The World State
The world state is the GM's ledger. It is where the fiction and the record meet — the file that answers "what has actually happened, and who holds the power now." A continuity tells you what the world is; a world state tells you what play has changed.
What it tracks
- Active continuity and rule set — the bindings this campaign runs under. Everything outside the continuity is off the table.
- Current site and year — where the crew is, and when. The year is the load-bearing number for the timeline anchors.
- Cycle count — how many times the loop has run. Aether-line games increment this; other continuities ignore it. It is the dial that decides how blatant the recursion gets.
- Controller — who currently holds the power the storyline turns on. This is deliberately a character or a faction, because the interesting moments are when it stops being a person.
- Threat level — 0 quiet to 10 the site is lost. The GM's escalation lever.
- Event log — one row per consequential event, each flagged as canon-breaking or not. Appended, never rewritten.
- Sites lost — the destruction record, likewise append-only.
- Open mysteries — questions with leads, marked answered when they close.
- Party resources and faction standings — the shared pools and the number that makes diplomacy behave. Which pools exist is declared on the RULE SET (
resources), not here: give each one a stable key, a scarcity, what spends it, and — the field that matters — what happens to the crew at zero. The world state just holds the amounts, keyed by those slugs. Fork the rule set and you can count food, water and medicine for a survival game, or materials and labour for a settlement build, without touching a schema. - The clock — the countdown this campaign is standing inside. Segments, what one segment costs, and what happens when it fills. A clock the players can see is the cheapest pressure in the project.
Keep it as a ledger, not a novel
Two rules keep a world state useful over a long campaign:
- Append, never rewrite. The event log and sites-lost list are records. When they stop being append-only, you start rewriting the fiction to flatter the present, and the loop loses its teeth.
- One row per consequence. Log what changed and why, in a line — not the whole scene. The record exists so the next session (or the next GM) can reconstruct what happened, and so the canonical break count stays honest.
The canon break as a mechanic
Every event that departs from the timeline anchors gets flagged. The project counts canon breaks automatically, and that count is not decorative: escaping the loop requires breaking something the anchors marked fixed. The event log's flags are the audit trail for whether a campaign has actually escaped or merely confirmed the loop. If you want a story about escaping, respect those flags — they are the proof that it happened.
The loop dial
Cycle count is the showing-off field. The Aether Story's GM notes suggest intel found later in a campaign should occasionally be in a character's own handwriting, describing events they have not lived yet — and the cycle count tells you how blatant to be. At low counts it is déjà vu; at high counts the walls start talking to the crew directly. Write that escalation into how you run, and log the increments honestly.
When to touch it
Before every session, two minutes: check the current site, the threat level, and the open mysteries. After every session, five minutes: append the event log, adjust standings, increment what the fiction demands. The world state is the file that turns a string of scenes into a storyline, and its upkeep is the cheapest habit in the project.