A state engine the AI cannot touch
Where you are, what's in your pack, who is bleeding and how badly — held in a
running state of its own, outside the narrator's reach. The AI is told what is
true. It doesn't decide it, it doesn't hold it in its head, and it can't
quietly revise it between one message and the next.
A rules engine, separate again
Whether you hit, how far you moved, what that critical failure costs you —
decided in code, before a word of the story is written. And the ruleset is a
component rather than the foundation: Pathfinder 2e Remaster for the alpha,
with room for 5e and whatever else earns a place, running on the same engine
underneath.
A memory engine that holds a grudge
Characters and NPCs remember what they did and what you did. Walk into the same
shop fifty sessions later and the shopkeep knows you — warmly, or coldly, or
with a hand near the counter, depending entirely on how you left things. In
build now, on top of the ledger the game already writes.
Open world — go anywhere, do anything
No rails and no required next scene. Follow a rumour, take a job, or walk the
other way entirely. Quests are things you pick up on the road, not a track you
are placed on. And if what you want tonight is to go kill rats in a cellar for
coin, that is a perfectly good evening.
Your companions are real characters
They have their own sheets, their own spells and their own tactics, and they
take their turns under exactly the rules you do. They act on what they can
actually see, and they'll argue with a bad plan. Take the reins from any of
them whenever you want.
A whole session in ten spare minutes
Built for a phone. Type what you do, read what happens. Put it down in the
middle of a fight and pick it up on a laptop three days later, on the same
square, facing the same wolf.