How Isentroth is made
Isentroth is built on Ironsworn, Shawn Tomkin's tabletop RPG system, used under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That isn't a loophole we found —
it's the point of the license. Shawn released a complete, generous set of rules
for telling sagas alone and invited people to build on it, with credit. We took
the invitation seriously: the rules our engine enforces come from the text as
written, not paraphrased from memory; the credit appears everywhere the license
asks and a few places it doesn't; and we say plainly that we modified the
system for solo play with a language model. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by Tomkin Press, and we
don't trade on their name — you will not find "Ironsworn" in our hero art or our
key art, only in our credits, where thanks belong.
What the machine does: Isentroth's Game Master is a machine. We named it
plainly — the Machine Game Master — in the game and everywhere we speak about
it. It narrates — live, in response to what you type.
What it does not do is keep score. Dice, harm, supply, momentum, vows, progress,
the permanent scars your character carries — all of that is enforced by
deterministic code implementing the rules as written. The Machine Game Master can no
more fudge your progress track than a human GM can reroll your dice after
they've landed. When the machine narrates a consequence, the consequence
already happened, in code, where it can't be taken back.
What people made: the world — its regions, its names, its cold — was authored
by this studio. The interface, the systems, the voice the Machine Game Master
is held to: designed, reviewed, and answered for by people. We build with the
machine as well as around it — our commit history says so on its face, because
we sign what the machine helps write instead of hiding it. What ships is
decided by a person: me. The scene art, music, and ambient audio were generated
during development and art-directed by the team — we've said that on our store
page from day one, because the Content Survey asks and because you'd be right
to want to know.
And the authorship that matters most isn't ours. Ironsworn's whole design — the
reason we chose it — is that the player is the author. The Machine Game Master deals
consequences; you decide what they mean, what you'll swear because of them, and
what you'll break. Every saga in Isentroth belongs to the person who played it.
Our job, human and machine both, is scaffolding that never gets between you and
that — and comes down when the story stands on its own.
— Matt DiSabatino, DiSabatino LLC (publishing as Schedule 3 Wizards)