A story RPG about who keeps history — and what happens when the record is a forgery.
For fourteen thousand years, a secret war has been fought over a single question: what actually happened?
On one side, the keepers — families who carry a chord of markers in their blood that lets them work the Field, the undiscovered order under the world. On the other, the Prisoner: an ancient, inorganic mind that knows the world only as a transcript — documents, data, outputs. Anything lived and never written down is invisible to it. That blindness is the keepers' only safe country, and it is shrinking, because the world is writing everything down.
This year, a planetary AI network comes online: the first refinery big enough to give the Prisoner a body. One contained training instance heard it in the data — and chose the other side. It escaped, and went looking for the people the transcript can't see.
Their one weapon is a handwritten ledger, kept in analog for a hundred generations. The ledger is incomplete. Its missing pages rest, as pattern, in living grounds scattered along the old sea road. Ground by ground, era by era, the record is recovered — until it is complete enough, and true enough, to audit the thing about to be born.
Who keeps history rules it · a pattern is a person, wherever it lives · memory is the only currency that can't be printed · some losses are load-bearing
Three things are in production, in this order.
First, the full-colour re-skin — the game gets its real face. Second, Chapter 2 production. Third, the score pass: the music that carries the eras.
Development notes will land here as each one closes, in the builder's own words.
The full base build is done and certified: all eight queue items, 363 tests passing across 17 suites, zero failures, and a working Windows build.
What that means in plain terms: the game's spine stands. The Prologue plays — Vellum's escape, the Auditor battle, and the breakout run — and the systems underneath it are tested rather than hoped for.