R3TCON brings deterministic continuity checking to TTRPG worldbuilding
R3TCON is a local-first continuity system for fictional worlds, built to track canon, chronology, character knowledge and changing world state without generative AI or a mandatory cloud account.
Long-running fictional worlds have a problem that becomes harder to manage the larger they get: everything has to remain consistent.
Characters move. Relationships change. Information is learned. Places are altered. People die. Events happen in a particular order. Journeys take time.
Eventually, keeping all of that straight becomes its own job.
R3TCON: Canon & Continuity for Creators is a new local-first software system from independent UK developer 115 Studios, built to treat fictional continuity more like a structured system than a collection of notes.
Instead of generating story material, R3TCON represents the creator’s existing world through characters, events, locations, chronology, relationships, knowledge, state changes and prerequisites, then performs deterministic continuity checks against that information.
That means it can flag problems such as:
- a six-day journey occurring inside three available days
- an NPC appearing after their established death
- conflicting dates or event order
- a character knowing information they have not yet learned
- a world-state change occurring before its prerequisites have been satisfied
The creator remains responsible for deciding how those conflicts should be resolved. R3TCON does not rewrite the story or decide what canon should be.
One of the system’s core features, AXIS, allows a fictional world to be examined at different points in its timeline and from different character perspectives.
This separates two questions that are often accidentally treated as the same thing:
What was true at this point in the world?
and
What did this particular character know at this point?
For TTRPG creators and GMs, that distinction becomes particularly useful in campaigns where information is deliberately unevenly distributed between players, NPCs and factions, or where a setting changes substantially over time.
R3TCON is deliberately not a generative AI writing tool and does not use an LLM to determine canon. The continuity engine is deterministic, and the creator remains in control of the world.
It is also designed as a local-first application. There is no mandatory cloud account, and fictional worlds can be stored in portable .r3t files rather than being locked inside a hosted service.
R3TCON is also being designed with collaboration in mind. 115 Studios has already explored and engineered a local-first approach to collaborative world editing that does not require moving a creator’s project into a mandatory cloud service. More details on that work are planned for a future Kickstarter update if the campaign progresses well.
Existing source material can also be brought into the system. Where imported material is ambiguous, the goal is to surface that ambiguity for the creator rather than confidently inventing an answer.
R3TCON is already beyond the concept stage. Working development builds currently exist across Android, macOS and Windows, and the system has been used against populated fictional worlds to test chronology, character state and continuity conflicts.
The project is now crowdfunding on Kickstarter as 115 Studios works toward releasing it more widely to writers, worldbuilders, TTRPG creators, narrative game developers and other creators managing complex fictional universes.
The idea behind it is simple:
Continuity errors are bugs. Writers just haven’t had a linter.
YOUR WORLD HAS RULES. R3TCON REMEMBERS THEM.
Back the project and follow its development on Kickstarter, or learn more about R3TCON at 115 Studios.
