What became true here
A Chronicle is the durable record of one lived continuity: its people, events, discoveries, promises, costs, and unresolved questions.
The Chronicle Engine
Durable memory. Open possibility.
The engine keeps what became true from becoming negotiable later, while leaving the next honest attempt open.
One boundary to understand first
The engine is not the setting.
The Chronicle Engine records events, claims, identity, relationships, knowledge, and consequences. The manuals author the Tread's setting and table practice. A Chronicle carries both, but neither silently replaces the other.
What may govern every Chronicle
Recognition is an explicit authority act. It promotes a proposition into shared architecture or setting truth; ordinary play, design notes, and implementations do not.
A Chronicle may discover local truth. Recognition changes the shared ground and therefore requires separate authority.
The dependency direction
Philosophy becomes implementation—never the reverse.
Each layer serves the one above it. A useful interface or convenient data model cannot migrate upward and redefine the game's meaning.
Philosophy
The engine is authoritative about what happened and permissive about what may be attempted. Agency remains with the people at the table.
Architecture
Durable truth, authority, knowledge, identity, and chronology receive stable boundaries before any game-specific feature is built.
Behavior
The engine decides how established truth constrains a present attempt without inventing a preferred plot or narrating bookkeeping.
Events
What changes is recorded as an event: a durable difference with cause, participants, knowledge, and consequence.
Frameworks
Reusable structures coordinate discovery, action, relationships, memory, time, pressure, and presentation.
Systems
TREADBOUND rules give those structures setting-specific behavior: the Pulse, Practices, conditions, travel, and resolution.
Implementations
Interfaces, storage, models, and services realize the layers above them. Their convenience cannot rewrite higher truth.
At the table
The machinery stays behind the experience.
Present experience
Narrate the smallest truthful portion of a moment that lets a player inhabit it and act.
Method first
An intention becomes actionable when the player describes how the character pursues it.
Resolve honestly
Use uncertain resolution only when success and failure are both plausible and the difference matters.
Let consequence stand
Changed relationships, access, danger, cost, and knowledge remain part of the next moment.
A mark is evidence
Knowing the way is not the same as knowing where you are.
The Chronicle can preserve a route, a mark, and a memory while still requiring the present place to be recognized through evidence.
Read the Tread Master's Guide