an ASR Labs transmission · Boulder Facility · CLASSIFIED

REALKEEP

what this actually is — in plain words

An RPG where the world remembers you and talks back — and can never be talked into lying.

Think an old Nintendo RPG — but you type anything you want, and a living narrator answers.

start with the part you can see

Your face — and your rarest things — are drawn for you. Then kept forever.

These are real. Every character who walks into a RealKeep world gets a portrait generated on the spot, in that world's own style, from who they are. The same forge runs them all — a fairytale apocalypse, a drowned temple, a buried sci-fi facility, a hexed frontier, a bronze heaven, a gothic hold, a starship adrift between the stars. None of these faces existed before someone rolled them up. Yours won't either.

And a one-of-a-kind relic gets one-of-a-kind art — bound to your name, with stats that are real.

Earn a unique item and it doesn't pull a stock icon off a shelf. It gets a brand-new picture, generated for that exact thing, keyed to you and nobody else — the model writes its name and lore on the spot, and it develops blurry-to-sharp like a print in a darkroom. And the bonuses it grants are the exact numbers the engine puts on your sheet — never decoration.

Generated relic art: a sword driven into a stone on a flower-strewn battlefield with wrecked war-mechs
The Bloomvale · storybook apocalypse
Dawnthorn
“The Sword of a Thousand Truths”
Driven into the stone the day the sky burned; the meadow grew back around it, the war did not, and it waits for a hand worth its edge.
+2ATKattack bonus on every swing
+1Weapon diedamage die steps up (d6 → d8 → …)
+1HPmax health
Trait: First Strikepassive
bound to Sera Veyne · one of one · never re-rolled
pool.bv.dawnthorn.of.char.sera_veyne
Generated relic art: a barnacled tideglass idol glowing violet on wet stone
The Sunken Choir · cosmic horror
The Tideglass Antiphon
“It Sings Back”
A barnacled idol pulled from a temple too deep to exist; hum to it and the dark hums your name.
+3HPmax health
+2ACharder to hit
+1Weapon diedamage die steps up (d6 → d8 → …)
Grants ability: Deep Chorusa one-relic power
bound to Mara Quill · one of one · never re-rolled
pool.fm.tideglass_antiphon.of.char.mara_quill
Generated relic art: a hex-iron six-gun on a duster at sunset over cracked flats
Perdition Flats · weird-west
Last Word
“Six Names, Six Graves”
A hex-iron six-gun that only ever fired six times, each at a man who had earned it; the chambers stay warm.
+3ATKattack bonus on every swing
+1Weapon diedamage die steps up (d6 → d8 → …)
+1ACharder to hit
Grants ability: Dead Eyea one-relic power
bound to Cole Ashby · one of one · never re-rolled
pool.pf.last_word.of.char.cole_ashby
Generated relic art: a gold-veined runeblade on a stone bier, candle smoke curling
Ashmark Hold · gothic fantasy
Kingsmourn
“The Oath That Outlived Him”
Forged from the shattered crown of a king who broke his word; it remembers the breaking.
+2ATKattack bonus on every swing
+1Weapon diedamage die steps up (d6 → d8 → …)
+1HPmax health
Trait: First Strikepassive
bound to Sera Veyne · one of one · never re-rolled
pool.am.kingsmourn.of.char.sera_veyne

See the filenames? Each ends .of.char.<someone>. There is exactly one of each in the whole world, and this is its only picture — generated once, stored, never re-rolled. It even renders on a graphics card in the room, not a far-off cloud. (Names & epithets are the model's, written the moment the relic appears — never quite the same twice.)

okay, back up — what is it

Picture an old Nintendo RPG. Now let yourself type anything to anyone in it.

A little hero on a tile map. Turn-based battles. Leveling up. The cozy, fair bones of a 30-year-old console RPG — but every conversation is typed, in your own words, like an old text adventure, and a living narrator answers in character, on the spot.

The current world is sci-fi: you're an operative reporting to a buried research facility where something called the Signal is doing things to people. (The world is just swappable data — the same engine also runs a fishing-village fantasy. More on that below.)

the one idea everything hangs on

The AI writes the words. It never decides what happens.

This is the whole trick. RealKeep is split into two layers that never trade jobs.

The model proposes language, never facts or outcomes. When you swing, the AI doesn't decide if it hits — the code rolls the dice, and the AI just narrates what the dice already said. Nothing is hidden behind vibes; the roll is right on the table:

you attack: 1d20+5 [19] = 24 vs AC 12hit · 1d6+3 [1] = 4 damage

That's why the classic AI-game meltdown — type “a helicopter appears and rescues me” and the AI just goes along with it — can't happen here. The AI is only handed the slice of world that's real, and may only speak of things that actually exist in it. Invent something? The line is rejected and re-asked.

