Canon and campaigns — the waterfall system

Skryrún is built around a single idea: the world you build and the games you run in it are two different things. The canon waterfall is the system that keeps them connected without conflating them.

The core distinction

Canon is your world's lore bible. It defines what exists: NPCs, locations, factions, items, history, secrets. Canon answers the question "what is true about this world?" It does not track what is happening in any game.

Campaigns are play groups running inside that world. Each campaign has its own roster, session log, game state, and player portal. One world can run any number of campaigns simultaneously — a weeknight group, a convention one-shot, and a solo player exploration can all exist in the same world without interfering with each other.

The relationship between them is the waterfall: canon sits at the top, and all campaigns flow beneath it, inheriting its content.

How content flows

When you create an NPC in canon, every campaign in that world sees them immediately. No sync required. When you edit that NPC's description — update their appearance, add a new motivation, fix a typo — every campaign sees the update at once.

Campaigns do not get copies of canon entities. They reference them. The NPC exists once; each campaign's view of that NPC is the canon version plus any campaign-specific overrides.

This means:

Canon edits propagate instantly and for free
You never have to "push" changes to individual campaigns
Adding a new campaign to a world with 200 entities gives it access to all 200 immediately

Campaign overrides

Each campaign can override specific fields on any canon entity without touching canon itself.

The most important override is entity status — whether an NPC is alive, dead, missing, transformed, or something else. Status is never stored in canon. The same NPC can be:

Dead in your Monday night campaign (they killed him in session 4)
Alive and allied in your Friday group (they haven't met him yet)
An antagonist in the convention one-shot (different story, same world)

Canon says the NPC exists and what they're like. Campaigns say what's happening to them.

Beyond status, campaigns can override:

Entity description (to reflect campaign-specific context)
Visibility to players (controlled independently per campaign)
GM notes (private to that campaign's GM)

📝Note

Overrides are additive. A campaign can diverge from canon in specific fields while still inheriting all the canon content it hasn't touched. If you later update the NPC's canon description, campaigns that haven't overridden that field see your update. Campaigns that have overridden it keep their version.

Campaign-born entities

Sometimes content originates in play rather than in prep. An improvised NPC you invented at the table. A location the players named. A faction that grew out of a player's backstory.

These start as campaign-born entities — they exist only inside that campaign and are invisible to others.

When a campaign-born entity becomes a permanent part of your world, you can Canonize it: a single action that promotes it from the campaign up into canon, making it part of the lore bible and visible to all campaigns going forward.

Canonize is available on all tiers. It is a core workflow tool, not a premium feature.

The canonize flow:

Open the entity inside the campaign view
Click Canonize in the entity menu
Review the preview — campaign-specific status is stripped; only lore content carries over
If an entity with the same name already exists in canon, you'll be prompted to rename or cancel
Confirm — the entity is now world-canonical

💡Tip

Canonize is one-way. Once an entity is in canon, it belongs to the world. If you want to "undo" a canonization, you can delete the canon entity — campaigns that had overrides on it will retain a campaign-owned copy automatically.

Visibility across the waterfall

Visibility works at two levels that compose together.

Canon-level audience tags are set once and inherited by all campaigns. A piece of ancient elven lore tagged race:elf will surface to every elf character in every campaign that runs in this world — no per-campaign setup required.

Campaign-level player reveals are game-state decisions. The GM controls what each campaign's players can see, independent of other campaigns. A faction revealed in your Monday game may still be GM-only in your Friday game.

The result: you define who should be able to know this at the world level, and who actually knows this at the campaign level.

Building a world with the waterfall in mind

Start with canon, not a campaign

The most effective way to use the waterfall is to build your world first, then run campaigns in it. Populate canon with your NPCs, locations, factions, and lore. Think of yourself as writing the setting sourcebook — who lives here, what factions are in conflict, what history shaped this place.

When you start a campaign, you're stepping into that sourcebook as a GM. The entities are already there.

Keep canon status-neutral

Canon entities should not have status. "Varek the Blacksmith" in canon is a living, working character with a full article, relationships, and history. Whether he's alive, dead, or missing is a campaign question.

If you write "Varek was killed by the adventurers" in his canon article, you've broken the waterfall — that's game state masquerading as lore. Keep canon lore timeless. Let campaigns track outcomes.

Use campaigns for depth, not breadth

The waterfall is not a limitation on how detailed your world can be — it's permission to go deep in different directions for different tables.

Your Monday group cares about the politics of the merchant quarter. Your Friday group never goes there; they're focused on the northern temples. Both groups inherit the same world. You can develop the merchant quarter lore for Monday without cluttering Friday's experience, and vice versa. The world grows with each campaign's focus.

Don't canonize too early

Let campaign content breathe before promoting it to canon. An improvised NPC who shows up once might not warrant world-canonical status. One who becomes the party's recurring contact, shapes the story over six sessions, and feels like a permanent part of the world? That's worth canonizing.

Multiple campaigns in practice

One world, three campaigns. All three share:

Every NPC, location, faction, and item you've added to canon
Audience tags and visibility rules set at the canon level
Any entity you canonize from one campaign (visible to all going forward)

Each campaign tracks independently:

Which entities each group has encountered
Status of every NPC (alive, dead, missing, allied)
What the players know (per-campaign visibility reveals)
Session history, arcs, spotlights, and GM notes

A campaign runs in your world like a lens — it sees everything in canon, filters it through what's been revealed, and adds its own layer of game state on top.

Campaign archiving

Finished campaigns can be archived. Archived campaigns are read-only — players can still view their portal and browse the history, but no new sessions or changes can be made.

Archived campaigns do not count against your campaign limit. This means you can run a one-shot, archive it, and start a new campaign without losing your record of what happened.

Tier limits

Tier	Campaigns per world
Chronicler (free)	1
Weaver ($5/mo)	3
Runekeeper ($25/mo)	Unlimited

Archived campaigns are always free and do not count toward these limits. The core waterfall mechanics — content flow, overrides, canonize, audience tags — work identically at every tier.