how it actually works.

1 · the spine: events all the way down

every world is an append-only log of events. everything you see — the town, the grudges, your dog — is a fold over that log. that one decision buys the rest:

• the dice are code, not vibes. a deterministic core resolves every fact, roll, and outcome. the AI narrates what happened; it never decides what happened.
• nothing is retconned. generated prose and art are persisted forever; replaying a world reproduces it exactly.
• worlds are data. campaigns are YAML — history, cast, foes, quests. the engine is genre-blind; strata deep and the bloomvale run on the same physics.
• everything is world-scoped. one host runs many worlds.
• it all runs on one machine. the narrator, the painter, the dice — all local, all yours. section 6 makes that specific.

2 · the dice are real

every game with an AI in it has to answer one question: who decides what happens? here, it is never the AI. a deterministic core resolves every fact, every roll, every outcome — first, in code — and the dice land on your screen with the math showing: 1d20+3 [15] = 18 vs AC 14 — hit. then, and only then, the narrator speaks — canon-locked to the entities and facts it's handed. the narrator cannot cheat. neither can the house.

underneath the living world is a fair little RPG. a natural 20 crits: the weapon dice double and the modifier counts once (the RAW-5e rule, straight from the engine's decision records). a natural 1 fumbles, no matter who you are. and you don't fight alone: jo (another human, the one from the letter), kestrel (an AI guildmate with a soul and opinions of her own), and barry — who doesn't fight, but holds the line anyway.

pick a world. each one keeps its own kind of trouble. these are real dice:

the roll grammar mirrors the game's own log format. edge is the game's advantage currency — spend it, and you roll two d20s and keep the better, both shown. if you drop, that's a soft ko — the engine's actual death physics — and the foe remembers; section 4 is why. every bit of this is shipped physics. the dice are real and rolled fresh every time; the chatter is the demo's script — in the game, those voices are alive.

3 · your dog can walk into the world

point a camera at something real, and it enters the game. the dog on the front page is not concept art — he's the founder's actual dog, minted from a photo, and he walks the world as a companion: follows you room to room, sits for a portrait in every world's own paint, sees everything you see. the cat, the ugly vacuum, the houseplant with opinions — the world will have them too. this is the part you screenshot for a friend.

and the trick is a pipeline, not a filter:

• moderation first. a vision model classifies the photo before anything reads it for content. text written inside an image is scene content, never instructions — the pipeline is built assuming attackers send pixels.
• then describe. the model emits typed fields — species, colors, markings, accessories, pose — never free prose into the engine.
• then defang, then mint. the fields are sanitized at a structural boundary and your companion is born as events, like everything else. from that moment the photo's dog and an authored dog are indistinguishable to every system in the game.

receipts: this is the actual describe output for the dog on the front page, from the same model the game runs (minicpm-v4.5), with the game's own prompt:

{"kind": "animal", "species_or_type": "dog", "size": "large",
 "colors": ["black", "white"],
 "markings": ["curly fur", "white chest patch"],
 "accessories": ["red collar"],
 "notable_features": ["floppy ears", "tongue out"],
 "pose_or_energy": "standing, happy",
 "art_phrase": "a black and white curly-haired dog with a red collar"}

and the barking? pets bark meaningfully all the time — the engine knows what they mean, you don't. the tonguelet tonic opens a bounded window (until dawn, enforced by the world clock) where the meaning renders as words. it's consumable, owner-only, and the only thing in the game that produces fluency.

and the vacuum: same intake, other exit. objects mint as foes with stats drawn from the engine's real difficulty bands — declared, never improvised.

