The Shared Persistent World

When people hear "shared persistent world" they usually picture an MMO — same dungeon, same dragon, two players walking past each other in the tavern. That's not what Tapestria is. Three different things could plausibly be shared between players, and Tapestria deliberately shares some and not others:

What	Shared in Tapestria?	What an MMO would do
World state (who rules where, who's alive, what factions are at war)	Yes — and irreversibly.	Yes, sometimes per-shard.
Locations and NPCs (the cast that exists in the game)	Yes — one canonical Aethernia, one canonical cast.	Yes, but often instanced.
Sessions (you and I in the same scene at the same time)	No.	Yes.

The reason for the third row is what makes the first two possible. An AI narrator can hold a coherent scene for one party. The trade Tapestria makes is intentional: you get a world that genuinely matters and remembers, in exchange for not sharing the literal moment with other players.

What persists, concretely

When your turn ends and your changes commit, the things that survive forever are:

• NPCs you killed are dead. Not respawned. The NPC is gone from Aethernia.
• NPCs you befriended remember the friendship. Their disposition toward your character, and toward your character's party, persists.
• NPCs you wronged remember the wronging. Disposition shifts in the other direction. Future encounters carry the grudge.
• NPCs know what they witnessed, and they keep most of it to themselves. Every event an NPC was present for is recorded against that NPC, along with the version of it they'd choose to tell. Those can differ. The world of Aethernia is one in which mutual trust is rare — what one person knows is leverage, what one says travels, and the factions that watch each other also watch everyone who talks to them. NPCs learn early that a secret given is a secret no longer theirs, and they default to evasion or to active falsehood with people they have no reason to trust. Earning a truth out of an NPC means earning the speaker first.
• Lies you told stay believed until contradicted. An NPC who believes a false thing acts on the false thing.
• Items you took from one place are at the place you put them. Or on your person. They're not duplicated, they're not magically replenished.
• Locations you altered stay altered. If you burned down a barn, the barn is burned. If you cleared a cave, the cave is cleared.
• Quests you advanced are advanced. Quests you abandoned are abandoned. Quests you triggered emerge from the world state for everyone, not just for you.
• Factional power shifts persist. Deposing the governor of Luminastria is permanent. Aligning the Ordo Luminis against you is permanent.

What does not persist in a way that affects other players: things internal to your character session (combat HP between rests, your party's inventory pickup state mid-session, your reservation on a location while you're in it).

What's shared vs. what's parallel

The simplest way to think about it:

Shared (one canonical version, evolves over time):

• The world: locations, the cast of NPCs, factions, items.
• Faction power and the stances factions hold toward each other.
• What NPCs know about events they witnessed.
• Quests as recorded outcomes.

Parallel (each player gets their own):

• Your character and your party.
• Your character's relationship to NPCs — who you've met, what you've done together, how they feel about you.
• Your character's quest log.
• Your inventory.
• Your session state, narrative history, turn log.

A change to a shared entity from your session is visible to mine; a change to your party's inventory is not.

What this looks like as a player

The deposed governor. You play a campaign that ends with the governor of Luminastria stepping down under pressure. From that point on, the governor of Luminastria is a deposed figure in hiding, the city is in a political vacuum, and the factions that benefited from the deposition are bolder. Two weeks later, a different player starts a campaign. Their character arrives in Luminastria and walks into the consequences of your choices. They have no idea you exist; they're just in a city you reshaped.

That isn't theoretical. The deposition is a recorded outcome, the governor's standing is durable, and every future session reads against the post-deposition state of Luminastria.

Why scenes stay single-party

Two players in the same scene is technically tractable, but it's not the shape Tapestria takes. Three reasons drove the design:

1. Pacing. Free-text TTRPG turns take 5–30 seconds of typing per player. A two-player turn means one player waits while the other types, then both wait for the LLM to respond to two intents. The UX falls apart fast for an asynchronous, mobile-first medium.
2. Narrator coherence. A narrator that writes a coherent scene from one party's perspective is a tractable problem; a narrator that merges two parties' perspectives into one scene without flattening either is a much harder one — and the resulting prose tends to be worse for both players.
3. Skill check resolution. When one player rolls Persuasion and the other rolls Insight on the same NPC at the same moment, what does that mean mechanically? D&D solves this around a physical table by table-talk; the software equivalent would require coordination overhead that the rest of the design avoids.

The shared world gets you the meaningful part of multiplayer — every player's choices matter across sessions, the cast you encounter is the cast everyone encounters — without the coordination overhead of shared sessions. The mode where you and a friend both adventure in Aethernia is "you both have stories there, and your stories shape each other indirectly through the world." Not "you both meet in the tavern at 8pm."

How this differs from MMO sharding, AI Dungeon, and tabletop

	Tapestria	MMO	AI Dungeon	Tabletop with a DM
One canonical world	yes	usually per-shard	no, regenerated	yes, but only for the table
Choices persist after logoff	yes, for everyone	yes, sometimes per-instance	no	yes, for the table
Other players see consequences of yours	yes (different sessions, shared world)	yes (same session)	no	no
You meet other players in scene	no (by design)	yes	no	yes (the table)
Mechanics are deterministic	yes (5e SRD)	yes	no	yes
The narrator improvises	yes	no	yes	yes (the DM)

The closest analogue is "asynchronous tabletop where the world is the canon and the DM never forgets." That's what we're building.

Read on

• The Mechanics overview covers the per-turn loop and what the AI is and isn't allowed to do.
• Architecture has the system view.