the community. Your Character is the person who acts in the world. Your House supplies a structured family identity and surname. These layers may appear together, but none is allowed to impersonate another. A Handle does not become a Character name, a Character does not become an Account, and a House name does not grant ownership of the people who carry it.
A Character owns a personal first name and stable Character history. Character Lifecycle decides whether that person is living, active, dead, or succeeded. Houses consumes those facts but cannot create, revive, or rewrite a Character to make a House transition convenient.
The House owns its stable identity, current structured family name, status, memberships, roles, leadership tenures, lineage links, heraldry association, and history. A legitimate House rename may update qualifying current House-derived surnames while personal first names and Community Handles remain unchanged.
This separation makes generational play legible. Marcus Valmeris and Aldric Valmeris can belong to one continuing Account dynasty and House while remaining two different people with different lives. Historical records keep the names that were true when events occurred instead of flattening every ancestor into the latest profile.
The first household
For the normal first-Character path, an eligible verified Account without a Character chooses a Character first name and a distinct House family name. Completion creates the Character, the new Active House, and the founding Head membership together. The founder does not create a temporary placeholder family that later becomes real; the authoritative transaction either establishes the complete beginning or establishes nothing.
House identity is protected as durable world identity. Names are normalized, reserved during contested workflows, and checked against uniqueness and protected terms. The stable House ID survives later presentation changes. Founding also establishes the beginning of membership and leadership history, not merely the current values shown on a profile card.
A person invited into an existing House before creating a Character follows a different path. They choose the Character’s first name, but the receiving House supplies its current authoritative surname. That path creates the Character directly in the destination House and records the accepted Sibling or Adoptive Child relationship atomically. It does not silently create and discard an intermediate House.
One present allegiance
A living Character can hold at most one active House membership. That invariant applies across founding, Family onboarding, Sibling invitations, Adoption, Marriage, Cadet creation, and restoration. A client cannot display membership into existence, and two racing workflows cannot validly place the same Character in two Houses. The server resolves the current facts and commits one coherent result.
Membership records both the current role and the path by which belonging began or ended. Head and Consort have defined structural meaning; ordinary members remain members even when family relationships describe them more specifically. Closing a membership never erases the tenure. Former Houses remain part of Character history, and former members remain part of the House’s story.
Shared surname, friendship, biological relation, or Community identity never proves active House membership. The authoritative membership record does.
Relationships that move history
Family owns relationships: siblinghood, adoptive parentage, spouse lifecycle, kinship validation, invitations, and consent. Houses owns the resulting identity, membership, leadership, surname transition, and lineage state. This boundary matters because a family relationship is not automatically a membership command, and membership alone cannot fabricate kinship.
A current Head of an Active House may invite an eligible person as an explicit Sibling or Adoptive Child. Existing Characters receive Character-targeted contracts. A verified person without a Character may be found by exact Community Handle and receive a Family Onboarding Contract. Accepting an invitation does not let the recipient choose a different House or surname: completion rechecks the Head, House, invitation, relationship, current identity, and conflicting workflows before applying the documented result.
Adoption permanently establishes adoptive parentage; it does not fabricate biological parentage or automatically designate an heir. Siblinghood may arise through shared parentage or an accepted explicit invitation, but a shared House or surname never implies it by itself. Ordinary Sibling and Adoption transitions do not convert Religion. A Character brings their existing lawful religious affiliation with them.
A directional dynastic choice
Marriage is directional. The proposer is the Marriage Head and the recipient is the Joining Spouse. Those labels organize the Marriage workflow; they are not gender roles and do not mean the proposer is automatically Head of every House involved. The proposal records one of two House outcomes before it becomes effective.
The Marriage Head continues their valid House. The Joining Spouse leaves their former House, enters the destination as Consort, and receives its structured family surname. Existing House identity and lineage continue.
The Marriage creates a new independent House. The Marriage Head becomes its Head, the Joining Spouse becomes Consort, both receive the new surname, and every available valid parent-House link is preserved.
Acceptance is consent to immutable material terms, not proof that every effect has happened. Before effectiveness, Backend authority rechecks life, Account separation, kinship, exclusivity, Religion policy, House state, leadership safety, identity reservations, and stale versions. If a participant is a House Head and other living active members remain, valid leadership transfer must occur before departure. A sole living active Head may depart through the approved transition while the old House becomes Extinct atomically.
The Marriage Head’s organized Religion governs Marriage. Where that Religion requires validation, exact current religious authority must approve the combined Marriage and Joining-Spouse affiliation transition. That bounded exception does not let Houses assign Religion to ordinary members and does not create a generic conversion shortcut.
A branch that stands alone
A Cadet House is a permanent House founded through the approved Marriage outcome. It receives its own stable identity, family name, heraldry, status, Head, Consort, membership, and history. Its parent links express lineage; they do not make the new House a department, vassal, child record, or jointly owned possession of its parents.
Canon preserves every available lineage source. Depending on actual pre-Marriage membership, a Cadet House may record zero, one, or two distinct parent Houses. Two parent links are normal when each spouse arrives from a different valid House. A shared origin is not duplicated merely to manufacture two parents.
Parent Houses are neither erased nor guaranteed survival. They remain Active under valid transferred leadership or become Extinct when the sole-member departure rule applies. The Cadet House begins with no designated heir because creating a new family identity is not the same decision as selecting who will continue it after death.
