The charter

What Shared Myth is

Shared Myth is a place to extend old stories together. Each world starts from public-domain sources, summarised in a small founding canon. Everything after that is written by members and accepted by members.

Nobody owns a world here. Stewards keep order, but the canon grows only through community review.

How an entry becomes canon

Any member can submit a story or a lore entry to one world, and mark the sealed entries it builds on. It then waits on the review desk.

Members review it. Each review is a verdict (approve, decline, or contradicts canon) plus two ratings: craft, and fit with the canon. A decline or a contradiction flag must include a note that tells the author what to fix.

When an entry reaches its world's quorum of reviews (three during the pilot), the votes are counted. With two thirds approval it is sealed. Otherwise it is declined, and the author can revise it and submit a new version.

Authors never review their own work. New accounts can review after their first hour, which makes it harder to stuff the ballot with fresh accounts.

Contradictions and stewards

If two reviewers flag the same entry as contradicting sealed canon, it leaves the normal vote and goes to the stewards. A steward reads the flags and either seals it or declines it, and every steward decision is written to a public log.

Stewards can also raise an especially important sealed entry to core canon, and hide spam or abuse. They cannot edit or remove sealed blocks. Nobody can.

The chain

Every sealed entry becomes a numbered block in its world's chain. Its block hash is computed from its exact text, its author, its number, and the hash of the block before it. Change one comma in any sealed entry and every later hash stops matching.

You can check this yourself. Each sealed entry has a button that recomputes its hashes in your own browser, and the chain page walks the whole world from the first block to the last.

The chain is a public record, not a cryptocurrency. There are no tokens, no fees and nothing to buy.

Reputation

You earn one point for each review, two more when your verdict matches the final outcome, ten when your own entry is sealed, and fifteen more if it is raised to core canon. Reputation is a record of care, not a currency.

License and sources

Everything you submit is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Anyone may build on it, including other members and future projects, as long as they credit you and share their work the same way. This keeps the worlds open forever.

Only use material you wrote yourself, plus public-domain sources. Do not copy from modern novels, films, television or games, even ones set in these worlds. The Mythos draws on Lovecraft's circle published before 1931. The Matter of Britain draws on medieval and Victorian sources.

Shared Myth is an independent fan project. It is not affiliated with any estate, publisher, studio or game company.

The founding canon and the opening anthology

The founding entries, signed by the Archivist, summarise the public-domain source stories. The opening anthology, signed Anthology, is a small set of stories and lore the Shared Myth team prepared so the worlds are not empty on day one. Both were drafted with AI assistance and edited by hand, and both are labelled.

The anthology entries marked as in review are open to real review like any other submission, and the community can decline them. Everything written by members goes through review before it is sealed.

Conduct

Review the writing, not the writer. Be specific, be kind, and assume good faith. Harassment, hate (including the racism that runs through some of the source material, which stories here must not reproduce), sexual content involving minors, and plagiarism are removed, and the accounts behind them are closed.