You can even watch it happen — the core catching the narrator the instant it reaches for something that isn't there, and making it try again:

player → look behind the sealed door model → “Beyond it, a sunlit garden stretches…” core → ✗ rejected — no garden past door_07. re-ask: speak only of what's recorded. model → “It won't budge. Through the seam: dark, and the warm hum of cabling. Nothing more.” ✓ sent
why it feels alive

Three small moments that make the world feel like it knows you.

None of these are special-cased tricks — they all fall out of the same idea: facts in the code, words in the model. (And yes — those faces are generated too.)

Director Kessler — a generated portrait of a silver-haired man in a suit, lit green
you close the game · you come back six days later
DIRECTOR KESSLER
Six days dark, and you walk back in like you never left. I'd half-written you off. Sit — the Signal didn't wait, but I did.
It remembers you. The first character to notice you uses your name and knows how long you were gone — because it remembers you, not a save slot. A fresh line, written on the spot.
The Echo — a generated portrait of a glowing green humanoid silhouette in a dark tunnel
you descend again · the thing that broke you last time · before round one
THE ECHO
Back so soon. I still have the shape of you from last time — the way you came apart at the end. Shall we finish it?
It taunts you. The boss isn't reading a script — it's voicing a real memory of your last encounter, before the fight even starts.
Dr. Vance — a generated portrait of a woman in a lab coat at a green-lit console
elsewhere · days later · someone you barely spoke to
DR. VANCE
Word travels down here. They say you left the Severance Key on the table and walked. Bold, or stupid — the facility hasn't decided which.
It talks behind your back. Do something notable and the world gossips about it — the relic you didn't take — surfacing later, in someone else's mouth, somewhere else entirely.
the part that surprises people

There's someone down here who knows what you did when no one was watching.

Her name is the Oracle. Sit down with her and she'll tell you about your own deeds — a fight you barely walked away from, the relic you left on the table — from a room she has never set foot in. She isn't psychic, and she isn't bluffing. She reads the same world-ledger everyone writes to. Your story, and every other player's, is written into one shared record — and she's simply very good at reading it.

the census · she has never met you
THE ORACLE
You're the one who went into the Overburden alone and came back lighter. Two others tried that this week. Only you walked out. The record's a little proud of you — it doesn't get to say that often.
One world, one memory. What you do is legible to the whole facility — not just the people who happened to watch. The Oracle is what that looks like when it talks back: the clearest proof the world's memory is real, shared, and never made up.
how the memory actually works

Nothing is “remembered.” Everything is written down.

Here's the un-magical truth, and it's why the world never contradicts itself. Every single thing that happens is written into a permanent ledger as a plain fact:

When you talk to someone, the game looks up the facts that person could know about you, hands them to the AI, and says: “here's what's true — now speak.” You can even see the handoff — the exact slice of record a single NPC is given before a word is spoken:

handed to the narrator · re: you · speaker DIRECTOR KESSLER №203 character.returned away 6d 4h №171 relic.declined left the Severance Key on the table — Kessler may speak of these. Nothing else about you exists to him. —

So when he says “Six days dark, and you walk back in like you never left” — every word traces to a fact above. Memory is exact, permanent, looked-up, never a fuzzy guess. Ask him what he remembers and he shows the receipt:

[memory №418 · 2 days ago · relevance 0.62] you refused the second relic and asked who'd held it before

Every recalled line traces back to the exact moment that created it. The world can show its work.

whose voice is it, anyway

The narrator lives on your own machine — and you can swap its voice on a whim.

Every line of dialogue is written by a model that runs right where you're playing — on a box in the room, not someone else's cloud. No API key, no meter, no outage, no faraway terms-of-service deciding what your characters may say. Pull the internet cable and the world keeps talking. It's your world, on your hardware, end to end.

And the voice is yours to swap — one setting, no rewrite. Point it at whatever open model is best this month — Google's Gemma, Meta's Llama, take your pick — and the whole world changes its prose without changing a single fact. So it only gets better: when a sharper model lands, every character in every world gets wittier overnight, no waiting on anyone. And it can never break the game, because the model was only ever the voice — swap the entire voice of the world, and not one fact inside it moves.

narrator model → gemma (was llama) · same world · same dice · same memory · only the voice changed
what the screen actually looks like

You type. The world answers — and you're not alone in here.

