// THE PREMISE
What this world is
Merancourt, October 1916. One sector of the Western Front in Picardy, on the chalk downland between Arras and Albert, in the fourth month after the great offensive opened to the south. The British line and the German line face each other across two hundred yards of churned mud, rusted wire, and standing water that neither side has crossed in strength for over a year. This is grounded history, not an alternate version of it. There are no invented machines and nothing the real 1916 did not carry. (If you want the dieselpunk road instead, that is our Loire Valley, 1917. This is the real thing.)
The trenches are held by the Alderwick Pals, a battalion raised in 1914 from one mill town and its valley: weavers, clerks, colliers, and most of a football team who enlisted together on the promise that pals who joined together would serve together. In the summer the battalion lost half its strength in forty minutes in front of a wood nobody at home had ever heard of, and was rebuilt with conscript drafts. Originals and new men are two tribes learning to be one battalion, and it is nobody's job and everybody's.
You enter as anyone the trench can hold. A private in B Company, original or new draft. A stretcher-bearer working beside the lay preacher who refused a rifle. A sapper thirty feet down in the chalk, listening for German picks. A signaller sharing the wire and everything that passes along it. A junior officer sharing a green subaltern's dugout and his fear. Or the chaplain's assistant, learning the padre's silences. The world hands you no destiny, only a place in the rotation.
In nine days, on the new moon, brigade wants thirty men to cross the two hundred yards for a prisoner. It will move no line on any map, and everyone from the colonel down knows it. What is real is nearer: a boy whose rescue paper is crawling through the post, a sergeant coming apart behind his own steadiness, a voice across the wire that learned its English waiting tables in Bradford. Merancourt remembers how you treated the men within reach of your voice.
// PLAY PROFILE
What this world plays like
Your first ten turns are about earning a name among men who measure each other constantly. You take your turn in the Ear out in no-man's-land, you carry rations up the Long Drag after dark, you learn who the originals are and who the new drafts are and how thin the line between them runs. Nobody has decided about you yet. The trench is already learning your name.
By turn fifty you are part of the rotation's fabric, and the small allegiances have hardened: whose orders you soften, whose grey-market rum you take, whose shaking hands you have noticed and said nothing about. Your standing with the men within reach of your voice is the one currency at Merancourt that never devalues, and it is real. The favour you called in is remembered. So is the one you refused.
By turn one hundred the raid has come and gone, the mine under the Quarries has spoken or stayed silent, and the choices you made when the whistle blew have settled into who you were here. Some men came back because of something you did. Some did not, and you carry the arithmetic of it. The record of what you did in this trench stands, in the letters home if nowhere else.
Merancourt does not reset when you close the tab. The pumps are still losing to the rain, the Long Drag is still forty minutes of duckboards, and the men you leave are exactly where you left them.
// FACTIONS IN MOTION
Principal factions
The official command structure for the company holding the Merancourt sector. Tasked with executing orders from Brigade HQ, maintaining discipline, and achieving tactical objectives regardless of cost. They represent the absolute authority of the army, caught between the demands of the staff at the rear and the grim reality of the line.
An informal but powerful social clique comprising the surviving enlisted men who joined the Alderwick Pals in 1914. Bound by shared hometown roots and the trauma of the July offensive, their primary goal is the mutual survival of their own. They hold immense moral authority and are deeply suspicious of new conscripts and the seemingly careless orders from officers.
The spiritual heart of the battalion, focused on maintaining morale and humanity amidst the slaughter. Led by the Padre, this faction provides religious services, comfort for the wounded and dying, and the grim task of writing to bereaved families. They operate outside the direct chain of command, offering a space for confession and doubt that challenges the army's rigid structure.
An unofficial, grey market enterprise run by Private Sid Marlow, supplying the troops with luxuries the official quartermaster cannot provide. Dealing in everything from rum and cigarettes to dry socks and French bread, they operate through a network of contacts and 'lost' crates. They thrive on scarcity and provide a vital boost to morale, making them unofficially tolerated by some in command.
A secretive detachment of Royal Engineers, specialists in offensive and defensive mining. Their world is the silent, underground war of listening posts and explosive charges. Their current mission is to locate and counter a suspected German mine beneath the British lines, a dormant threat that dictates the true, unspoken purpose of much of the surface activity.
// KEY FIGURES
People you'll meet
// SITES OF RECORD
Places that matter
A warren of trenches dug into the chalk, named after streets in Alderwick. Wet, crowded, and infested with rats, it is a place of rigid routine: stand-to, sentry duty, work parties, and the daily rum ration. The smell is a mix of wet earth, chloride of lime, cooking, and death.
Two hundred yards of churned mud, shell craters filled with stagnant water, and tangled skeins of rusted barbed wire. It is littered with the unburied dead of past attacks. By day it is empty and watched by snipers; by night it comes alive with patrols and wiring parties.
A strongpoint in the German line, reputedly well-drained and concreted, built around an old chalk quarry. It is the source of accurate sniper fire and the occasional taunt in English from the man called 'Emil'.
A mile-long communication trench, in places only shoulder-deep, connecting the front line to the support trenches and the Sunken Road. It is a river of mud, navigated by duckboards. All food, ammunition, mail, and men move up and down it, always at night.
A road worn deep into the landscape by centuries of carts, now serving as the battalion's main support line. It holds the reserve platoon, the aid post in the White Farm cellar, and battalion HQ.
A small Picardy village six miles from the fighting, where the battalion goes for its four-day rests. It has barns for billets, a church for the padre's services, old brewery vats for baths, and an orchard that now doubles as a cemetery.
// LIVE TURN
A real turn from this world
You close your eyes for a moment, straining to discern the subtle vibrations beneath the pervasive rumble of distant artillery. The low, guttural thrum that has become a constant companion in these trenches seems to sharpen, coalescing into a faint, rhythmic tapping - the unmistakable sound of picks against chalk, deep below. It's a chilling sound, a silent enemy working its way towards you from the unseen world beneath the wire.
// SYSTEM RATIONALE
Why Merancourt, 1916 holds up over a long campaign
Most AI roleplay tools are built around a single session. They start to fall apart at hour ten and are barely playable at hour fifty. Merancourt, 1916 doesn't, because the world isn't living in a chat history - it's living in a database.
Mechanical truth in a real database. Coins, inventory, NPCs, factions, locations, properties - all in real database rows. The narrator describes around the database; the database is what's true. By turn 500, your business ledger still balances and your apprentices still have the names you gave them.
Long memory that doesn't fade. The hundredth turn still knows what happened in chapter two. Old threads stay intact instead of blurring into vague backstory.
The right detail, when it matters. A promise you made 800 turns ago resurfaces at exactly the moment it counts. The world kept the receipt.
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