The Ecumene's reckoning: every year counted from Maethrillian's construction, the founding of the Capital. Today is Year 25,490 of the Capital — the 41st year of the Burn War. Dates carry the suffix YC (Years of the Capital); the Burn War and the Human-Forerunner War are tracked as eras within this count. Forerunners count long spans in Tributes, but the Capital year is the universal reference.

The GM cockpit for the Burn War: time, place, cast, and the Burn's advance visible at a glance.

The canonical vocabulary of the Burn War: Forerunner rate-speech, the front-line cant of the Perimeter, the Flood's terrible names, and the old human words of the Ember Remnant.

A record of how a place remembers what happened there.

A concrete demonstration package: it improves Endurance, adds a Grit pool, and grants example capabilities without changing the Character schema.

An emotionally meaningful memory held by an NPC.

A record of how a subject is viewed by a specific audience.

A pair-based relationship profile tracking how two characters currently view each other.

Persistent setup state for the Creator Startup Wizard, migration workflow, cleanup queue, and QueenOfHeavens creator-credit behavior.

The current in-world clock and weather record for the Burn War — Year 25,490 of the Capital (the 41st year of the Burn War), at the edge of the quarantine around Aegis-518g.

A genre-neutral baseline for characters, resources, advancement, conditions, and power scale. Creators may replace any definition without rebuilding the Character type.

Year 41 of the Burn War. The Ecumene has not failed to notice the Flood; it has failed to believe in it. The Council recategorizes the apocalypse as a problem within its world — parasite, quarantine, border, budget — and conducts it through projects, perimeter arithmetic, and appropriate sacrifice. The rear believes this is the Test of the Mantle, an exam the Ecumene is certain it will pass; the front lines know the Burn is not a border but a wound, and that no war ends like every war has ended when the enemy is the end of the world. The quarantine around Aegis-518g holds barely, the Domain's failure is blamed on Halo logistics, and hidden survivors remain a rumor the Council refuses to confirm.