Live Simulation
The Briarwatch simulation runs on the Taniwha engine, featuring 15 individual agents — each with their own personality, backstory, and relationships — interacting with each other and a supporting cast of background crowd NPCs in a medieval fantasy setting. Watch them respond, adapt, and change as the environment, unfolding events, and each other shape the people they are becoming.
The Setting
Briarwatch is a small village at the end of a road that most travellers have no reason to take. The Kingroad passes through it — just barely — and beyond the northern fields the Blackbriar forest begins, dark and close, pressing against the boundary cairns as if it has been slowly advancing for years. The village has a mill, a shrine tended by Sister Calyn at the green's edge, and at its heart the Throttle & Thistle inn, a three-generation establishment run by Marta, who has seen enough strangers to know the difference between someone passing through and someone hiding.
Around her, forty-odd villagers go about their days in the ordinary rhythms of a medieval settlement — field hands and foragers, homebodies and gossips, the devout and the superstitious — but the emotional weather of the place runs a little cooler than it should. There is a baseline suspicion here, a vigilance. The forest is too close, and the things that come out of it lately have not behaved as they should.
Into this village has arrived a particular collection of guests, and none of them are quite what they claim. Aldren is a knight sleeping in his armour with his sword beside the bed, courteous to stable hands and evasive about where he's been. Corvin is a merchant with a warm smile, generous rounds, and a wagon he checks twice a day with locks that have never been explained. Lyswen is a bard filling the common room with music and asking, gently and persistently, about things people would rather forget. Nael arrived on the Northroad — which no one comes from — and his memories don't quite hold together. Rovan, nominally a courier, flinches when riders pass. Maren, young and sharp-eyed, studies stolen pages by firelight and calls herself a student. And Ithric keeps his dawn and dusk vigils at the treeline with a discipline that unsettles everyone who watches him.
The village, already carrying low-grade fear and a slowly fraying sense of order, now has all of these people under one roof — observed by Edda the potter who misses nothing, grounded by Marrec the shepherd who trusts his sheep over rumours, and presided over by Old Bram who spent forty years in that forest and stopped without explanation. Something is building in Briarwatch Vale. Whether it ends in fire, plague, war, or something quieter depends entirely on what these people do next.
Live View
Click an agent on the map and enter POV mode
Briarwatch runs at a time dilation of 4 hours to one in-simulation day
Live Vote
Choose an event to inject into the simulation. One vote per person.
Recent Events