Free World Starter / Version 1
One rule.
A real cost.
A scene that holds.
Begin with something you can read, adapt and carry into your own tools. This example is an AI-assisted original proposal outside official Arcanea canon.
Download the Markdown starterDownload the JSON briefThe world in five signals
- Promise: a coastal mystery about what people choose to remember.
- Rule: a damaged memory can be repaired only with an equally specific memory.
- Cost: the repairer loses their lived connection to what they give.
- Pressure: an archivist wants to preserve her father for a younger brother.
- Visual direction: salt-clouded glass, copper repairs, narrow tide stairs and low morning light.
The repair
At low tide, the archive's windows rang like drinking glasses. Mara set her father's photograph beneath the repair lamp and watched the sea eat another corner of his face.
The keeper placed a copper dish beside it. 'One memory for one memory,' she said. 'Choose something you can bear to lose.' Mara offered the winter she had spent counting ferry departures. Nothing happened. The photograph did not want a season. It wanted a person.
Outside, the tide bell struck. Her younger brother was coming up the stairs with the last of their father's letters. He had never learned to swim; their father had carried him through every flooded street. Mara could still hear the laughter, and that was when the lamp began to warm.
She put both hands over the photograph. The glass filled with a summer afternoon: the harbor steps, her brother's wet hair, their father's shoes held above the water. His face returned to the paper, ordinary and tired and unmistakable. At the same moment, the afternoon emptied out of her. She remembered that it had happened. She could no longer remember being there.
Her brother reached the door. 'You saved him,' he said. Mara looked at the restored face and then at the boy who expected her to smile. 'Tell me about the harbor steps,' she said. He sat beside her. For the first time, she listened to the story as someone who had never heard it.
What the scene demonstrates
The rule becomes visible through an exchange. Mara achieves her immediate goal, but loses an experience she valued. Her brother keeps a memory she can now receive only as a story. The cost changes their relationship and creates a next scene.
Make the method your own.
- Replace the promise and rule with an original idea.
- Name the character who wants something the rule makes difficult.
- Write the decision and its observable consequence.
- Record accepted details and keep new suggestions marked as proposals.
- Export the brief with the scene and ask another person what they understood.
The downloaded starter includes editable records and a personal/commercial adaptation permission for this sample text. It does not grant rights to official Arcanea characters, artwork or trademarks. Model/API use, when you choose it, has its own cost and provider terms.
Inspect the full edition specification