What have you read? none of 78
Tick what you have finished and the Commons will show you each character as they were at that point, instead of as they are now. It is a courtesy screen, not a lock — everything is in the page either way, and nothing you tick leaves your browser.
Books
Livewrites and experiments
Topic Tag stories
The projects
Everything that exists →-
Bytown
1836 Bytown, ruled through terror and mayhem. Episodic historical webfiction.
2020 4 characters9 files
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Dustrunners
Illegal asteroid mining in 2038, flown by mercenary pilots in low Earth orbit. The oldest world here — its production materials were CC-licensed in 2001.
2001–2011 2 characters1 file
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TorrentBoy
A kid with a talking watch, a teddy bear with a laser blaster, and the TorrentSphere to defend. The world bible was opened to contributors in 2009.
2009 5 characters2 files
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Oki and Nobbin
A mercenary with a debt and a prince who has misplaced an entire planet. Science-fiction comedy, livewritten across a month.
2019 3 characters1 file
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The Vector
A snowy, ash-strewn apocalypse and the bio-hackers who caused it.
2012 1 character1 file
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The Pig and the Box
A fable about a pig, a magic copying box, and why hoarding it goes badly. Downloaded over two million times in a dozen languages.
2009 2 characters1 file
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Cutest Little Thing
An adorable bobblehead arrives in the mail and begins hunting people for sport.
2015 1 character1 file
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Arkady and Kain
A counterspy assigned to interfere with a young terrorist. Livewritten in a month.
2010 1 character1 file
Browse the media
The same files, cut across the projects instead of down them — for when what you want is every logo, or every track, rather than everything about one world.
- Imagery Covers, key art, backgrounds and reference — everything drawn or photographed. 16 images
- Logos Wordmarks, lockups and title treatments, at whatever resolution survived. 1 logo
- Music Soundtrack, themes and the leitmotifs that carry a character between them. no tracks
- Documents World bibles, series outlines, production notes and the rest of the paper. no documents
What's here, and what can't be
The Commons covers work I own outright. The animation I've written for other studios — the credits list — isn't mine to license, however much of it I wrote, so none of those characters can appear here.
A character appears once they've been introduced, not before, so this fills up as the stories do. Most entries are still names and descriptions: the character kits — turnarounds, expression sheets, palettes, layered source where it exists — go up as I get them scanned and organised. The files already here are the covers, key art and logos that shipped with the work.
Nobody appears under one world only. A character can turn up in as many projects as the
stories put them in, which is why every page here lives at
/commons/their-name rather than under a world that would have to be picked as the
winner.
Agents and other machines can read all of this through the MCP endpoint rather than scraping it — same content, with the licence and a correct attribution string attached to every response.
This isn't new. In 2003 I argued that characters, settings and concepts all need to be freely available to the community if you want people to build on them, and in 2009 I opened the TorrentBoy world bible to contributors. This is the same idea with better tooling.