People: guards, patrols, and topic tables

A guard, and the state that moves her

Mrs Kettle stands between you and the study. She is three facts working together: an NPC with the guard role, her own states, and the blocked exit from The world reading those states live:

create Mrs Kettle
  aka housekeeper, kettle
  a person, guard
  in the Entrance Hall
  states: guarded, softened

  on giving it
    change it to softened when it has the sherry bottle
    award softened, once when it is softened
    phrase kettle-softened when it is softened
  end on

create the Entrance Hall
  west is blocked while Mrs Kettle is guarded: kettle-blocks

The on giving it clause is the give-gate: hand her the right bottle and she softens. Because the block is a live condition, the study door opens the same instant, with no extra wiring. The when tails on each statement keep wrong gifts from softening anyone.

A patrol

create Tobias
  aka groundskeeper
  a person, patrol with route [the Gravel Drive, the Fountain Court, the Boiler Shed] and wait-turns 5 and announces-movement true
  in the Gravel Drive
  states: steady, shaken

The NPC library's patrol role takes its route as a name list and walks it on its own schedule. announces-movement true narrates his comings and goings (announcements default to off).

Topic tables

Conversation is a declared table per person; ask/tell both consult it. Rows come in two tiers: entity rows (the player asked about a thing in the world) and quoted free-text rows with comma-separated aliases:

define topics for tobias
  about the boiler:
    phrase tobias-boiler-reply
  about the silver locket:
    phrase tobias-locket-reply
  about "the folly", "the fire":
    change it to shaken
    award truth, once
    phrase tobias-folly-reply
  about "the bank": phrase tobias-bank-reply
end topics

A row's body is ordinary statements: the folly row changes Tobias's state (which is what unsticks the folly door two chapters from now) and scores the discovery. A miss falls to the owner's on asking it catch-all if it has one:

  on asking it
    phrase tobias-shrug
  end on

Mrs Kettle's table has no catch-all, so her misses get the platform's polite default. Both shapes are legitimate; pick per character.

A follower you recruit

Smoke the cat previews the next chapters: she is a person, follower, but feeding her uses an authored trait, so she waits for the state & verbs chapter. The short version is that you bring the kipper.