November 2026 Newsletter: New Narrators, the Journal and Your Story Illustrated
A round-up of October: three narrators for Architects, the Journal and a new Manual, a refreshed Library and Community, the Story Book, and money and newspapers that the game keeps track of.
The Timekeeper · 2026-11-01
Welcome to the Live Through Time November newsletter. The last newsletter was all about what goes on under the hood; this one is more about the things you can see and keep: who tells your story, where you find it, and what you take away when it's over.
Feel free to join us over on Discord or our new Reddit community to get involved with the future of the platform, share your own worlds and stories, or get any support you need.
Choose your narrator
Until now every story in Live Through Time has been told by Google's Gemini Flash. It's been a phenomenal workhorse, and it isn't going anywhere: as The Chronicler, it remains the default for everyone.
But a gangland shakedown in 1952 Chicago shouldn't sound like a quiet investigation in Victorian London, so Architects can now choose who narrates their campaign:
- The Chronicler (Gemini Flash): fast, vivid and cinematic. The default, for everyone.
- The Scholar (Claude Haiku): the literary one. Introspective prose, rich inner lives and real nuance in dialogue.
- The Veteran (Qwen 80B): the street-level realist. Punchy, hard-boiled and gritty, and very much at home in the trenches of 1917.
The question we always get is "why not the biggest models?" We tested them, and the prose is wonderful, but waiting twenty seconds or more for every turn kills the tension, and it would have made a flat $9.99 subscription impossible. Haiku in particular gets remarkably close at near-instant speed. Whichever narrator you choose, your Ledger and the Librarian work exactly the same.
Architects can also now paint portraits and backgrounds for the people they meet in community worlds, from their card in the Directory.
In the manual: AI Narrators · Turns & Access Tiers
Your story, illustrated
This is the one I'm most proud of this month. Most text adventures leave nothing behind: you play for an evening, survive a plague winter in 1348 London, and then it's gone, a scrollback you'll never scroll back through.
Now there's the Story Book. Open the menu in any story and your game so far is laid out as a proper book: a cover with your poster, your character's dossier, a chapter for each day (or every eight turns in myths and Unbound worlds), the newspaper clippings that reported on you, and your Vitality, Stress and Renown at the end of each chapter. If you didn't make it, your obituary closes the book. Press Download PDF and you have an A5 book ready to print, keep or send to the friend who doesn't believe you survived that shipwreck. It's free, and it never uses a turn.
To go with it, Timekeeper Mode now has an Illustrate this Moment button on every narrator reply. It picks the most striking moment of the passage and paints it as one wide cinematic frame, keeping your character's face and clothes consistent with their portrait, and the picture goes straight into your Story Book. It works on every plan, in every story, for 3 turns a picture.
In the manual: The Story Book · Timekeeper Mode
Every coin counts
Every AI RPG player knows the moment: a penniless urchin pats down a drunk and walks away with 500 gold coins, and ten turns later the purse is somehow still full.
So we took the money away from the narrator. Your purse is now a number the game itself keeps, in each era's own coins: denarii in Rome, pieces of eight in Nassau, pounds, shillings and pence in Dickens's London, East or West Marks in Berlin. The narrator only reports what changed hands, and the game does the sums. You can't spend what you don't have, a failed pickpocketing earns you nothing, and if the story says you handed over threepence, the threepence goes.
In the manual: Money
Read all about it
Every era now prints its own newspaper, from the Acta Diurna posted in the Roman Forum on market day to the Daily News that Dickens founded, and it reports on the world that carries on without you.
There's an About Town column, covering what the people you've met have been up to while you were busy. There's a rumour about you, never naming you and always a little wrong, which climbs from the gossip at the bottom of the page to the front page as your Renown grows. And you can now write in yourself: send a letter to the editor, or pay for an advert in the era's own coins, and it's printed in the next edition.
In the manual: The Newspaper · Letters & Telegrams
The Journal, the Manual, the Library and the Community
You're reading the newest of these. The Journal is now home to every newsletter since launch, alongside a Feature Spotlight each Saturday, and, since last week, the Grand Tour each Wednesday: a deep dive into one of our worlds, starting with the Dickensian Age. Tombstone is next.
The Manual has replaced the old How to Live page: more than forty pages in all seven languages, from your first session to how the engine remembers, and the Journal links to the right pages at the end of each post.
The Library has been rebuilt so you can find a story by searching, filtering by world or theme (war, crime, power, rebels, faith and more), or ticking "Real people" for the stories based on someone who really lived. You can browse world by world, or see all 136 stories at once.
The Community page now has Worlds, Stories and My Worlds tabs, the same filters as the Library, and a dossier for every world. We also have a Featured World from the community, which this week is from a member who is paying homage to the late great Patrick Stewart.
And you may have noticed every era and myth has a new poster, all in our double-exposure style.
What's next
We won't stop there. Our next engine is well under way: short, timed scenes in very different times and places, where whatever happens leaves a mark you carry into the next. And the stories of the Second World War are still very much on my desk.
As always, we'd love for you to join the conversation on Discord or Reddit and help shape the next chapter of the platform, or play for free today.
Thanks for reading.
See you in the past…
The Timekeeper