The Memory System

This is the part of the system most worth understanding before you change anything, because it is the part that decides whether a campaign still makes sense at turn three hundred.

Three pieces and no more

• The Campaign State. One pinned file holding the live picture. Current scene, where the party is, the world date, party state, and the Promises list. It also holds the Journal, which gains exactly one line per turn.
• Chronicles. When the journal grows past its fold line, its oldest stretch is retold as prose in a Chronicle file, together with the facts that still matter. Chronicles are never edited after they close and never deleted.
• Story Arcs. Open questions with stakes, each carrying its own development trail and a hidden truth underneath.

Everything else in the workspace is memory too. Characters, locations, items, and Lore all carry their own history in their own fields, and the GM is instructed to search before inventing anything.

Why it is shaped this way

The number of pieces is deliberately small, because every extra piece is another thing that can be dropped on a turn where the GM is short of room.

The journal is a single text field that gets one line appended at the bottom, and that shape was chosen because it is the operation an AI GM performs most reliably. Appending a line to the end of a string works. Rewriting a structured list, copying entries between files, deriving an identifier by counting, and executing the fourth step of a multi step ritual all fail often enough to lose history.

If you extend the memory system, hold to that. Prefer a text field appended at one end over a list that has to be maintained. Prefer a dedicated instruction with a condition in its name over an extra step tacked onto an existing one.

The cap is not the enforcement line

The journal field holds nine thousand characters, and the fold fires at thirty five hundred. That gap is on purpose.

A hard limit must never be the thing that triggers the cleanup, because when a save fails for length, the only recovery available is shrinking the field, and shrinking the field destroys history. Give any growing field slack between the point where it should be tidied and the point where it physically cannot grow.

The fold line is also a cost control. The Campaign State is pinned, so every character sitting in the journal is in front of the GM on every call it makes during a turn, and the whole field is written out again each time a line is added. Folding early keeps that weight down. A low fold line means more Chronicles, which costs nothing, because a Chronicle is read only when someone goes looking for it.

How folding works

The Chronicle is created first, holding what stretch it covers, the retold prose, and every fact that still matters as one line each. Open promises, debts, standing changes, who died, who left.

Only after that file exists do the folded lines come off the top of the journal, and the newest lines are kept word for word rather than summarized. Creating the record before deleting the source is the whole safety property, and it is why the instruction is written in that order.

Arcs and their trail

When an arc moves, the previous latest line is promoted to the top of the development trail before the new line overwrites latest. One motion, nothing to compose, nothing to lose. The trail never shrinks, and a trail shorter than it was means something was erased.

What not to add

Two things get proposed often and both have been tried and removed.

A master index of tags maintained on one file never survives, because keeping an index current means copying data between files every turn. File search over well described files covers the same need.

Identifiers derived by counting drift the moment one turn goes wrong, and then every later identifier is wrong too. If you need a sequence, read the last entry and go one past it rather than counting how many exist.