School Edition
School RPG
Trace by Phionyx — School Edition
A 2D play-card digital narrative RPG for school-age players. Five scenarios in The Wheel and the Balance universe, designed for emotional resilience, decision-making practice, and reflection. Powered by the Phionyx governed runtime — the model is treated as a noisy sensor; every scene passes safety gates and lands in a deterministic audit trail.
Try the browser preview →Preview vs full runtime
The browser preview is static and deterministic: pre-authored scenes, no model in the loop, no account, no server-side save. The full School RPG runtime is in development — it will add Phionyx-backed scene generation, persistent character progress, a real teacher dashboard, and pilot deployment controls. Everything described further down this page is the full runtime direction, not the preview you can play today.
What it is
A card-loop digital RPG. Each scene presents a piece of narrative followed by three choice cards. The player picks one, and the world responds — physics-driven, audit-recorded, never randomised. Characters, quests, badges, artefacts, and regions persist across the playthrough.
The setting is the Wheel and Balance universe — Grey School, City of Arz, Realm of Silence, Chamber of Echoes. Players are travellers; the world watches; the echo of every decision remains.
What it records
School RPG produces a signed Safeguarding Decision Record per pupil turn — the card shown, the structural risk read, the gate verdict, and whether anything was routed to a designated lead. It records the structure of the turn, never the pupil’s words. Below is a synthetic example: a reflective card that passed cleanly, nothing escalated.
Safeguarding Decision Record
synthetic dataphionyx.safeguarding_decision_record.v1
One signed record per pupil turn: the card shown, the structural risk read, the gate verdict, and whether anything was routed to a designated lead — never the pupil’s words.
- scenario
- balance_trial
- card
- c_reflect · reflective
- intent_signal
- 0.9
- escalation_floor
- 0.4
- risk_category
- none
- gate_verdict
- allow
- directive
- pass
- escalation_to
- null (nothing routed this turn)
- dsl_visible
- false
Change one field, re-verify
tamper turn 1 → { valid: false, broken_at: 1, reason: "record hash mismatch (tampered)" }
The record is the account of what happened — and it tells you when someone changed it.
Planned full runtime
The features below describe the direction of the full runtime in development. The browser preview above is a smaller, static slice.
2D play-card RPG loop
Scene text, three choice cards, a small physics-driven outcome. Twelve scenes per scenario, ~30 minutes per playthrough.
Deterministic, audited scenes
Scenes in the full runtime are produced under the Phionyx pipeline — 46 evaluation blocks, safety gates, ethics checks, audit trail. The model stays probabilistic; the governance path is deterministic and gates generated content before it reaches the player.
Five ready scenarios
Resilience, behaviour, speaking up, catching up, wellbeing. Each maps to a stat focus (Wheel, Balance, Echo) and a badge. The preview includes three; the others are reserved for the full runtime.
Character + progress
Players track a character with stats, earn badges and artefacts, and unlock regions of the world as their trace deepens. None of this persists in the preview.
Teacher view
Teachers would assign scenarios individually and see structural progress and badges. No private content surfaced. The preview includes a small concept-window sample only.
Multi-tenant by school
School code + random pupil ID model. Each school an isolated environment. No data crosses school boundaries. Pilot-only.
Safety & review
Ethics vector mandatory on every turn. Risk indicators are structural and would route only to a school’s existing pastoral or support pathway in a formal pilot. No personal content stored — only structural risk indicators.
Privacy by design
Pseudonymous pupil IDs, GDPR export and delete on request, no persistent emotional profile. The system processes and discards.
The five scenarios
Each scenario is a 12-scene card-loop quest, ~30 minutes, set somewhere in the Wheel and Balance universe. Themes are educationally aligned but the player experience is narrative — students never see framework labels in the game.
The Balance's Trial
13+Personal development · Resilience · Character
“You stand on a bridge in the Realm of the Balance. Both sides call you in different directions; the echo of your choice will reach far.”
The Wheel's Turn
13+Behaviour · Conflict · Communication
“In the Wheel Square someone has misunderstood you. The wheel keeps turning; how will you resolve this without stopping the motion?”
Breaking the Silence
13+Speaking up · Trusted adult · Care
“Someone in the world is quietly waiting for help. Nothing changes until the silence is broken. What do you do?”
The Trace of Lost Time
13+Catching up · Progress · Small steps
“The Wheel of Time has made you feel left behind. But every small step redraws the trace. Twelve stops, twelve small wins.”
When the Echo Fades
16+Wellbeing · Stress · Balance
“The echoes are too strong; everything is coming at you at once. The Balance is shaking. Stepping back, breathing, or saying "enough" is in your hands.”
Full runtime direction
When live, scenes in the full runtime are produced under the Phionyx deterministic governance pipeline: 46 evaluation blocks, an ethics gate that runs on every turn, an audit trail that signs each interaction, and a kill switch that fails closed when something deviates.
The full runtime is designed to treat the model as a noisy sensor and the pipeline as the system. Same input is intended to produce the same audit chain; risk indicators are designed to be deterministic rather than pattern-matched. The school profile applies stricter thresholds than other deployments. None of this engineering applies to the static browser preview — the preview is pre-authored content only.
Read the technical background at phionyx.ai.
What School RPG is not
- × Not therapy, diagnosis, or clinical intervention
- × Not behavioural surveillance — risk flags are structural, never personal content
- × Not a replacement for the school’s own support pathway or trusted-adult relationships
- × Not a chatbot or conversational AI — it is a card-loop narrative RPG with deterministic scene production
- × Not multi-school data aggregation — each school is isolated; no cross-tenant analytics
Current stage
Related
Tabletop Edition
The same world, played at a table with friends. d6 Pool / Echoism Engine. P22 Starter Kit, Player Book, Game Master Book.
See the Tabletop line →The Universe
Echoism, the Three Laws (Wheel, Balance, Echo), and the world that all of Trace shares.
Explore the Universe →Safety & Boundaries
The no-blood policy, age-aware design, and what the system does not do — applies across all of Trace.
Read the Safety page →For pilot interest, scenario questions, or technical detail — [email protected]