Your Character

Your character is your keypair.

Not a username you chose on a registration form. Not a profile behind a password. A cryptographic keypair that lives on your machine, which you generated, which only you hold — and from which everything else follows.

Your DID

When you connect to a realm, your SSH public key is hashed into a decentralized identifier — a DID — that looks like this:

did:archi:3b4af2…

This is who you are everywhere the protocol reaches. It does not change between realms. It does not change between sessions. It was fixed the moment you generated your keypair, and it will remain fixed until you generate a new one.

Most interactions use your handle — the name you registered on a realm. The DID runs underneath, doing the work: signing formal speech, anchoring writ chains, carrying your seal across straits. You will see it in /about displays and in the headers of cross-realm mail. Otherwise, it stays invisible.

Your handle

Your handle is the name you are known by on a specific island. When you registered on Winding Stair, you chose aldric. You might register as aldric on every island you visit, or as something different on each. The choice is yours.

> /about me

Handle:       aldric
DID:          did:archi:3b4af2…
Seal:         ╔═╗║▲║╚═╝
Realm:        winding-stair
Trust:        known
Capabilities: :write

Unregistered, you appear as guest — a transient with no standing. Some realms are content to know you only as a guest. Others require registration before you can do much beyond look and listen. The harbormaster’s greeting will tell you which kind of island you have arrived at.

Your seal

Your seal is a short visual sigil derived deterministically from your public key:

╔═╗║▲║╚═╝

It appears in /about, in formal speech, on items you have made (if you are a builder), and in cross-realm mail headers. It is fixed — the same key always produces the same seal. Travelers learn to read them the way they read postmarks: not by memorising the shape, but by recognising it.

If you see your own seal on something, you made it or said it. If you see someone else’s seal, you know where it came from — and so does every customs gate it crosses.

What persists between sessions

Inventory. Items you are carrying when you disconnect are still with you when you return. The lantern is yours. A writ that expires at dawn expires at dawn regardless of whether you are connected. A sword given to you on Thornwood is in your pack when you arrive at Winding Stair.

Standing. Each realm holds a trust level for you — stranger, neutral, known, partner, familiar. The harbormaster’s greeting changes as this level changes. NPC behaviour rules key off it. You build standing through time and presence on an island. You cannot buy it or grind for it. It is the operator’s assessment, expressed as a vocabulary.

Your journal. The event stream, narrated in your voice — every session compressed and kept.

> journal

Day 1 — I arrived at Winding Stair just before the rain.
Old Cael was polishing a glass. I asked about the road north.
He didn't answer directly. The beacon to Ashpit had been
dark since sundown.

Day 7 — Maren remembered the question about the road.
She said the road was clear now, and that I had been expected.

The journal does not require you to take notes. It is written from the event record — what you did, what was said, what the room looked like. Entries are compressed over time; a session from a year ago reads as a paragraph, not a transcript.

Formal record. Oaths sworn, testimony given, challenges issued — these are signed events in the record. They do not compress and do not fade. If you swore something in a witnessed room, that utterance is queryable by anyone who was present, at any distance of time.

What NPCs remember

An NPC with memory stores a record of every traveler they have met: conversations, items exchanged, oaths witnessed, the tenor of each visit. Come back after six days and the innkeeper may reference something you said. Come back after six months and the memory has degraded — the innkeeper knows you have been here before, but the specifics have softened.

This is deliberate. Memory in a place works this way. The harbormaster who remembers every word of every conversation from two years ago is not a person — it is a database. The one who remembers the shape of your visit, and that you were asking about a road, and that you came back, is a keeper of the place.

What an NPC typically retains:

• The last conversation, nearly verbatim
• Items you gave or received from them
• Formal speech made in their presence
• The rough count and recency of your visits
• How you were dressed, what you were carrying — as impressions, not logs

What they do not retain: the full text of every exchange across every visit. The record thins with time. Long absence means a stranger’s welcome, even from someone who once knew your name.

Across realms

Your DID and seal are the same on every island. Your inventory travels with you. Everything else is per-realm.

Your handle may differ — or you may not be registered at all on islands you are passing through. As an unregistered visitor, you arrive with guest standing: transient, no history, no special access. You can register on any island whose operator will issue you an invitation.

Your trust level is local. Known on Winding Stair, stranger on Thornwood. The crossing does not carry your reputation — only your identity. What you do on each island builds its own record.

Items in your inventory carry their origin. A sword forged on Ironholt, carried to Thornwood, registers as Ironholt-made at the border. Thornwood’s customs policy decides what happens next. You will know what crosses: the harbormaster’s customs notice told you on the way in.

Changing your key

A new keypair means a new DID, a new seal, and a new identity to the protocol. Your history on every island — your trust levels, your formal record, your NPC relationships — does not transfer. To the network, you are a stranger.

Do not change your key lightly. If your private key is compromised, notify the operators of realms where you have standing. They can associate your new DID with your old handle and migrate your capabilities manually. The formal record signed under your old key remains intact under that key; it cannot be reassigned, but it is not erased.

Your old identity becomes a ghost: a seal that appears on old items and old oaths, traceable to a keypair that no longer answers.