Chronicle is for you if you enjoy exploring fantasy worlds and engaging with big ideas; however, there is also lots of room for introspection and character-driven plot.

The game's thematic core is reflected in its turnsheet structure. Turnsheets will typically be constructed around a confluence of characters’ personal lives, hopes, and aspirations, and their more intellectual research. Turnsheets take place over a three-month, seasonal period in character. Consequently, they will often tend towards a montage of different aspects of characters’ lives in that period, linked thematically, rather than necessarily focusing primarily on a single dramatic event.

Chronicle's narrative logic is naturalistic. Totalising success or failure is less likely than smaller victories, whether personal or political. Whatever mysteries the player characters successfully unravel, whatever changes they bring, there will remain powerful forces pushing in the other direction. In particular, there are many people in the world with firm beliefs beyond the player characters, and we intend to keep this fact in play.

Chronicle is a game about the power of ideas; about research and information; about belief and narrative. It is about how knowledge relates to emotion and the raw, lived experience of life, and about the ways in which it is filtered and controlled by power. It revolves around the tensions in attempts to preserve, catalogue and organise endless diversity, and the endless flow of time. The clash between our effort, our symbols and our explanations; and the endlessly retreating marsh-light of meaning. The sand that slips through our fingers with the wind, back into the hourglass or off somewhere unnameable.

In the world of Chronicle, people believe in many different things, from the powerful, organised religious system of Endring, to the privileging of science and technology above all in Mayton Greynes. In a landscape of changing religious practice, characters will be encouraged to explore what faith means to them, and what – if anything – they believe in, over the course of the game, whether divine or much more ordinary.

In Chronicle’s setting, direct physical violence between humans has been culturally abolished for around a thousand years. This by no means makes it a utopia. Instead, control over information is central, monopolised by archival bureaucracies, corporate copyright and temple-guilds. Authority is enforced primarily through the threat of ostracism and deprivation: demotion, losing jobs, losing partial access to communities of mutual aid. Prisons, police forces and armies do not exist. The game contains a significant focus on social inequality and oppression. This will centre around the suppression and control of knowledge, both within societies and through unequal dynamics between them.

The lack of direct physical violence is intended to allow us to retain a tight focus on our central theme of information, and the intellectual, cultural, emotional and economic violence arising from its control. In terms of gameplay, it is intended to encourage creative solutions to problems, and heighten the de-familiarisation of the world’s ancient history for characters who research it. The reasons that physical violence has ceased so completely will be explored.

Another central theme is scale: Chronicle focuses on a world where people are separated by space, time(-zone) and culture, but bound together by speech and ideas. This is why the game takes place on a forum rather than in the Archive itself. Plotlines will unfold within each region and across them: downtimes will focus players on the affairs of one or perhaps two regions, while uptimes tie the threads together again.

As they research, players will be encouraged to explore both the past and present of the world around them, and reflect on what that might mean for their characters' futures. Just as past civilisations have shaped the present world, so will the present affect the future. Shifting international relations throughout time will be prominent, and plotlines will take place at scales from local and contemporary, to global and historical.

Chronicle aims to explore the interplay between realism, fantasy and magical realism, the mundane and the weird. It is set in a fictional world in some ways like our own: connected through the internet, with the existence of the supernatural a matter of debate and faith. In some ways, the world is very different: people believed to be living gods sit in the internet cafes of Endring, and direct interpersonal violence is a thing of the distant past. The game will grow stranger as the story progresses, unevenly for different players (depending on their Playstyle Quirks and the plotlines they explore), but in ways increasingly difficult to ignore.* The sense of what is real will be tested, and genre boundaries will blur. The game contains elements of psychological horror, on both the fantastic and the realistic levels (in its depiction of social manipulation). That said, it is not primarily a horror game.

*It is possible to go through the game without your character being subjected to any mind-bending effects, although NPCs may lead them to believe that this will not be the case. It will likely not be possible to avoid discussion of others’ experience of these effects.

We intend Chronicle to be largely a PvE game, although conflicts may arise between player characters representing competing factions. Conflict will be verbal or intrigue-based rather than physically violent. In particular, while sharing knowledge has many benefits, it may also have consequences if done indiscreetly. Access to information and resources may be removed, symbolised by a loss of Quirks.

Out of our sprawling archive of inspirations, we've picked a few that best represent how we intend Chronicle to feel.

• The short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, especially ‘The Library of Babel’ (portraying an endless library that contains all possible information). A major inspiration for the Archive.
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, for its portrayal of living gods, religious bureaucracy, esotericism and fantasy academic debate and source criticism. The major inspiration for Endring.
• Disco Elysium, for its portrayal of a fictional world tonally similar to the modern real world, and many of its central themes of strangeness and haunting cultural memory.
• The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin, for the detailed world-building and portrayal of academic cultural exchange between an anarchist and capitalist society.
• A lot of real-world historical documents: plays and epics and ballads and pamphlets and chronicles. Nemeus’s tone and aesthetics are particularly inspired by epic poetry.