How Saving, Chapters, and Sessions Work in Embertold
Lorenzo · · 4 min read
Adventures in Embertold can last hours. The game is designed to let you play at your own pace: pick up where you left off, review what happened before, and keep your story coherent over time.
Sessions
A session is a single playthrough of an adventure. When you start an adventure with a character, a new session is created. Everything that happens, every message, every choice, every item gained or lost, is recorded in that session.
You can:
- Pause anytime. Close the browser, come back tomorrow. Your session is saved automatically.
- Resume seamlessly. When you return, Embertold shows you a short "Previously on..." recap built from your last few exchanges, so you're not starting cold.
- Review history. Open any past session to read through the full transcript of your adventure.
Chapters
As your adventure progresses, it's automatically divided into chapters. Chapters serve three important purposes:
1. Narrative Structure
Each chapter represents a major section of your story. When a significant narrative beat completes, you've escaped the dungeon, resolved a conflict, arrived at a new location, the AI concludes the chapter and begins a new one.
Chapters get AI-generated titles that reflect what happened. "The Escape from Undermount," "A Deal with the Devil," "Sunrise over the Ruins": each one is a bookmark in your adventure's story.
2. Context Management
This is the clever part. AI models can only process a limited amount of text at once (see Scaling Stories for the technical details). In a long adventure, the full transcript of everything that's happened might be too long for the model to take in at once.
Embertold solves this by summarizing completed chapters. When a chapter ends, the AI generates a detailed summary of the key events, decisions, and outcomes. In future chapters, the AI uses these summaries plus the current chapter's full transcript, so it always knows what happened without needing to re-read every single message.
3. Character Checkpoints
Chapter boundaries also serve as save points for your character's state. At the start of each chapter, the system snapshots your character's health, inventory, currency, and status effects. If the adventure uses chapter-checkpoint death behavior, dying restores you to this snapshot: you retry from the beginning of the current chapter instead of losing everything.
You're not locked into waiting for death, either. If a chapter has gone somewhere you'd rather not continue, and the adventure allows it, you can voluntarily restart the current chapter from its checkpoint through the session settings, no death required.
Your Choice History
Every session that reaches a conclusion keeps a running log of the decisions the Game Master flagged as consequential, tagged with what kind of consequence they had and which factions they affected. On a completed session, this shows up as a "Your Defining Choices" summary, a quick way to see the shape of the story you told without rereading the whole transcript.
Viewing Your History
From your dashboard, you can:
- See all your sessions across all adventures
- Open any session to read the full transcript
- Browse by chapter to quickly find specific moments
- See your character's final state, stats, inventory, health at the end of each session
Multiple Characters, Multiple Stories
You can play the same adventure with different characters and get completely different stories. Each session is independent: what happens with one character doesn't affect another.
Want to see how a charming rogue handles the same situation as a blunt warrior? Create two characters, start two sessions, and find out. Need help building your character? Check out our character creation guide.
When Adventures End
Adventures can end in several ways:
- Victory — You've completed the main objective
- Defeat — Your character's health reached zero (in adventures with permanent death)
- Chapter restart — Your character died or chose to restart, but the adventure uses checkpoint death, so you continue from the start of the current chapter with your character restored to their checkpoint state
- Abandoned — You chose to walk away from the adventure mid-story via the session settings
- Natural conclusion — The story reached a satisfying endpoint
Completed sessions become part of your permanent history. You can revisit them anytime to relive your greatest, and worst, moments.
Play at your pace. Your story will be waiting.
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