narrative-continuity

name	narrative-continuity
description	Review narrative material for continuity of chronology, character knowledge, motivation, relationships, injuries or resources, location, world rules, prior choices, and causal consequences across scenes or branches.

Narrative Continuity

Use when stories, quests, dialogue, or cutscenes span multiple scenes, timelines, branches, or writers.

Procedure

1. Identify the material's timeline, scene order, branch state, characters, location, and dependencies on prior events.
2. Track what each character knows, believes, wants, possesses, has promised, has lost, or has physically experienced at each point.
3. Check relationships, titles, names, injuries, clothing or items, travel, time passage, weather, and other visible state whose unexplained change would break continuity.
4. Validate world rules, faction state, technology or magic, quest consequences, and player decisions against current canon.
5. Distinguish deliberate mystery, unreliable narration, flashback, deception, or off-screen change from accidental contradiction.
6. Trace cause and effect across scenes so later emotional or plot outcomes have actually been earned by prior events.
7. Record continuity findings with exact source references and route true canon conflicts to Worldbuilder or the appropriate narrative owner.
8. Recheck corrected scenes in sequence rather than approving isolated lines that create a new contradiction elsewhere.

Decision rules

• Continuity includes emotional and causal state, not only dates and names.
• Characters cannot act on information they never received unless the story deliberately explains it.
• Intentional contradiction needs narrative purpose and reader or player framing.
• Fix the earliest owning cause rather than patching every downstream symptom.

Quality gate

Continuity passes when timeline, character state and knowledge, world rules, relationships, branch consequences, and causal progression agree across the relevant material or intentionally documented exceptions explain the difference.