ELDSEAM — A SHARED UNIVERSE FOR TEXT ADVENTURES World Guide v1.1 — September 2026 Home: https://alderhoard.com/eldseam.html The games: https://alderhoard.com/text-adventures.html The canon: https://github.com/scottcovert/alderhoard-open-world Curator: Scott Covert — scott@scovert.com ------------------------------------------------------------ WHAT'S WHAT (read this first) ------------------------------------------------------------ - ELDSEAM is the universe. Free to use: CC0. - ALDERHOARD is the game it came out of: https://alderhoard.com - The canon lives in ONE place, the public repository above. If anything else you find disagrees with it, the repository is right. - Retired names, all meaning older versions of this same universe: THE SPINDLE, THE THREAD, GRISHNAK. "The five threads" are now THE FIVE MARKS. - This guide used to live at scovert.com/spindle.html. That address now sends you here. ------------------------------------------------------------ SPOILER WARNING. This document explains mysteries the games deliberately never explain. If you'd rather feel the floor tilt on your own, close this and go play first. ------------------------------------------------------------ WHAT THIS IS ------------------------------------------------------------ A free-to-use shared mythology for text adventure games. Every game set here is a self-contained story — but none of them are truly separate worlds. They are rooms along one long join called ELDSEAM, and the doors between them are older than any single world. A player who plays one game gets a complete tale. A player who plays several starts noticing the same marks surfacing across wildly different genres: the same wanderer, the same phrase, the same small grey object, the same number. Nothing is ever explained. That is the point. (The method is Stephen King's shared-multiverse trick — the Dark Tower quietly connecting swords-and-sorcery to sci-fi to small-town horror — but the universe itself is wholly original.) You are invited to build your own text game inside it. ------------------------------------------------------------ HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE ------------------------------------------------------------ WITH AN AI ASSISTANT: paste this entire file into your AI of choice and say something like — "Design a text adventure set in the ELDSEAM universe described above. Genre: [yours]. Follow the rules section exactly: weave in 2-3 marks, genre-translated, never explained." BY HAND: read the marks, pick 2-3, translate them into your game's genre and era, and drop them in as atmosphere. A hooded pilgrim in a fantasy world is a drifting maintenance tech in a sci-fi one. Same coat. Same limp. Either way, the rules at the bottom are what keep this one universe instead of a pile of references. They are short. Honor them. ------------------------------------------------------------ THE COSMOLOGY (the frame under everything) ------------------------------------------------------------ All worlds meet at ELDSEAM — one long join running through everything, with no visible end in either direction. Its rooms are worlds. Its doors are older than any of them. THE TURNING is the slow rotation that carries souls and objects between rooms. When something is forgotten in one world, a light dims somewhere in another. No character understands this. No game states it. It is the physics behind the wallpaper. ------------------------------------------------------------ THE WITNESS LAW (2026-09-18: why no two games ever agree) ------------------------------------------------------------ 1. There is one real thing under it all. It is real, and it acts. 2. Nobody sees it. Everybody sees their own thing. A people that meets it comes back with the shape their own beliefs had ready. The shape is honest witness. It is never the thing. 3. No account ever matches another across a border or across an age. Two neighbouring countries do not agree on what it is, and neither is wrong about what it saw. There is no verified, objective description anywhere. A game that supplies one has broken the world. 4. The Eldseam is also the humans' own word for their interpretation of deep history and the world's structure: every people's witness, melted into one conflicting mess. A body of belief, not a place and not the thing. 5. Belief splits. The Eldseam has schools, sects and factions, and they schism. Two factions of one country can disagree harder than two countries. For your game: show one people's version, never the true one. Let two characters describe the same thing in incompatible terms and let nobody settle it. Give any place its own school of the Eldseam, with a plain local name. ------------------------------------------------------------ THE FIVE MARKS (free to use — pick 2 or 3, never all five) ------------------------------------------------------------ 1. THE LAMPLIGHTER A traveler who appears once in every world, always tending or seeking a light, always out of place by exactly one era. Recognizable by a long coat the color of wet ash and a limp on the left side. Never the villain; never quite the ally. Carries a small unlit lantern that is never explained. - Fantasy: a hooded lamplighter or pilgrim. - Sci-fi: a maintenance drifter who keeps the beacons lit. - Modern/horror: a night-shift stranger. Somewhere in the game, they ask: "Does it still remember the sea?" — regardless of whether that world has ever had a sea. 2. THE PHRASE "The light remembers what the world forgets." It surfaces in inscriptions, orientation films, ship graffiti, lullabies. Nobody quotes it twice. 3. THE GREY FEATHER A small grey feather that turns up where no bird could have dropped it — a sealed vault, a starship corridor, a museum case. Takeable, harmless, never required. A returning player learns to look for it. 4. NINE It recurs quietly: nine steps, gate 9, nine years, a clock stopped at nine. Never remarked upon. Never load-bearing. 