Keep playing.
Your telling keeps up.
A game server remembers what happened — who arrived, who was lost, what got built, where you went down and got back up. Skald reads that record and turns it into a telling, and you are its author. Play on Tuesday; on Wednesday there are new strands waiting for you to shape and approve.
How it works
- Connect your serverPoint Skald at a server you play on. It reads what the server already keeps — the save and the log — and never touches the game itself. What it needs.
- It gathers what happenedArrivals, deaths, journeys, what was built and what it was built of. Nobody had to write any of it down; the game already did.
- You write the beginningThe game already knows some of it — who the enemy is, how you arrived, what was taken from you. What it can't know is who these people are to each other, what they want, and who is telling the story. That part is yours, and it's the part worth reading.
- It writes. You direct, edit and approveEach moment becomes prose. Send it back with a note, rewrite a line yourself, or keep an earlier version. Anything Skald made up is flagged, and nothing becomes part of the story until you accept it.
- You play againThe next session is the next strand. The telling carries on, and it remembers everyone in it.
From the record to the page
What the server wrote down
- Maren arrived
- Maren died: crocodile, at the river
- Maren respawned, at her bedroll
- Built: 6 foundations, 9 walls, 1 door
The river took its price before we had been an hour on the bank. Maren went in for the waterskins and came out with her forearm opened to the bone, and something long and patient sliding back under the brown water. She did not speak of it.
By dark she had a floor down, six stones square, and walls rising around it, her arm bound in a strip torn from her own hem. I have watched people build out of hope. She built the way you close a wound.
An example written for this page, not taken from anyone's telling. Four lines of record, told in the voice of The Witness. The death became a wound: in a Skald telling it always does.
The voice it is written in
- The Witness. First person, told years afterwards by someone who was there. Cool, concrete, unsentimental; withholds more than it explains.
- The Chronicle. Third person, no narrator at all. Measured and documentary, the way a history is written about people who are gone.
You choose one when you start a telling.
What you can count on
- What happened stays what happened. Skald fills the gaps between events; it never rewrites them.
- A death is a wound. Respawning is how the game works, not what happened to your people — in the telling, they went down and got back up.
- Private until you share it. Each telling is yours alone until you choose otherwise, and you can take it back.
- People you share it with get the telling. You see every fact the story was built from; they see only the telling.
More questions? Read the answers, or get Skald for your server.