Your campaign gets its own copy: how World Seed cloning works

When you press play on a World Seed, Fabulator does not lend you the Author's world. It makes you a copy of it. That single design choice answers most of the questions Players tend to have about their campaigns: whether the story can be changed underneath them, whether their own additions are safe, and what an Author can and cannot do once a campaign is running.

What actually gets copied

A World Seed is a set of cards that an Author has written: locations, factions, items, magic or technology systems, historical events, world rules, storylines and plot points. When you start a campaign from a Seed, the orchestrator reads the Seed's current cards and writes a fresh row for each one into your campaign. Every copy gets a new identifier and is attached to your campaign instead of the Seed.

That last part matters. The copy is a physical row in the database that belongs to your campaign, not a pointer back to the original. There is no live link to follow.

Cards that refer to other cards keep making sense. A location nested inside a region still sits inside that region in your campaign, and a plot point still belongs to its storyline. The copy process rewrites those references to point at the new cards rather than at the originals, so your campaign's map and plot structure are internally consistent without touching the Seed.

The campaign itself also takes a few things from the Seed at the moment of cloning. It is named after the Seed, and if the Author has switched on the Seed's rules option, the campaign is assigned the rules engine that goes with it. Otherwise it runs in narrative-first mode, with no mechanical ruleset applied.

What you own afterwards

Once the copy exists, it is yours in a practical sense. Cards in your campaign are scoped to your campaign, and the database enforces that scoping with row-level security rather than relying on application code to remember it.

Editing a card inside your campaign changes your copy only. Those edits are recorded as Player-authored changes, so the history of what came from the Author and what came from you stays distinguishable. An edit does not overwrite the old version in place: the previous version is marked as superseded and a new current version takes its place.

Nothing you change travels back to the Seed. Another Player who started from the same Seed has their own independent copy and will never see your additions, and you will never see theirs.

What the Author's later edits do

This is the question people ask most often, and the answer is simple: an Author editing a World Seed after you have cloned it does not change your campaign.

The reason is structural. The edit lands on the Seed's cards. Your cards are separate rows with the Seed reference cleared, so there is no path by which an edit to the original could reach them. The connection simply is not there.

In practice, that means:

• An Author fixing a typo, rewriting a faction or removing a location affects Players who start afterwards, not campaigns already in progress.
• A storyline you are halfway through will not be rewritten by an Author's revision.
• If you want something an Author added later, you start a new campaign from the Seed, which takes a new copy of the Seed as it stands then.

The trade-off is real and worth stating plainly: your campaign does not receive improvements or corrections an Author makes later. You get stability instead. Whatever canon you started with is the canon your campaign keeps, apart from what you and the narrator add to it.

What happens if the copy fails

The copy is made as one all-or-nothing operation. If something goes wrong partway through, the transaction rolls back, so you do not end up with a campaign that holds half a world. The portal then removes the campaign row it had created for the attempt, so a failed start does not leave an empty campaign sitting in your list.

Retries are safe as well. The copy records a receipt for each campaign it has populated, and a repeated request for a campaign that was already filled does nothing instead of copying everything a second time. A dropped connection during your first click cannot double up your cards.

Where the Author's authority ends

The same boundary protects Authors. An Author edits the Seed through Author-side tools, and those writes are checked against the Seed's ownership. Authors do not get a back door into your campaign through their Seed, and Players do not get write access to the Seed through theirs.

It also means the cards in your campaign are marked as authored by the Seed's original Author where they came from the Seed, so credit stays attached to the person who wrote the material even though the copy is yours.

If you want to see this for yourself, pick a World Seed in Discover, start a campaign, and look at its cards in your campaign's lore view. They are yours to read, and to change, without affecting anyone else's.