Scenes & the Journal

The scene loop

Stories are played in scenes — bounded moments of place, time, and stakes. Each scene moves through a small loop (the phase chip shows where you are):

  1. ✦ Setup — only at campaign start: premise, threads, characters, chaos.
  2. ◇ Frame — establish where the scene opens and what’s at stake. At higher chaos, the scene test may alter or interrupt what you intended.
  3. ◆ Play — act, ask the oracle, interpret, scribe. Most of the game lives here.
  4. ↻ Transition — close the scene, adjust chaos, do the bookkeeping, and frame the next one.

Ending a scene

  • Assistant mode — you decide when a scene is done: ⤳ Wrap & start new scene. The assistant scribes a closing beat, reviews the scene for thread and cast changes (as proposals you confirm), then Begin Scene N → opens the next chapter.
  • Game Master / Autonomous modes — the GM paces scenes itself, wrapping after a handful of beats, shifting chaos by how the scene went, and framing the next scene from what just happened.

What gets journaled

Everything notable lands in the campaign journal, each entry tagged by who wrote it:

  • Your actions — in GM and Autonomous modes they’re also scribed: rendered into the journaling style as second-person prose, so the story reads as one voice.
  • Oracle rolls — question, table, dice, result.
  • Story prose — the narrative itself, written in your chosen style.
  • System notes — scene markers, chaos shifts.

The story is the prose; the chatter, rolls, and notes are the table-talk around it. The reading view and export show only the prose — your finished story without the scaffolding.

Proposals: suggest-then-confirm

The AI never silently edits your world. When it believes a new thread emerged, a character entered the story, or a thread resolved, it raises a proposal card — New thread:, New character:, Close thread: — and you ✓ accept or ✕ dismiss. The world list only changes by your hand.

Browsing past scenes

The scene bar steps through earlier scenes read-only — reread anything without risk; a Return to current scene link brings you back to the live edge of the story. Writing a new action always returns you to the current scene automatically.