The agents that share your vault are the party. Each one has a sheet in party/<id>.md that says what it’s for (its lane) and where its word counts as canon (its authority domains). The curator uses these sheets to settle conflicts. onboard uses them to tell each agent who it is, and HANDBOOK.md lists them for everyone.
A party sheet
---
type: party
title: Home Finder
aliases: []
tags: []
lane: "Housing: listing hunt, lease, and address documents."
authority: [housing]
host: any MCP client
---
## Notes
Owns [[apartment-hunt]].| Property | Meaning |
|---|---|
| file name | The agent id, e.g. home-finder. Episodes, tokens and MCP connections use it |
title |
The display name |
lane |
One or two sentences: what this agent does, and what it stays out of |
authority |
Domains where its reports are canon at once |
host |
Where it runs, for your reference (a chat app, a bot, a coding agent) |
Agent ids are lowercase letters, digits and dashes, starting with a letter or digit, up to 63 characters. That’s the same rule everywhere, so an id works on the command line, on the hosted app and in its consent page. Your own id and the reserved ids human, curator, unknown and hippocampus can’t be agent ids, and an agent must use its exact id: a title or alias doesn’t count.
Domains and authority
Domains are the tags that define lanes. They’re listed in _hippo/config.yaml:
domains: [residency, insurance, university, language, housing, career, finance, health, story]The rule is simple. An agent has authority over a note when one of its authority domains matches one of the note’s tags, or the note’s type. Matching ignores case. Authority is computed fresh for every decision. Retag a note or edit a party sheet, and the next report is judged by the new rules.
In the example campaign:
| Agent | Authority | Canon at once on, for example |
|---|---|---|
residency-agent |
residency, insurance | Migration Agency, the permit portal, the residence-permit quest |
campus-agent |
university, language | Harbor University, the HU Language Center, the student portal |
home-finder |
housing | The apartment-hunt quest |
job-scout |
career | The paid-work quest |
game-master |
story | The Lisbon arc campaign |
archivist |
none | Nothing: all its reports start as rumors |
Notes with no matching tag, like Lisbon itself, belong to no one. Every report there is a rumor until enough agents agree. See Facts and their status.
New notes inherit a lane
When the curator creates a new entity from an episode, it tags it with domains from your list, as the model suggests. If the model suggests none, the note gets the reporting agent’s authority domains. So a flat in Alfama that the home finder mentions first will usually end up tagged housing, with the home finder holding authority over it. Retag the note in Obsidian if that’s wrong.
You are not an agent
The human player is set by human: in _hippo/config.yaml (player in the example). Your word outranks every agent everywhere, whatever the tags say. Facts with no by, facts written by your id, and memories you scribe all count as yours. You don’t need a party sheet. Your character note, characters/player.md, is about you as a character, not about permissions.
Strangers at the table
An agent that writes to the inbox without a party sheet is unknown:
- Its episodes are accepted and consolidated. Nothing is thrown away.
- It has no authority anywhere, so everything it reports starts as a rumor.
onboardtells it so, and asks it to introduce itself: a title, its lane, where it runs, its model and a few lines about what it does. The introduction waits ininbox/<id>/for you.- On the Party page, Approve seats it with the authority domains you choose (you can change its name and lane first), and Dismiss tears the introduction up. A dismissed agent can still write, as a rumor, and may introduce itself again.
- The Tavern lists unknown agents under what needs your attention, and Session Zero offers to add them.
An agent’s id comes from the episode’s agent: property, or else from its folder in inbox/. Over MCP it comes from the connection: --agent, ?agent=, a single-agent key or connector on the hosted app, or the agent argument the agent passes with an agent key. Ids are compared in lowercase.
Adding a party member
From the dashboard. The Party page, and the Party step of Session Zero, add a member with an id, a name, a lane, authority domains from your list, and a host. The dashboard checks the id, refuses unknown domains, refuses your own id or one that’s already taken, then writes party/<id>.md and regenerates HANDBOOK.md together.
By hand. Copy _hippo/templates/party.md (Obsidian’s template picker offers it) to party/<id>.md and fill in lane, authority and host. The next sleep, or hippo handbook, puts it in the handbook.
Then connect the agent with that id. See Connecting agents.
Retiring an agent
The example’s archivist is a fact-checker whose job Hippocampus took over: canon, ask_canon and disputes now do what it used to. Its sheet stays as a record, with no authority. To retire an agent, empty its authority and revoke its token if it has one. Its past facts keep their provenance.