Player-facing truth
What the game currently does and what a player can reasonably depend on.
PUBLIC TECHNICAL DOCUMENTATION
How the world works.
Fortune & Gallows is built around free-form player actions, revisioned authoritative state, historically grounded world data, and a narrative layer that is not allowed to invent persistent reality on its own.
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Technical transparency without exposing the control room.
This portal explains the architecture and design contracts that materially shape the player experience. It is intentionally different from both the Player Guide and Black Keel Games' private engineering manual.
System architecture
How natural-language actions move through bounded narrative reasoning, validation, and authoritative commit.
Historical world model
How locations, people, ships, events, evidence, dates, and consequences are represented as structured data.
CURRENT SYSTEM CONTRACT
Five ideas explain most of Fortune & Gallows.
1 · You write what your character attempts.No required verb list and no fixed numbered-choice interface.
2 · The server builds canonical context.Current location, revision, world state, visible scene data, relationships, time, inventory, and supported mechanics constrain resolution.
3 · The narrative layer is bounded.It may describe the result and propose supported operations, but it cannot make unsupported persistent outcomes true through prose alone.
4 · Persistent changes are validated and committed authoritatively.Successful committed turns advance revisioned campaign state; failed pre-commit turns should not silently advance it.
5 · History remains a world constraint.Player agency changes the character's life and local consequences without granting the player authorship over fixed historical anchors.
STATUS LANGUAGE
We distinguish what exists from what is merely intended.
Documentation claims are labeled so development doctrine is not mistaken for deployed behavior.
Verified CurrentDesign ContractDevelopment OnlyPlannedHistorical RecordUnverified
Counts are snapshots, not promises. Registry and event totals shown in these pages describe the audited project state on the stated date. They will change as research and implementation continue.
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