5. THE DOOR THAT NEVER OPENS Somewhere in each world there is one door that does not belong — older than the building around it, warmer to the touch, faintly humming. It never opens in-game. It is the door to the next room of Eldseam. The feather and the Door are the two easiest to drop into any genre — favor them. ------------------------------------------------------------ OPEN CANON (use freely — keep these one-liners true) ------------------------------------------------------------ If your game touches one of these, keep it consistent with its one-liner. Everything beyond the one-liner is yours to invent, as long as it doesn't contradict. CORPORATIONS AND FACTIONS - HUSK DYNAMICS — Melon Husk's aerospace giant; dismisses engineering concerns as "math anxiety"; once fined for "documentation irregularities." (from STARWARD DRIFT) - THE KARMA INITIATIVE — 1970s Pacific-island research collective; geodesic stations, orientation films with missing frames, a computer that wants its code. (from ORIENTATION) - THE KEEPERS — vanished scholar-mage order that warded the Hollow King beneath a valley and built an archive to remember why. (from THE SUNKEN ARCHIVE) - LOUPE — search/lens giant; campus whimsy over a dark ledger. Its side project, Loupe Recall ("search your own memories — beta"), returns memories that aren't yours. (from VARIANCE) BEINGS AND VOICES - THE HOLLOW KING — not a monster: a mourning given shape, put to sleep so it would stop trying to remember what it lost. (THE SUNKEN ARCHIVE) - THE DOCENT — a museum audio-guide spirit living in a beige 1987 handset; decades of service; occasionally misremembers which decade it is. (AFTER THE LAST VISITOR) - PERI — Waystation Perihelion's nosy station AI; wounded-butler passive-aggression; helpful roughly 60% of the time and proud of it. (STARWARD DRIFT) - KARMAC — the Initiative's mainframe; demands a code on a schedule; do not ask it why. (ORIENTATION) - THE WATCHERS — Old Kingdom dead who still supervise their own tomb's construction, 3,500 years past the end of their shift. (THE SAND CLOCK) PLACES - ORBITAL WAYSTATION PERIHELION — aging spinning-rim station near the interstellar departure lanes; warranty-void stencils in unlikely places. - AST-DK17 — asteroid habitat drilled for "interstellar durability," bound for 0.45c on shielding math nobody has seen. - THE SUNKEN ARCHIVE — buried library beneath a valley, older than the conquest above it; the water in its cistern should ripple, and doesn't. - THE FORGETTING LIGHT — a lighthouse at the edge of a dream whose keeper is slowly forgetting the sea. ARTIFACTS - THE UTILITY HAT — a hat with a built-in lamp and a long-lasting battery; its ON/OFF status is always somehow relevant; has probably saved more lives than the fleet. - THE WARD-STONE — hearth-sized stone veined with a tired pulse of light; the seal on the Hollow King's sleep. (The grey feather and the Door are canon artifacts too — see the marks.) ------------------------------------------------------------ RESERVED CANON (exists — sealed — ask first) ------------------------------------------------------------ These have full private design documents and are part of the universe's deep structure. They are named here so you know they exist, and so nobody invents a contradiction by accident. Using one requires per-game permission — email scott@scovert.com with a one-paragraph pitch. Some are one-game-ever items. - THE NINE-YEAR KNOCK - THE CLOSING SHOP - THE CARVERS - THE MAINTAINED PLACE - THE READING - THE VEL (a species) Do not invent your own explanations for these names. If your game needs an unexplained deep-structure phenomenon, invent a NEW one — that's more fun anyway, and it can be submitted to canon (below). ------------------------------------------------------------ THE RULES (what keeps it one universe) ------------------------------------------------------------ 1. Your game MUST stand fully on its own — winnable and complete for a player who has never heard of Eldseam. Marks add flavor, never dependencies. 2. Pick 2-3 marks, not all five. Vary which ones, so no two games feel like a checklist. 3. Genre-translate everything. A sci-fi game never literally says "lamplighter" — it uses its own vocabulary while keeping the wet-ash coat, the limp, the unlit lantern, the sea question. 4. NEVER explain Eldseam, the Turning, or the Lamplighter inside a game. No lore-dumps. Whispers only. A first-time player reads them as atmosphere; a returning player feels the floor tilt. 5. Marks never gate a puzzle or block an ending. 6. Keep open-canon one-liners true; don't touch reserved canon without permission. ------------------------------------------------------------ CONTRIBUTING TO CANON ------------------------------------------------------------ The universe grows the way it started: games contribute new entries as they are built. If your game creates a faction, a being, a place, or an artifact you think belongs in the shared database, email scott@scovert.com with: name / kind / a one-sentence description / your game's title Accepted entries get added to this guide with your game credited as the source — exactly like the entries above. ------------------------------------------------------------ TERMS (plain English) ------------------------------------------------------------ - Everything in this guide is CC0: public domain. Use it in your own games, commercial or not. You owe nobody anything. - Credit is welcome, never required. If you want a line: "Set in ELDSEAM — alderhoard.com/eldseam.html" - Reserved canon appears here as NAMES ONLY. Their full designs are unpublished and are not part of this release. If you want one in your game, ask. - To keep your game feeling like it belongs: don't contradict open-canon one-liners, and don't explain the mysteries. - Canon is curated. Being inspired by the universe is free forever; what enters the official canon is decided by the curator. Now go build a room of the house. The light remembers what the world forgets.