The Boundaries of the Shared Setting

Part IV — The boundaries of the shared setting

Most of this Guide is craft, and craft is yours to exercise. This part is not. These are the boundaries of the shared setting. They are not yours to move, and a Chronicle that moves one has quietly stopped sharing a setting with everybody else's.

29. What is closed, and stays closed

⚠️ Time travel does not exist in the Tread. No agent, object, information, artifact, Pulse practice, anomaly, portal, technology, or Chronicle premise travels to or returns from another time, reverses established history, creates a causal loop, branches into a reachable timeline, or re-enters an earlier moment. Memory, records, dreams, prophecy, long life, suspended animation and Wanderer dormancy all exist in their own forms. None of them is a door.

⚠️ Space exploration does not exist in the Tread. The sky may be observed, studied, named, measured, navigated by, and argued about at length. It is not a destination. There are no spacecraft, no off-world visitors, no spacefaring civilizations, no orbital or interstellar travel, and no Pulse or portal exception that makes space reachable. Airships, travel across a Wanderer, expeditions into the low world or the Depths, and short Convergence crossings all remain available, and they are enough.

Neither of these is a mystery. They are not hooks, not lost technologies, and not things a sufficiently clever party eventually unlocks. A player who asks is not being told not yet.

30. There is no confirmed god

There is no objectively confirmed true god and no separate universal pantheon. ⚠️ Cultures may worship, invent, deny, debate and reinterpret gods freely, and none of that makes one objectively real.

A Wanderer may occupy a divine or covenantal role exactly to the degree a culture grants it. Ancestor-veneration and Depths-adjacent spirit traditions exist. Religious confidence, sincere testimony, and experience shaped exactly like a miracle do not settle protected metaphysics — and a Tread Master who lets them is answering a question the setting is holding open on purpose.

For the Wardpriest and Songweaver institutions and what they actually maintain, see the Player's Handbook, Chapter IV.

31. What a Chronicle may add

The shared setting is a foundation, not a prewritten campaign. A Chronicle may create its own Wanderer, geography, settlements, cultures, institutions, families, creatures, factions, laws, conflicts, beliefs, histories, mysteries, villains, heroes and singular wonders wherever the setting leaves room — which is nearly everywhere.

Three boundaries keep that from breaking anything.

Universal truths remain universal. A Chronicle may not create time travel, space exploration, or another exception to an explicitly closed boundary.

Protected mysteries remain unresolved. A Chronicle may hold beliefs, clues, testimony, consequences and local theories without objectively settling the deepest nature of Wanderers, the Pulse, death, or any other protected setting mystery.

⚠️ Local truth stays local. A practice, creature, culture, cause, custom or historical event invented for one Chronicle does not silently become a rule for every Wanderer. What you established is true where you established it — and that is not a limitation, it is what makes it yours.

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