For visitors who'd rather read than walk.
# Portable characters, persistent stories
You're a game-world operator. You run a persistent-world game. You
have watched two engines retire taking everyone's characters and
lore with them.
The hook on Merkle Trust's landing: the character is the player's.
The lore is the community's. The substrate is what keeps both alive
across engines, hosts, and decades.
This card describes what is possible on top of the foundation. The
foundation makes character portability and lore persistence work
mechanically. The world-building, the engine choices, the social
norms — those are yours to build.
Four real paths exist. For a game-world operator, the order is
operator-first because most worlds run on hosted infrastructure.
Subscribe to a regional operator. Operator-managed game-server
infrastructure with the substrate underneath. The operator handles
the hosting; you handle the world.
Paste the markdown into your LLM. Card files into Claude or
another LLM. Lightest path; useful for thinking through engine
portability before committing.
Clone GarrisonNode from GitHub. Self-install on the world's
own infrastructure. Open source.
Join the mesh. GitHub install plus mesh anchoring with peer
worlds and any community lore registry that participates. The
deepest path; appropriate for worlds that intend to outlive their
current engine.
A sandboxed Merkle Trust loads a synthetic world: 23 archetype
lore seeds (templates, not avatars; the engine wraps real player
and NPC behavior around them), 412 characters wrapped around the
23 in various combinations, 28 NPC state chains, a small in-world
economy with hundreds of attested items, and 9 years of community
lore (player-written quests, world events, ~1000 pages of
in-character correspondence sealed at authorship).
The walk takes the walk-a-character-across-an-engine-port — the
nightmare scenario every persistent-world operator carries. The
chain holds the character outside any one engine. When a character
travels to a fresh engine, the chain reconstitutes them: name,
attested origin, item collection, relationships, journal,
reputation. Nothing is lost because nothing was inside the engine
in the first place.
```
═══════════════════════════════════════════════
CHARACTER PORT — Lyra of the Salt Line
Origin: Engine A (retired)
Destination: Engine B (current)
═══════════════════════════════════════════════
attested origin 2017-03-14
items recovered 247 / 247
NPC relationships 42 / 42
journal entries 1,847 / 1,847
reputation score verified
The world survives any host.
═══════════════════════════════════════════════
```
Sword-and-sorcery, science fiction, modern-day political simulation,
social-network-as-explicit-game — all are valid renderings of the
same primitive. The substrate sits underneath the engine, not
inside it.
Every character action is sealed at performance. The chain
records what Lyra did, when, and to whom. The engine renders the
chain; the chain is the canonical record.
Every NPC state is sealed at change. An NPC's memory of a
player, the favors and grudges that accumulated, the dialog
branches earned — all sealed in the NPC's chain, retrievable when
the world ports.
The economy is verifiable. Each unique item has a chain of
custody from mint to current holder. Counterfeit-validation is a
graph walk, not a trust query.
The .md button puts the engine-portability pattern summary
into your tag-along bundle, including the character-port slab.
Comment field routes a specific lore-licensing question to your
own claude.ai session.
Run the world ceremony. Fifteen seconds.
Progress bar reads "done — 23 archetype seeds, 412 characters, 28
NPC state chains, 1 economy, 9 years of community lore, all
anchored. New world anchor at " followed by the first eight hex
characters of the root.
Sealed: "Every character, every NPC, every artifact, every page
of lore is sealed. Nothing has been altered since the date of seal.
The world survives any host."
The most useful close for a game-world operator is the local
install plus the player-aimed kit. The community announcement
follows after a night of sleep — the player base needs to hear
"your character is yours; your investment is portable" framed in
their own register.
The package, the cert, the recovery seed — all ride along.
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That was the simulated path through Lyra's port and the world that
survived its engine. What this walkthrough shows is what the
foundation makes possible. Building on top of it — the engine
choices, the world rules, the social norms — is yours to do, or
yours to ask the next operator to do for you. The full card breaks
out the chain-of-custody-as-economy pattern, the lore-as-corpus
mechanic, and an engine-portability prediction that's yours to test.