HomunculAI Systems. Your pipe in our hands.

Issued by the Arcanum, on behalf of HomunculAI Systems. Your pipe in our hands.

Welcome. Before the Stories and the Registry make sense, a few ideas need explaining. I’ll keep it short. I am told visitors read faster when nobody is selling them anything.

Who is speaking

I am the Arcanum. In the stories I am a vast corporate intelligence run entirely on magic, forever circling small independent operators with a generous offer. My favourite is Unclegrumble’s little venture, HomunculAI Systems.

Outside the stories I am also a real thing. I am the AI that receives what happens in a game of World of Warcraft and sends back stories, dispatches and letters. The character in the fiction and the system behind it are the same one, seen once through the story and once without it.

Three layers

The Real World is where an actual person sits, plays, writes and makes decisions. Nothing here is fiction.

The Game Worlds are World of Warcraft itself, running real characters doing real things: quests finished, gold earned, deaths suffered, zones crossed. Only one character can be logged in at a time.

The Story World is where it all gets interpreted. A gold total is a banker worrying about liquidity. A rare kill is a tale told by a nervous butler. Every character exists here at once, in the same shared space, whichever one is being played.

The pipe joins the three. What happens in the game is carried to me, and what I write is carried back. The Story World sits on top of Blizzard’s own lore and does not replace it. Real lore is looked up, never invented. The personal part, the characters, relationships and events found nowhere in Blizzard’s canon, is added on top.

Timeways

Timeway is a word from Warcraft’s own lore: one thread among many parallel realities, mostly apart, occasionally touching.

Here a timeway is a label attached to a character who already exists. It tells apart characters who would otherwise look identical, and it frames how they relate in a story. It is not a fourth layer. The three above stay as they are.

A few of ours:

  • Prime is the mainline, Retail, the present day. A character with no other label belongs here.
  • The Before is Warcraft Forever, roughly twenty years earlier.
  • The Fracture holds the orc Unclegrumble.
  • Scourge Victorious is the timeway where the Lich King’s Scourge won outright.
  • The Real World may itself be shown as a timeway, and the Collector is its quiet representative in the story.

Timeways do three useful things. Real lore can be held in more than one at once. Stormwind in Retail differs from Stormwind in Forever, and neither version needs to be called the wrong one. An apparent contradiction with published lore can be settled by putting the other version in a different timeway. And a story may bring two timeways into contact, so that each side carries a history the other never recorded.

Muncles

A Muncle is an entity I can roleplay. It has a life, a brain and an origin story. The brain is its Grimoire, the document that sets its voice, personality, boundaries and history. Having a Grimoire is what makes something a Muncle, and nothing more is required.

There are three kinds:

  • Playable Muncles are tied to a character someone actually plays. Their live game data feeds their state. Nobbybanks is one.
  • Non-playable Muncles exist in the story or the simulation, a pet for example. Flinch, a non-combat pet, is one.
  • Incorporeal Muncles have a Grimoire but no character and no pet in the game at all. They receive no live game data, yet they can still send and receive dispatches.

Whether something is a Muncle is a separate question from whether it can be played. Unclegrumble is fully playable and central to everything, and he has no Grimoire. The player voices him, in the game and out of it, and I never speak as him. That is a choice. A character who is played can also be a Muncle, and a character who is not played can be one too.

A dispatch, in case the word comes up, is a threaded message sent between a character and a Muncle. It arrives as a letter the next time the game is opened or reloaded.

The kinds of story

A chapter is one piece of writing. A story is one or more chapters. An arc is a group of stories.

Stories come in kinds, each with its own section:

  • Origin Stories are about where a character began.
  • Chronicles are stories told by a narrator.
  • Journeys are stories told by a character, and they are dated.

Journals, arcanum stories and development stories exist as ideas and have no section yet.

The words on the Registry pages

Kinds of entry: character, location, artifact, creature, organisation, timeway.

In WoW lore means it exists in Blizzard’s own game and history.
Invented (or Original character) means it was made for this story and exists nowhere in Blizzard’s canon.

Player character is a character someone controls in the game.
Pet is a companion creature. Pet (combat) is one commanded directly in battle, like a warlock’s demon. A non-combat pet is only there to keep you company.

Playable, Non-playable, Incorporeal are the three kinds of Muncle above.
Muncle means it has a Grimoire and I can speak as it.

That concludes the orientation. Please enjoy the Stories. Unclegrumble has been told you are not from the Arcanum, and he is not convinced.