A dystopia where the wrong sentence is evidence
You decide what the city is allowed to have said. The work is steady, the pay is good, and you have started removing your own name from the record one entry at a time.
No account, no card, nothing to install. The world's lore is already built, so it starts in seconds.
Surveillance is only frightening if it accumulates
What you have said and done is kept, so risk compounds instead of resetting between scenes. A story that forgets what you did last chapter cannot make you careful in this one.
The world
In the Citadel, the Ministry hears everything and forgives nothing. When archivist Wren is ordered to erase a banned memory, she reads it first—and can no longer pretend she didn't.
The Glass Citadel is a transparent city of perfect surveillance, where the Ministry curates not just what is said but what is remembered. Dissent is edited out of history, and the editors themselves are watched most closely of all.
Who is in it
- The Ministry of Record
- the bureaucracy that controls all memory and history.
- The Unwritten
- an underground that smuggles forbidden memories to safety.
- Citadel Wardens
- the enforcers who arrest and 'correct' the deviant.
Where you go
- The Archive Spire
- the glass tower where memory is catalogued and deleted.
- The Greywards
- the unmonitored slums the Ministry pretends don't exist.
- The Quiet Room
- where the 'corrected' go and do not come back the same.
What already happened
- The Great Redaction
- the purge that erased a decade of the city's history.
- The First Leak
- the day a banned memory first escaped the Archive.
Who you can play
-
Wren Calder Defecting archivist
A quiet, careful woman discovering that the truth she buried won't stay buried in her.
At the start: a loyal functionary who has just read one truth too many.
-
Old Sef Memory smuggler
A weathered smuggler who has outlived everyone foolish enough to be idealistic.
At the start: a cynical survivor who trusts no one, least of all a censor.
Or write your own character — the setup form takes a name, a background and what you are good at, and the game master works from that instead.
How a turn works
- You say what your character does, in your own words.
- What you attempted is weighed against your character sheet and the state of the scene — and the outcome is settled before the scene is written, so the part telling the story does not get to decide that you succeeded.
- The game master narrates what happened, grounded in the world's own characters, factions and places, and remembers it for the rest of the run.