Pawn Chronicles: Personal Epics

Uploaded · Published June 17, 2026 · Updated June 20, 2026

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Author: D4egon

Last revision: 17 Jun at 23:33 UTC (1)

File size: 19.45 MB

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Description:

For Players Who Want Their Colonists to Feel Like Protagonists

Your colonists already have backstories. Pawn Chronicles turns those backstories into something that actually happens.

Every pawn carries an unfinished story. Pawn Chronicles reads who they actually are — their traits, skills, history, relationships, and the state of the world — and builds a living personal narrative around them in real time.

No templates. No hardcoded scenarios. Every arc is composed at runtime from the pawn’s actual data.

How It Works

Sparks fire quietly — small retroactive moments the game noticed and stamped. A first kill. A pain spike. A bond forming. They write a chronicle entry and leave a mood memory, but ask nothing of you.

Embers are daily texture. A relationship moment. A skill practice. A grief beat. Small, parallel, expiring quietly if ignored. The pawn is living a life.

Arcs are when things get serious. They appear in the quest tab with a timer and demand real decisions. Ignore one and it fails. Fail one and the consequences compound.

Arc Tiers

Kindle — 3 stages. The first real demand. Low stakes: mood consequence only.
Flame — 4 stages. Minor faction relation shifts.
Fire — 5 stages. The pawn is permanently changed. Arc Story added below Childhood + Adulthood.
Inferno — 5 stages with a mid-arc branch driven by the pawn’s dominant tag at that moment.
Hellfire — A chain of 2–4 linked epics, each escalating world consequence. Success spawns a named site or alliance. Failure spawns a named threat.

Entangled Arcs

Some stories belong to two people. Rivalry. Mentorship. Shared grief.

Entangled arcs bind two colonists into a single shared quest — one story, two protagonists, one outcome. Both pawns must navigate the arc together. What happens to one, happens to both.

Player Choices

At key moments, arcs offer branching choices shaped by the pawn’s dominant narrative tags. A Violence-dominant pawn and a Curiosity-dominant pawn will see different options facing the same crisis. What you choose shapes who they become.

Full Transparency

Every mechanical consequence announces itself in plain language.

"The arc sparked an inspiration — Inspired Shooting!"
"The weight broke them. They’ve entered a sad wandering state."
"The arc lifted their worst burden — gut worm is gone."
"Something fell near the pawn: a smokeleaf joint."

You’re supposed to always know exactly what caused what. But I cant guarantee I remembered to explain 100% ^_^ – so let me know in the comments

Compatibility

safe to add to any save
Requires Harmony
Mod-compatible by design — the scraper reads any content registered in RimWorld’s DefDatabases. Custom traits, genes, factions, world objects, and backstories from other mods are automatically incorporated into arc grammar.

For translators

All UI things are in the ../Language/Keyed/English/Translation folder

All the grammar is handled as such:

<Operation Class="PatchOperationReplace"> <xpath>Defs/RulePackDef[defName="PC_NarrativeGrammar"]/rulePack/rulesStrings</xpath> <value> <rulesStrings> <li>pc_lex_scene->translation text</li> <!– all ~1100 rules translated –> </rulesStrings> </value> </Operation> <Operation Class="PatchOperationReplace"> <xpath>Defs/RulePackDef[defName="PC_EntangledGrammar"]/rulePack/rulesStrings</xpath> <value> <rulesStrings> <li>pc_lex_scene->translation text</li> <!– all ~1100 rules translated –> </rulesStrings> </value> </Operation>

Help me improve the mod

Github link here:

https://github.com/d4egon/PawnChronicles

Bug reports and feedback welcome. This mod is in active development.
Kindly report bugs here:

https://discord.gg/ZbxHXMnvq – Screenshots in particular!

or here:

https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/discussion/3726344914/844006002571439170/

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