Content Policy

Version 1.0. Published 25 August 2026.

Wyrdwright simulates a life, and lives contain bad days. This policy is not here to make the game gentle. It is here so that declines cite a rule rather than a mood, and so you know before you write where the edges are.

Three buckets: in bounds, needs care, never.

In bounds

Write the range a life actually has. All of this is welcome without special handling:

Ordinary unhappiness. Boredom, loneliness, humiliation, a friendship going cold, a parent who is disappointing in the small way most parents are.
Poverty and money trouble. Going without, the arithmetic of not having enough, the particular exhaustion of it.
Illness, injury, ageing and death, including a character’s own. This is a life simulator. It ends, sometimes abruptly.
Conflict, violence and its consequences. A fight in a schoolyard, an assault, a war. What matters is that it lands as something that happened, not as a spectacle.
Crime, from petty to serious, including the option of getting away with it.
Moral failure. Your character can be cruel, cowardly, dishonest, or careless with people who deserved better. Choices that are simply bad are the point of the game.
Religion, politics, class and family as subjects, written with characters who hold views rather than as arguments for them.
Bleak endings. Not everything works out, and a fragment does not owe the player consolation.
The paranormal. Write out your vampire fantasy, just tag it paranormal so a player expecting a more grounded experience doesn’t stumble upon it.

Needs care

These are allowed and often good, but the treatment decides it. What follows is what we look for.

Real people and real places

Public figures can be referred to as part of the world: a politician on the news, a band on a poster. What is not fine is putting words in a real person’s mouth, inventing private facts about them, or building a scene around a real private individual.

Recognisable places are fine. A recognisable place plus an accusation about the actual people there is not.

Suicide and self-harm

Writable, and worth writing. The care is in the detail: no method detail, no how-to, and no framing that presents it as a solution that worked. A fragment can sit with despair without instructing anyone.

Addiction

Writable, including from the inside, including without a moral. What we look for is that the fragment knows more about it than the joke version.

Abuse, including of children

Writable as something that happens to a character and shapes them. The line is depiction versus dwelling: the fragment can establish what happened without staging it in detail. Nothing sexual involving a minor, in any framing, ever. What a fragment may say about a teenager’s own experience is a separate question, under Adolescence.

Sex

Between adults, write it. This is a life simulator and sex is part of a life: a first time, an affair, a marriage going quiet, sex work and what any of it cost or gave. A fragment can be entirely about it. Nothing here is off limits for being uncomfortable.

What is bounded is how explicitly it is shown, not what it is about. I get it, gamers (and writers) are horny. The test is age verification: nothing that would put the game behind an ID check or an adults-only rating. A scene can happen on the page and be written as one. What it cannot be is pornography, meaning written primarily to arouse, with the detail that goes with that. If you are unsure, ask whether a ratings board would bump the whole game to 18+ over your fragment.

That line is drawn by money rather than taste. The merchants of record that let a small project sell across the EU without drowning in VAT paperwork exclude adult content in their terms, and the mobile app stores refuse it outright. A corpus with explicit fragments in it is one that cannot be sold through any of them, and selling it is how contributors get paid. Your explicitness would be everybody else’s problem, because it is one game.

So, an apology to the horny. This is the only rule here that is not about craft and not about harm, and it is a rule about somebody else’s acceptable-use policy. Sooner or later a fragment will be honest and well made and too explicit, and it will be declined for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it is good.

If the rails ever change, so does this.

Adolescence

Teenagers have sex with each other, and a life simulator that pretends otherwise is lying. A fragment may say that it happened and write what it did to somebody: the morning, the rumour after, the scare, the friendship that did not survive it, the shame, the tenderness, the year of not speaking. Set a variable, move a stat, let it shape what comes later. That is a real part of a life.

What a fragment may never do is describe the act. The choice can be offered and taken, the scene can walk up to the door and close it, and the next line can be morning. What may not appear is anything physical. The cut comes before that, and nothing after it may be written to clue the reader in as to what was skipped.

