People, memory, and simulated lives

This article's status describes its scope. See development status for current limits.

Every NPC is an individual in the simulation, with a persistent identity and a life that extends beyond the moment you meet.

One continuous identity#

A person belongs to the campaign as an individual. Their name, ancestry, occupation, family, faction, age, and life history are part of their record. Returning to a familiar NPC connects you to that same person, including when their visible body has left and returned to the scene. Their existence is part of the world you share.

Personality and purpose#

People have traits, drives, goals, schedules, and remembered events. Ambition, loyalty, greed, courage, piety, and other qualities inform the character layer. The intended depth comes from these qualities meeting a situation: a captain has obligations, a merchant has interests, and a ruler has reasons to care about a changing border.

The people around them#

Family ties and political relationships connect individuals to wider history. Children, parents, houses, officers, claimants, and successors create continuity across generations and changes of leadership. A death can alter a family, vacate an office, and change who has a claim to power. The history of a person is also part of the history of their society.

What they remember about you#

The player-memory system records the name you introduced yourself by, significant conduct, grievances, amends, and a summary of conversations. Those memories enter later dialogue alongside personal standing. Repeated encounters can carry familiarity, trust, resentment, or unresolved tension. A conversation can have an afterlife in your relationship with that person.

Conversation from the same life#

When you speak to an NPC, live AI gives that particular character a voice using their identity, memories, knowledge, and current situation. Their conversational perspective connects to their simulated life. This gives the game room for exchanges shaped by the history between you rather than only by the latest question.

Across distance and time#

The world uses different levels of detail for nearby life, regional activity, and distant affairs. Individual records persist across those changes. A person can belong to a family, hold an office, pursue a goal, and be part of political history beyond the place you are currently watching. The world clock and campaign state connect those scales.

Lives leave a history#

Birth, death, lineage, offices, and remembered events remain meaningful to the campaign. The simulation retains the identities of the dead because other people and institutions can still be connected to them. In a world with magic, even a life that ended may remain relevant to what happens next.

Development scope#

Persistent identity, individual records, player memory, life history, and succession have development implementations. Goal behaviour, physical representation, social consequences, and their integration continue to be expanded and validated. The depth described here is the direction of the person simulation throughout the game.