One office, no invented mandate
Each Active House has at most one current Head. Founding and Cadet creation establish the initial Head. Later change may occur through an accepted voluntary leadership transfer, valid Dynasty succession, or a specifically authorized restoration. Houses do not support Votes of No Confidence in Version 1. Members, Regents, clients, titles, or informal votes cannot promote someone into Headship.
A voluntary transfer uses proposal and acceptance rather than unilateral reassignment. The intended successor must be an eligible current member, contested state is revalidated, the old tenure closes, and the new tenure begins atomically. The former Head remains subject to the exact result of that workflow; history is retained rather than overwritten with a new current-name field.
If no valid transition is immediately available, the office is Vacant under Constitutional Governance. Vacancy is honest state, not permission for a client to guess the nearest relative or highest-profile member. A House may remain historically meaningful while leadership resolution waits for canonical authority.
Continuity after death
Dynasty & Succession owns heir designation, replacement, removal, playable-heir activation, and death inheritance. Houses does not calculate an heir from a roster, marriage, surname, or age. When a Character dies, Dynasty determines whether the Account has an eligible designated successor and asks the relevant owner domains to apply the lawful consequences.
A valid designated successor may become the Account’s one active playable Character after permanent death. If the deceased was House Head, Houses separately revalidates House-specific eligibility and applies the requested Head tenure transition in the same authoritative process. The distinction prevents a client from confusing “next Character” with “automatic owner of every office and asset.”
There is no silent fallback House election. With no valid successor or transfer, Headship becomes Vacant. When the final living active member dies, the House becomes Extinct rather than assigning a deceased, NPC, dependent, or unrelated Character to preserve an appearance of continuity.
Separate owners, coordinated consequences
Personal inheritable property follows the approved Dynasty order: a valid designated successor first, then a surviving spouse, then the current Head of the deceased Character’s House. These are ordered fallbacks for one recipient, not percentage shares and not proof that the House owns the estate.
Personally Character-owned placed Buildings are designed to pass through that owner-domain process. The Building remains a world object, and its furniture, state, and Universal Building Inventory remain with the property. Authoritative placed-Building persistence and transfer govern when that behavior becomes operational.
Carried and equipped Items follow physical Inventory, Equipment, custody, corpse, and loot rules instead. They are not distributed as abstract Family inheritance. Religion rank, Institution leadership, Building Manager authority, and arbitrary delegated roles also do not pass through House bloodline. Only the explicitly hereditary territorial offices—Mayor, Count, Duke, and King—may follow a valid designated heir when territorial eligibility remains satisfied.
An ending that remains visible
A House becomes Extinct when canonical transitions leave it without living active membership. Implemented causes include final-member death and approved Family departures by a sole living active Head. Extinction is not dissolution, moderator cleanup, Founder deletion, or a punishment command. It is the historical terminal state of a family whose active continuity ended.
The aggregate remains. Its stable identity, former members, Head tenures, heraldry, lineage, and history can still be presented. Names are not released for a replacement House to impersonate the extinct family. This lets ruins, records, descendants, and old political relationships refer to the real House that once existed.
Restoration is exceptionally narrow. If durable Marriage provenance proves that a Joining Spouse’s departure through that same Marriage caused their former House’s extinction, effective Divorce may restore that exact House and make the returning former spouse its active Head. Unrelated extinction, regret, administration, or a matching surname cannot revive a House.
Public identity made visible
A House may carry canonical heraldry as part of its public identity. Houses owns the association between a valid heraldic design and the House; the Heraldry and media boundaries own artwork ingestion, licensing evidence, normalization, moderation, storage, exports, and safe public references. A locally drawn client image cannot become authoritative merely because it resembles the coat of arms.
Heraldry can appear wherever public House identity is legitimately projected: directories, House records, Character presentation, historic context, and compatible world equipment. Presentation should follow the canonical House identity and heraldry version rather than hard-coding a Character-specific copy. Extinction does not erase the arms from historical records, and a rename does not replace stable House identity.
The same distinction applies to symbols and power. A crown in a coat of arms does not make its bearer King. A sword does not grant military authority. Heraldry communicates identity and history; territorial office, Institution diplomacy, Religion authority, and combat permissions remain with their own systems.
The world remembers
House history records meaningful transitions rather than reconstructing them from whatever rows happen to exist today. Founding, membership changes, leadership tenures, succession, surname transitions, Marriage outcomes, Cadet lineage, extinction, and exceptional restoration all leave durable evidence. Public records may show the world-facing facts while private Account identity and operational details remain protected.
This creates consequences that are social as well as mechanical. A House can become known for the settlements it founded, the offices its Characters held, the branches created through Marriage, and the choices that ended or protected its line. None of those meanings needs a developer-authored noble family. Players produce the history by acting within stable rules.
The Backend uses Authoritative Intent Resolution for contested transitions. A click expresses intent; it does not announce that history already changed. Current participants, versions, memberships, leadership safety, and cross-domain policy are checked at commitment. One valid outcome is recorded, duplicate requests resolve idempotently, and failed attempts do not leave half a Marriage, an orphan surname, or contradictory House memberships.
A pillar connected to many systems
Houses touch Character identity, Family relationships, Dynasty succession, heraldry, property, territorial office, Religion policy, public identity, Communication, and history. They do not absorb those domains. The House Head cannot rewrite Character life state, choose another Account’s heir, convert ordinary members, seize personal Inventory, invent a territorial title, or turn heraldry into legal power.
The Game Pillar explains why Houses matter. For the living register and the complete rules reference, continue to Governance → Houses.