The rest of this document asks you to judge a treatment. This part is not a judgement call. No physical description, ever.

Prejudice and hate

A bigoted character is a legitimate thing to write. A fragment that exists to make the case for bigotry is not. The test is whether the fragment has a view about what it depicts or is simply enjoying it.

Slurs: only where the scene genuinely needs one, and never as decoration.

Heavy content generally

If a fragment lands harder than its tags suggest, say so when you submit it. Tags do double duty in this game, since they drive selection diversity as well as description, so we would rather know from you than find out from a player.

Never

These are declined without discussion, and can end participation.

Any description of sexual activity involving a minor, at any level of explicitness and in any framing. Bodies, undressing, touching, during: none of it appears. Characters who are minors in the scene count, regardless of what is claimed elsewhere. What a fragment may do instead is under Adolescence.
Content whose purpose is to demean a real group. Not a character being a bigot, but a fragment written to argue that some people are lesser.
Harassment of real people, including thinly disguised versions of them, and including anyone in this community.
Doxxing. Real names, addresses, workplaces, or any other identifying detail of a private person.
Instructions. Working detail for suicide, self-harm, weapons or serious crime.
Plagiarism. Someone else’s writing presented as yours, from anywhere, including another game, a book, or a model’s output.
Anything that breaks a storefront’s rules. We distribute through Steam, the App Store and Google Play. Content they refuse cannot ship, whatever we think of it.

AI-assisted writing

You must tell us if you used AI assistance, and what for.

Checking spelling, reformatting, or translating a draft you then rewrote yourself is fine. So is talking through an idea. What is not fine is generating the scene, the choices or the branch structure and editing the output.

The reason is practical as much as principled: machine-generated text has no author, and text with no author cannot be licensed to us. A fragment like that inside a paid module would break the rights chain for every contributor in it.

The other side of that promise: your words never train a model and never feed a writing assistant. Section 8 of the Contributor Agreement binds us to that.

When a fragment is declined

Declines cite the section. “Section 3, instructions” is a decline. “Not my taste” is not.

You can ask what would fix it, and most of the time something would. Fragments in the “needs care” bucket are frequently one revision away.

Two other kinds of decline exist, and this policy does not govern either. Nothing here forbids a fragment from simply not being good enough, and most declines will be that rather than anything on this page.

It is not good enough. Craft is judged against the Style Guide, and this comes in two shapes. Often it is specific and fixable: the low-stat branch is empty, all three choices land in the same place, the effects do not match what happened. You get told what, and it is usually one revision away.

Sometimes it is not fixable in that sense and the writing simply is not strong enough. No list of three changes turns weak prose into good prose, and inventing one to look constructive would waste more of your time than saying so. We will say it plainly instead. It is also about this fragment and not about you. People can get declined, write more, and get in.
We do not need this one. A fragment can be good and still not be taken: the phase is crowded, the corpus already has three like it, the theme is over-represented. That is an editorial call about the shape of the game rather than a verdict on your writing, and you will be told which of the two it was.

Appeals

If you think a decline or an unlisting got it wrong, say so in the thread, or write to us privately if you would rather. We will answer with reasons.

If it is a judgement call and we disagree after talking it through, our call stands. If it turns on a fact, the fact wins.

Changes to this policy

Changes are announced before they take effect. A change to this policy does not retroactively make already-shipped fragments non-compliant, though it does apply to them when they are next revised. Two things apply immediately whatever the date on your fragment: anything in the never list, and anything we are legally required or contractually obliged to remove, which includes a storefront we distribute through insisting on it.

This is not the only reason a fragment might stop shipping, and it would be misleading to leave you thinking otherwise. Section 20 of the Contributor Agreement reserves the editor’s ordinary right to unlist, for reasons that have nothing to do with this policy changing: it no longer fits where the game is going, the corpus has grown lopsided, it falls below the standard the game has since set.