About Aletheia

What Is Aletheia?

Aletheia is an original fantasy world developed for tabletop role-playing games. This site serves as an open fantasy worldbuilding and campaign archive: the canonical reference for the setting's history, cultures, locations, assumptions, and internal logic.

The material here has grown out of decades of play and world-building. It is intended to support long-term campaigns and thoughtful exploration of the setting, rather than provide a fixed narrative or single "official" story.

The public direction of the project is archive-first rather than business-first. The goal is to make the world readable, useful, and trustworthy while leaving room for the campaign platform to mature over time.

Open Source and Service Boundary

World of Aletheia is maintained as an open-source and open-access project, dedicated to ensuring its public code and archive remain open source. That includes Canon, Using Aletheia, Reference, and the public-facing archive material that ties them together.

If optional paid work appears in the future, it is more likely to be campaign-specific and additive: private campaign hosting, seamless connectivity to the Canon and Reference layers, storage, availability, authentication/access control, backups, and operational support for individual groups. Those services would add to the project rather than close the shared public archive.

Administrative dashboards for campaign operations or site management may also remain private if they become part of hosted or managed services.

Scope of the Site

The primary focus of this site is world lore - information that defines Aletheia as a setting, independent of any single game or campaign.

Over time, the site will also include:

• Public campaign records from games set in Aletheia
• Protected or private campaign material where access is part of a real campaign space
• Shared reference surfaces such as maps, calendars, and timelines
• Observations, build notes, and lessons learned through play and maintenance
• Practical tips, tools, and links related to running and playing games in the setting

Not all content represents the same level of abstraction. World lore is curated to remain internally consistent, while campaign material may reflect specific interpretations, timelines, or outcomes.

Game Systems

Aletheia is designed to be largely system-agnostic. The setting is intended to be adaptable to different tabletop role-playing systems.

That said, some material - particularly campaign records and practical advice - assumes the use of GURPS, which is the primary system used in our games. When system-specific assumptions are present, they are noted as such.

Who Is Behind Aletheia?

This project is maintained by two long-time tabletop role-playing gamers and fantasy world-builders. We have been playing and running RPGs on and off for decades, and Aletheia exists as a way to organize, refine, and share the world that the two of us have had in the back of our minds for many years.

The site itself is self-built by Brad with AI assistance. It reflects an interest in durable publishing systems, maintainable content workflows, and keeping a long-running campaign archive readable over time.

My brother also contributes to the setting and related campaign material. He is a fantasy world-builder and long-time gamer. Contributor profiles and public credits live on the Contributorspage.

Technical Notes

This site is an Astro-first build with an Obsidian-first content pipeline, cloud-backed collections, and authenticated campaign boundaries.

It functions both as a public archive and as a reference implementation for the publishing and campaign tooling growing around it.

The public project also serves as a reference implementation for an Astro/Cloudflare publishing model that may later support separate hosted or managed campaign services.

Technical details and source:github.com/bradarnst/worldofaletheia

Current Direction

The current focus is to keep the public archive useful, open, and discoverable while learning whether optional campaign services could help other groups manage private campaign material.

Support links, if present, are intended to help offset storage, compute, and maintenance rather than create paid access to the public archive.

Canon and Interpretation

Material published here represents the current canon of the world of Aletheia.

Campaign notes and examples may depict specific events, perspectives, or outcomes that apply only to a particular game. Core world information is curated separately to preserve consistency across campaigns.

Contact and Transparency

This is a personal project, but thoughtful questions, corrections, and discussion are welcome - particularly regarding the setting, its assumptions, how the archive is built, or how the campaign platform ideas are taking shape.

You can reach me at: brad [at] worldofaletheia.com