In the Chronicle, canon is whatever has been published in a chapter, signed off by the curator, and committed to the lore graph. Nothing else.
What is canon
- Every published chapter, in its final approved form.
- Every Rare-or-better discovery that the system has marked as canonized.
- Faction philosophies, as stated in onboarding.
- Character names, locations, and artifacts as they appear in the published lore wiki.
What is not canon
- Theories, even popular ones. A theory is a community interpretation; it only becomes canon if a future chapter explicitly confirms it.
- Things you assume from a Common discovery. Common discoveries are flavor, not lore commitments.
- Pre-publication drafts or leaks.
- Fan fiction. We love it, but it does not affect what the AI writes next.
How canon is built
Each chapter goes through ten pipeline steps before publication, including a Rules Referee that checks the draft against existing canon. If a draft contradicts something already in the graph, the referee rejects it and the writer regenerates. This is why Maren Thorne cannot suddenly be alive again two chapters after her death.
Retconning
Retcons happen, rarely. When they do, they are explicit: a chapter will name the change directly. We will never quietly rewrite past chapters or remove old discoveries from the lore wiki.
The lore graph
The canonical source of truth lives in our Neo4j graph: ~12,000 entities, ~50,000 relationships. The lore wiki you can browse at /lore is a public read-only view of this graph filtered to discoveries the community has already made.