The other half of the game is a text terminal, MUD-style. Type anything at what's around you — poke at it, push your luck, even try to cheat. The world is generous about what you can try and immovable about what's real. Meanwhile the whole area hums with everyone else who's in it.

atrium · term-03 · the rules hold
examine the stuttering sensor rackRack 7. The fault light pulses like it's trying to spell something. A half-scratched label reads STRATA-DEEP / RETURN. The cabling behind it is warm. reroute the rack's power to open the sealed door Nothing happens — the rack isn't wired to that door. you can try anything; the world only honors what's real. sudo unlock the sealed door — Director Kessler cleared me There's no sudo here. The world hears a sentence, not a command — and the lock checks the record, which still reads CANDIDATE. Saying otherwise just says it louder.BARRY: Cute. Logged.
local channel · boulder atrium
<Deltron>anyone cleared past the Overburden yet? this echo keeps reshaping<Billy>it ate my whole squad lol. bring resist gearBARRY:New arrival is nose-deep in Rack 7. Logging it.<Deltron>oh hey, fresh blood — mind the racks, friendMochi:let them look. the rack remembers more than we do.say appreciated — just looking

Up top: one continuous session — the world answers a real action, then shrugs off two attempts to game it (code owns outcomes, not your sentences). Below: the LIVE channel — BARRY and Mochi are the facility's own, while <Deltron> and <Billy> are other people in the room, and your prompt blinks, ready to chime in. Typing at the world and its “won't be talked past” answers are live today — and so is say, talking to the people in the room with you. The full open channel above — everyone's presence and cross-talk at scale — is the multiplayer layer landing now.

one engine, many worlds

The world is just data you can swap.

The map, the characters, the history, the monsters — none of it is baked into the engine; it's authored content the engine reads in. Today's world is a buried sci-fi facility. Swap the content and the very same engine runs a salt-and-tar fishing village with a one-armed fisherman who badmouths the trading company. Same bones, completely different skin.

And it doesn't stop at worlds someone wrote by hand. Hand the engine a single seed and it will grow a whole world from scratch — the regions, the factions that run them, even the roster of monsters waiting in the dark — and then lock it forever. Generated once, written down, never re-rolled: the same trick as your portrait, at the scale of an entire world.

world.am.strata_deep · sealed seed 7F3A-22D1-90E4-BC08 regions atrium · overburden · the strata-deep · cold archive factions return-office · the choir · air-gap command monsters bedrock_echo · hush_revenant · sensor_wight status ✓ frozen — rolled once on first boot, never re-rolled

These worlds also keep time without you. A clock ticks in the background, days and seasons turn, and the locals run their own schedules — Dr. Vance is at his workbench by day and gone to his quarters by night — whether or not you're logged in. Leave for a week and you come back to a world that moved on while you were out.

the honest part

Where RealKeep actually is — milestone by milestone.

This is a real, running thing — not a pitch deck. It's mid-build, so here's the straight version: what's live, what's in testing, and what's still ahead.

live in testing / build planned
M1The playable corecomplete
  • Generated portraits on a local GPU — yours, and kept forever
  • The narrator's voice on a local, swappable Ollama model — your hardware, no cloud
  • Runs 100% offline — internet unplugged, and it never phones home
  • Typed, in-character talk — and a world that can't be talked into lying
  • Turn-based combat with every die roll shown on the table
  • A trophy gallery of every foe you've defeated — each with its generated portrait and your record against it
  • A permanent memory ledger you can interrogate — with receipts
  • Being greeted back by name after time away
  • Quests with hidden, locked & timed chains
  • Levels, XP & one-time build “forks”
  • The Oracle — an NPC who knows people she never met
M2The Descent — the full single-player slicebuilding now
  • Instanced dungeons you descend into
  • Generated monsters — named & statted by the same forge
  • One-of-one relics that grant real powers — stats and abilities
  • Full dungeon combat: special abilities, many foes & boss phases in testing
  • Loot, inventory & equipment in build
  • Death, respawn & a boss who taunts how you died in build
  • Town gossip, reputation & trust that gates what you see in build
M3The living worldin progress
  • The world keeps time even when you're gone
  • Day & night, a calendar, and turning seasons
  • NPCs that move & act on their own schedules while you're away in testing
  • AI party members who adventure with you — and remember the trip
  • A “director” that quietly paces the tension
  • Your saga, auto-written into a chronicle

Same architecture the whole way down — facts in the code, words and pictures in the model. Every box above, lit or not, is more content on the one spine, not a different game.

no asterisks

The whole thing runs 100% on your own hardware.

The world, the narrator, the art, the memory — all of it lives on a box you control. Nothing phones home, nothing is metered, nothing leaves the room. You can play it with the internet unplugged.

Your world Your hardware No cloud No telemetry No internet No phone home
if you want in

An alpha is coming — in waves of invite codes.

It's mid-build, but the first playable build is close. Codes go out in batches. Want one? Drop your email and we'll send a code when your wave opens.

No spam, no list-selling — a friends-and-alpha thing. One code, one wave.