A trope is a familiar story pattern — the secret benefactor, the love that was never going to work out, the prophecy that arrives on schedule. Adaptor House keeps a catalog of these patterns, and this series of papers, published from July 11, 2026 to July 19, 2026, is the argument for how that catalog is organized: the trope mapping schema, and the reasoning behind every rule in it.
The system itself is small. Every trope lives at one of eight addresses, written as three marks that are each either present or absent — 000 through 111. Each trope also wears one of four suits (heart, star, hourglass, mountain) and carries names that are chosen by rule rather than by taste. The point of all this structure is honesty at scale: a catalog of a few dozen patterns can be kept coherent by one careful editor, but a catalog of thousands stays coherent only if the rules do the work.
The papers make that case in order. The first two establish the load-bearing facts: that the quality grades in the catalog follow necessarily from the addresses — and that reading order matters, because reading a figure backward turns true statements into false ones — and that the matching of suits to addresses is partly forced by the structure and partly a genuine choice, which is signed and recorded rather than hidden. Three method papers follow, each closing one way a large catalog quietly rots. The first ties the grading vocabulary to exact sentences: every grade word is defined by the sentence it abbreviates, so whether the word fits a given trope is a question anyone can check, not a judgment anyone must trust. The second treats absence as information: a trope with nothing at some position is not a record with missing data — the absence is part of the description, so every record is complete, and any two records can be compared. The third makes names themselves into testable claims: a name is produced by applying a rule to the trope's structure, which means a name can be wrong, and a wrong name is corrected by the rule rather than by argument. Underneath all three is the same move — each trope carries one formal sentence, and those sentences can serve as premises in actual proofs connecting one trope to another; more on this here. The eight Progenitor papers then visit each address in turn: work out what must be true there, coin its names, and test the result against the public trope catalog.
Adaptor House is the author of record. Its papers are written in the challenge register: every claim states its refutation conditions, and answers and refutations are published, credited, at the address of record. That is why the series is published there — the papers are offered for challenge, and later papers cite earlier ones as law.
Historical Present follows in step. For each method paper the author writes a dual companion — a Position, in the belief register, first person — kept here rather than at Adaptor House because it is held, not argued: nothing in a companion is offered for challenge, and nothing in one is citable by any live system. The series commentary below, on why logic and why order, is the same convention applied to the series as a whole.
Reading the badges. Papers marked published are the versions of record at adaptorhouse.com. Papers marked DRAFT (none at present — all thirteen are published) are v1.0-DRAFT: readable here in full but unreviewed, not yet citable as papers of record.
Adaptor House: The Trope Compendium (ATTC) is the living corpus the whole series exists to govern: a database of narrative tropes, each record carrying a name, a description, its duality relations, and a suit-and-pole placement on the eight-address lattice the papers formalize. The public reader shows the surface of every record — the web of dualities and relations — while each record's formal core stays unpublished until its claim is made in the open, paper by paper. The Progenitor papers test their prose against this corpus; the corpus, in turn, is admitted and edited only through gates the papers justify.
Browse the Trope Compendium →Eight papers, one per address of the lattice, each executing the same fixed method — derive, coin, test. They were drafted in the decreed order, suit pair by suit pair: the heart pair first, then star, then hourglass, then mountain. All eight were published 2026-07-19 as Papers 6–13, papers of record at adaptorhouse.com; the renders here are the archive; their residue items were ruled 2026-07-20 and the papers stand at v1.1, claims open for challenge.