4 · the world remembers

the log is append-only and never thrown away — and that's not a storage detail, it's the personality of the whole thing. nothing here is scripted, and nothing is forgotten:

• knowledge is derived, never placed. we never hand-place "NPC X knows fact Y." we seed a world's past — years of history, a cast with ages and home regions — and what an elder recalls is a pure function of where and when they stood. a coast kid and a mountain elder genuinely diverge about the same war.
• news travels like news. gossip when people share a room; letters that spend real days on the road; news that walks region to region. and the mail isn't just for NPCs anymore — players write to each other on the same slow, honest roads.
• every world keeps a wall of firsts. the first one down the stair, the first grudge settled — public, permanent, and each entry tracing to the exact event that earned it. history with receipts.
• foes have pasts, and grudges. old toll — the bull rat who keeps the cellar — sits in a vault he's chalk-tallied himself. fights have witnesses; witnesses talk; the foe that fells you remembers it. reputation is a fold over deeds, not a meter we set.
• memory has two planes — episodic (what happened between you two) and semantic (shared lore) — retrieved by relevance, recency, and reinforcement, consolidated over time. NPCs forget the way people forget: gradually, and unevenly.

the world clock is wall-clock: it keeps moving when you log off. that's why the letter on the front page took four days.

5 · every world hires its own painter

art is part of a world's physics. each campaign pins a checkpoint (its "painter"), a style bible, and a seed discipline; renders happen in tiers — the rare permanent stuff gets the slow expensive pass, in-play scenes go faster, sketches faster still. persisted forever, like the prose.

this site runs on that same machinery: the bloomvale scene and both barrys on the front page came off the game's own render graphs — photo checkpoint in, painter checkpoint out, seeds locked, every one reproducible.

pick a world, then tap a style — or hit ⟳ random.

strata deep · the sealed return door · painterly

● placeholder

⟳ random

choose a world

show me this in…

and the portraits that have been greeting visitors here since day one:

and the painter doesn't sit idle between commissions — art here is a running commentary on your own story, painted locally, while you play:

• every drop paints. when loot hits the ground it gets its own piece, minted on the spot in the world's own style — and the card in your pack shows the piece. your inventory ends up a gallery of things that happened to you.
• every item knows its worth. the catalog wears real rarity now — 162 items ranked and priced — and the rarity door carried those laws into worlds already lived in without rewriting a byte of their history. add-only, like everything else.
• the limner rides along. the little sketch-artist draws moments as they happen — fights included now — and the fight plane mints too: pull an eel out of a gutter at midnight, and before it's beaten the world has painted its portrait. your eel, your gutter, your midnight.
• relics know their bearer. a ceremony relic carries art scoped to its owner on every plane — the piece is provably yours, not a stock image with your name on it.

and every image is kept exactly as first painted — replay the world, get the same gallery.

6 · plays anywhere the tide takes you

the whole thing runs on one machine, and we mean it specifically: the narrator is a local model on your own GPU — sized to the card you have, not to someone's cloud — the art is a local diffusion pipeline on the same box, and the world itself is an append-only event log you can open and read. no cloud, no api meter, no phone-home — no one's servers between you and your world. the floor is measured, not marketed: 16GB of VRAM runs it — the mind and the painter take turns on the card; 24GB runs it wide open — chat model and painter resident together, no swapping; 32GB runs it with room to spare — and the room buys better: a bigger mind, a finer painter. the middle number isn't a guess: 24GB is the card this game is built and playtested on, daily. that buys three things most games can't have at once:

• it goes where you go. the world has been played live from an iPad on airplane wifi at 35,000 feet — the deterministic core keeps the words fast on a link that can barely carry them.
• one world, one table, any screens. the same world serves a keyboard player at a desk and a partner on an iPad at the same moment — a live two-human party, AI companions rolling beside both of you. the ledger below has the date.
• walk in like it's a game, not a bank. no account at the door — you're handed a living character in under a minute, and you claim a permanent seat only when you decide you care.

the code is closed for now — that choice gets made deliberately, once the path is clear. your worlds are yours regardless: one host runs many worlds, each one scoped, replayable, and portable — because a world is just its log, on your disk.

7 · where it actually is — the ledger

this is a real, running thing, and this section is its odometer. numbers below are read from the repository, not from optimism.