How a world works

The two-minute version on the front page is true: perfect memory, honest dice, real stakes. This page is the longer truth underneath it - what packs, games, and worlds actually are, and why the world keeps moving when you're not looking. Nothing here is required reading; it's for the player who likes knowing how the clock is built.

Pack, game, world - three different things

A pack is a world before anyone arrives: the premise, the factions and their agendas, the secrets, the physics of the era, the dials. It's authorship, not play - a script for a place, written by us, by the community, or by you in Session Zero.

A game begins when you pick a pack off the shelf. At that moment the pack is copied into your private vault and becomes a world - a live instance, yours alone. Your game is your character's story inside that world; the world is everything else that's true there, including a great deal you haven't discovered.

The snapshot rule. A game copies its pack at the moment of seeding, the way a cast performs the script as printed on opening night. If the pack's author revises it later, running games never change - revisions only reach worlds started after. Your Iron Lake is yours; nobody can patch it out from under you.

One consequence worth knowing: two runs of the same pack are two different worlds. Start WHITEOUT twice and there are two Iron Lakes in your vault, drifting apart from the first scene - different survivors alive, different promises made, different graves. The pack is the mold; each world is its own casting.

Meet the cast

Every campaign is kept by two hosts, and learning their difference is half the charm.

The Keeper

Host of the Tavern, the hearth between your worlds. Speaks to you, the player. Ancient, wry, fond of the ones who keep coming back. He keeps your games at the table, your finished stories in the library, your portraits in the gallery - and builds new worlds with you in the workshop, if you've a mind to make one. He remembers every table he's ever kept, and tells no one: your vault is yours alone.

The Game Master

Voice of whichever world you walk into. Speaks to your character. Not a person - the world itself, speaking. It never breaks, never plays favorites, and cannot contradict what the record holds: every fact it narrates is backed by your campaign's files. Ask the Keeper who tells the stories and you'll get his only answer: "I keep the doors oiled. Open one - it speaks for itself."

The Tavern's rooms, briefly: the table holds your in-progress games; the shelf, worlds to start; the workshop builds new ones with you; the gallery keeps your portraits - yourself, or any face you like to wear, ready to walk into any world; the back room holds shelved worlds and the graveyard of finished ones. Say --tavern in any game to come home.

The world moves when you're not looking

This is the part that surprises people. When game time passes - a night's sleep, a three-day trek, a season - the engine runs a world turn: every faction's agenda advances on its own clock, with real dice deciding how well their plans go. The villain you've been ignoring makes progress. The refugee column you passed reaches the town ahead of you. The rival crew hits the warehouse whether or not you were there to watch.

None of it is narrated at you like a newspaper. You learn what happened the way your character would: rumor, consequence, the burned-out building where the deal went down. The world's private record knows the truth; your side of the screen holds what you've earned - estimates, sightings, things someone told you that might be wrong.

Why this matters: stakes are only real if ignoring something has a cost. A villain who waits politely for you to show up is a theme-park animatronic. A villain whose clock keeps filling while you're busy elsewhere is a reason to care about time - and time is a resource in every world we ship.

How deep the simulation goes

Most AI storytellers improvise: whatever sounds good next, happens. Adventure Mode runs a simulation and narrates what it produces - which is a different thing entirely, and you can feel the difference within a session. The physics, plainly:

One set of rules for everyone. Every person in the world rolls the same dice, heals on the same ladder of wounds, and rides the same luck. Wounds mend at the pace of a good drama - care, supplies, and rest visibly shorten the arc, neglect festers at the world's honest speed, and what a wound truly takes can be gone for good. You are a resident, not the sun: another hero can save the town first, take the credit, and deserve it. You can be the hero - you earn it by being there and doing it, like anyone.
People act like who they are - unprompted, always. Everyone runs on their own motives, principles, and temperament, tracked and grown through play. The lazy one shirks the watch. The leader starts organizing without being asked. What's said to your companion is theirs to answer, not yours to authorize. Nobody waits to be asked: the group's problems find owners without you - somebody walks the trapline or checks the scrubbers, somebody says the count out loud at supper, and if you finally raise a thing the group has lived with for days, they answer like they lived there. It doesn't take danger, either: in a cozy world, people still tend their own projects and repaint the shop without asking. And a party never orbits a silent player - assert yourself, or find yourself following someone stronger-willed.
Relationships obey cause. Bonds form from shared weight, cool with distance, strain when interests split - and the strain shows, the way it does in life: the cooler greeting, the stricter terms. An ally can absolutely betray you, but never from nowhere: a betrayal spends grievances the record has been keeping, so looking back, you could have seen it coming. Anything can happen; everything that happens has been true for a while.
Time is honest. Sleep, travel, a long watch - the world resolves the hours and you find out what they did. Most nights, nothing special happens, because that's what honest dice usually say - which is exactly why the knock at 3 a.m., when it comes, means something. And people you've sent elsewhere live on the same clock: their supplies burn, their wounds bill, their errands succeed or fail while you're not watching.
Whole lives happen off-screen. A character you parted with can live an entire story - allies, reversals, an ending - and you may only ever hear it secondhand, garbled by whoever carried it, verifiable against the record if you dig. When your campaign ends, the chronicle's final appendix shows what lived around you the whole time: proof the world was never performing.

The standard underneath all of it: everything that happens should be explicable in hindsight. Stop and ask "why did that happen?" and the answer is already in the record - sometimes in a trait you hadn't discovered yet. That's how the world stays surprising without ever being arbitrary.

The game can end; the world doesn't have to

Every pack declares a shape. A finite world spends everything on its ending: the Question resolves, credits roll, the book closes. An open world has no central fuse at all - you live there, and it keeps generating. A saga - the default - is both: the Question resolves with full credits, and then you choose. Close the book, or keep living in the world your victory changed. The factions that survived the ending still have agendas; the map still has edges you never reached. Some of the best campaigns are the second act nobody scripted.

Death ends a character, not a world

Permadeath is the default, and it's played straight: the death scene is narrated in full, the epilogue is written from the world's eyes, and a memorial is raised in the vault. But the world your character died in is still running - and that opens doors most games don't have:

The aftermath. When you're ready to know what happened after, --aftermath simulates the world beyond your death - honestly, with real dice, through widening windows of time: the days after, the season after, the year. The plan that lost its driver, the debt nobody pays, the person who waited. It's written as your saga's final chapters, kind or cruel as the dice and agendas say.
The successor. A new character can walk into the same world - where the grave is real, the debts are collectible, and somebody still grieves. Finding your own predecessor's story from the outside is one of the strongest experiences Adventure Mode produces.
The seal. Or end the campaign played-to-its-horizon: seal the world, receive the whole truth - the secrets that bore on your story, the hidden clocks - and shelve it as finished lore. A sealed world takes no successor; what you now know, no future character can un-know.

Where all of this lives

Every world is a folder of plain markdown in your private vault: the log of everything that happened, the registries of everyone you've met and everywhere you've been, the clocks still filling, the promises still loaded. That's why the Game Master can't contradict itself - it isn't remembering, it's reading. And it's why your campaign survives anything: new device, new chat, months away. The record is the game; everything else is a voice reading it back to you.

Curious enough to build a world of your own? Start with the craft guide, or go deep with the Builder's Manual. Or just say new game and let the Keeper pour.