The Lost Realms

Terms of Service

The terms on which you may use this website and the game we host on it. The software you install and run yourself is licensed separately — see below, because the difference decides which document applies to you.

1Who we are, and what this covers

Brave You Worlds, LLC, a limited liability company organised under the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, United States. Write to licensing@braveyouworlds.com about anything here.

These terms cover this website and any copy of the game we run and you play over the network, together “the service”. Using the service means agreeing to them.

What these terms do not cover. If you download The Lost Realms and run it on your own machine, you are not using a service of ours — you are using software, under the licences that come with it: the engine under the Business Source License 1.1, and the art, worlds, story and books as proprietary Game Content. The End User Licence Agreement collects those in one place. Signing in still reaches us even from a local install, so the Privacy Notice applies wherever you play.

2Your account

Signing in creates an account with our identity provider. What it holds is your email address and little else; the Privacy Notice says exactly what and why.

One account, and it is yours. Use an address you control. Do not share the account, and do not sign in as somebody else.
You are responsible for what happens under it. Tell us if you think somebody else has it.
You can close it at any time, by one email to the address above. We will delete what we hold.
Signing in is not by itself permission to play everywhere. Anyone running their own copy of the server decides who may use it, from a list they control on their own machine. We say who you are; they say who may use their box.

3The Game Master is a language model

This is the most important thing on this page, so it is not buried in a list.

The story is generated while you play, not written in advance and reviewed. The Game Master is a large language model. Its output varies between runs, can be wrong, and can be unsuitable — it is responding to what you type, and nobody has read it before you have. Do not rely on it for anything outside the game, and do not treat anything it says as advice, fact, or a statement by us.

Your turns go to a model provider. Whichever provider is configured — by you, or by whoever runs the server you are playing on — receives what you type and what the game sends with it, and handles it under its own terms. Any cost of using that provider is between you and them.

4What you may not do

Break into, overload, probe or disrupt the service, or try to reach parts of it that are not yours.
Use somebody else's account, or misrepresent who you are.
Scrape or bulk-download the service to rebuild it, resell it, or train a model on it. Playing is expressly not this — see §5.
Use the service to produce or distribute material that is unlawful, that sexualises children, that harasses a real person, or that is designed to deceive somebody to their harm.
Work around a restriction a server operator has set, including who may play on their server.
Resell or sublicense access to the service, or use it in something you take revenue from, without a separate licence from us.

Streaming and let's-plays are fine, monetised channels included — that is settled in LICENSE-CONTENT §2.5 and nothing here narrows it.

5What you make, and what we claim

These are the four positions a generic games licence usually gets wrong, and they are in force today in LICENSE-CONTENT rather than promised here:

Worlds you author are yours (§4.1). Worlds, quests, characters and prose you write belong to you. We claim nothing by virtue of the tools you used.
We claim no ownership of what the model writes (§4.2), and make no representation about who does — that sits between you and the provider.
We do not train on your content, and playing is not training (§3.5). Sending your prompts and world data to a provider so it can narrate a turn is expressly permitted; without that second half the clause would forbid playing the game.
The realms, the art, the story and the books remain ours. Free to read, quote and build against; selling or redistributing them needs a separate licence.

Part of the artwork is machine-generated, and whether such work is copyrightable at all is unsettled in some jurisdictions. That is disclosed rather than glossed.

6The service is early, free, and offered as it is

We make no promise that the service will be available, that it will keep working the way it does today, or that anything you leave on it will still be there. We may change it, suspend it, or stop running it. Where we can give notice of something that would lose your work, we will.

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, or that anything the Game Master generates will be accurate or suitable.

Nothing here excludes any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Where you deal with us as a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected by anything on this page.

One section here is written by the people who built the software, and it is the one to have a lawyer read. The disclaimer above and the limit of liability it implies are stated in plain terms and in good faith; the exact operative wording, and any cap, is the sort of language that comes from a solicitor rather than from an engineer. It is named here rather than quietly omitted, on the same reasoning as the EULA's own list: a document with invisible gaps is worse than one with visible ones.

7Ending it

You can stop using the service at any time, and close your account by writing to us.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks §4, or where we have to in order to keep the service running or to comply with the law. Where it is not urgent we will say why first. If we close the service down, §5 still decides who owns what: worlds you authored stay yours, and we keep no claim over them.

8Changes to these terms

This page carries a version id, at the foot and in its source, and an acceptance is recorded against that version rather than as a yes/no. That is deliberate: it is what allows a revised version to ask again instead of relying on an agreement to something you never saw. Substantive changes bump the version, and you will be asked again the next time you sign in.

9Law and forum

Virginia, United States, with venue in Prince William County — the same law and forum named in the project's other agreements, so that they cannot pull in different directions. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory law of the place you live.

10The rest of it

If a provision is held unenforceable, the rest stays in force.
Not enforcing something once does not waive it.
These terms, the Privacy Notice, and the licences named in §1 are the whole of the agreement about the service.
You may not transfer your rights under these terms; we may transfer ours to a successor of the business, on notice.