Living Worlds · an AI game master that remembers

The game master that keeps secrets, holds canon, and lets the world move on its own.

Octos is a self-hosted engine for game masters, narrative devs, and world-builders. Describe a world and its rules — the engine runs the story, keeps every player's secrets, and never forgets what happened. One short case is playable today; the engine that runs it is yours to deploy.

Run the scene How it works

Built on Octos, a self-hosted world engine · skip to the tech

A real turn, start to finish.

disco · case 41 — "The Hanged Man"

You come to on the floor of a wrecked room. Your mouth tastes of failure and cheap wine. Through the cracked window: a body, hanging from a tree in the courtyard. Your own necktie dangles from the ceiling fan above you, swaying, though there is no wind.

>Address your necktie.

INLAND EMPIRE"FINALLY. I have been SCREAMING. Listen — today, you and I are going to be magnificent."

>Try to stand up. [ 2d6 · physique vs 11 ]

✗"Your legs are a rumor. The floor rises to meet you like an old friend. Not yet, detective. Not yet."

>Study the hanged man.

·His boots are too clean for a man who walked here. He was carried, then strung up.

You're a Logic 3 detective, so that's all you see. A Logic 5 detective would also spot "a row of pinprick marks on his forearm — a cipher, maybe." You never do: that clue is absent from your view, never sent to your screen. Hidden means hidden.

What a session feels like.

Talk to a necktie that has opinions about you. Roll 2d6 to do what a sober person finds trivial — like standing up. Watch the skills you lack quietly hide options and clues, so every detective plays a different case.

One scene, ~10–15 min, runs today (self-hosted). Table mode — shared screen, one input — works now; networked per-player clients are on the roadmap.

Why it won't break the way AI games do.

A DM screen that actually works

A clue a player isn't cleared for is never sent to their screen — not greyed out, absent. Secret rolls, split-party knowledge, the reveal you're saving for act three: every player sees a genuinely different game. (Mechanism: reader-set scoped views, computed at read time.)

A campaign that never retcons

What happened, happened — every fact is an event with a source, not something the model forgets or contradicts three sessions later. Your canon holds. (Mechanism: canon = fold of an append-only log.)

A world that lives between sessions

Factions act, debts come due, last night's choice ripples outward — from rules you define, not a fixed branching script. (Mechanism: autonomous cascade.)

Your world. Your rules. Enforced.

Not locked to one system. Define your dice and your rules — 2d6, d20, or homebrew — and the engine enforces them every turn, so the model can't fudge a roll or bend a law of your world.

For builders: deploy the engine.

The reason that scene has hidden information, a canon that holds, and forkable timelines is the engine beneath it — and that engine is what you run. Describe a world → the engine runs its rules, characters, and hidden information → you play and steer.

$ octosd — self-host the node, point its LLM organs at any model (Claude · OpenRouter · your own)

For game designers and narrative devs who want to build worlds like this one. Planned: networked per-player clients · visual world authoring.

A short, strange case runs today.

The engine to build your own ships with it.

Run the scene Get the engine on GitHub