Lonelog v1.7: The Consolidation Release

devlog
Fixing the drift between the spec, its examples and the add-ons.
Author

Roberto Bisceglie

Published

November 13, 2026

Every release from v1.0 to v1.6 added something: inline tables, add-ons, tag categories, multiple actors, oracle rolls with d:, Lead/Assist. Each one made sense on its own. None of them went back and checked the examples, the legend or the add-ons that relied on the old way of doing things.

When I sat down and read the spec start to finish, the drift was obvious. v1.5 told you to write oracle rolls with d:, and nearly every example in the document still used -> Yes, but... (d6=4). [E:Alert 2/6] and [Clock:Alert 2/6] did the same job. ≤ meant “failed”, which is false whenever you roll exactly the target. The FitD example called a single 6 a critical. The Fate examples had dice that didn’t add up. The add-on table pointed at files that don’t exist.

So v1.7 adds almost nothing new. It settles things. Most of what changed is a decision about something that was already ambiguous in real logs.

No log becomes invalid. Every form v1.7 retires is deprecated: still readable, still meaning what it meant, just no longer shown in examples. The full list is in the new Appendix E.

Oracle answers: three forms, all valid

v1.5 tried to make d: the one way to record an oracle roll and demoted -> to shorthand. In practice, nobody stopped writing -> No, but... (d6=3), including me. It’s compact and it keeps the roll. So v1.7 stops fighting it and names three equal forms:

d: d100=60 vs 35 -> No        full: the roll and the target matter
-> No, but... (d6=3)          compact: the roll, no target
-> No, but...                 bare: just the answer

And likelihood finally has one home: on the question, because it describes what you asked, not the roll.

? Does the guard notice me? (Unlikely)
d: d100=60 vs 35 -> No

For compact logs there are now standard answer codes: Y, N, Ya, Yb, Na, Nb, Yx, Nx.

d: gives a verdict, tbl: gives content, and gen: is gone

This one took the most thinking. The old rule was: tbl: for one roll on a simple table, gen: for several rolls combined. But that’s a rule about how many dice, and nobody reading a log cares how many dice you rolled. The spec itself filed the same Mythic Event roll under both prefixes.

What a reader does care about is what kind of thing came back:

  • d: gives a verdict. Did it work? Is it so? Success, failure, yes, no.
  • tbl: gives content. What is it? Who? What happens? A thing, a name, an event.
? Does the guard notice me? (Unlikely)
d: d100=60 vs 35 -> No

? What disrupts the scene?
tbl: Mythic Event
  Focus: d100=78 -> NPC Action
  Meaning: d100=34 -> Betray

gen: is folded into tbl:. Old logs that use it read exactly as before. One nice side effect: a tbl: line without -> is a table definition, and one with -> is a result, so a tool can tell them apart without guessing.

Comparisons that are true

Before:

d: 2≤4 F
d:4≥5 F

After:

d: 2<4 -> F
d: 4<5 -> F

≥ means meets or beats, < means falls short, and vs stays neutral. The comparison has to be a true statement. Outcome abbreviations always go after ->. The d: line also has a standard order now, d: [Label] <dice>[+mod]=<total> [vs <target>] -> <outcome>, matching the Dice Notation Add-on.

Roll context moves in front of the dice

v1.3 put roll context in brackets after the dice. The Dice Notation Add-on put individual die results in brackets in the same spot. Two features, one position, and a reader left to guess whether [4, 4] was a pair of dice or a pair of tags.

Before:

d: Investigate 2d6 [Be kind to others, Naive] = 8 -> Mixed

After:

d: Investigate +[Be kind to others, Naive] 2d6=8 -> Mixed
d: Stealth +[cover] -[injured] d6=3 vs TN 4 -> Fail

Brackets before the dice are context, + for what helps and - for what hinders. Brackets after the dice are results. And against: isn’t needed any more, because -[…] already says it.

Events are events, clocks are clocks

[E:Name X/Y] and [Clock:Name X/Y] were the same thing, and the core examples used them interchangeably. Now:

  • [Clock:Alert 2/6] is the counter.
  • [E:Bridge Collapse], with no number, marks something notable that happened.

That gives E: a job nothing else does: search a campaign for [E: and you get its turning points.

Tags accumulate

v1.6 offered four ways to update a tag, and two of them looked identical: was [N:Jonah|captured] a full restatement or an addition? Now there’s one rule. A later tag adds to what’s known. -tag removes, old>new replaces, HP 6 sets a number, HP-2 adjusts it.

[N:Jonah|friendly|injured]
[N:Jonah|captured]              still friendly and injured
[N:Jonah|-injured]
[N:Jonah|friendly>hostile]

Adding things up is right for traits and conditions, but wrong for anything that can only be one thing at a time. A room is unexplored, then cleared; it shouldn’t end up both. So there’s a second rule: a value written as category:value replaces whatever that category held.

[N:Guard|status:alert]
[N:Guard|status:unconscious]    no longer alert
[PC:Jonah|trait:+reckless]      adds one entry to a list

Two more rules finish the set. Counts are values, not part of the name: [N:Bandits|×6] then [N:Bandits|×4], so the bandits stay the same element as their numbers drop. And progress tags advance from the name: [Clock:Alert+1], [Timer:Dawn-1]. Every add-on was already writing that last one, so core now says it officially.

The same review turned up add-on tags whose fields only made sense in a fixed order: [R:ID|status|description|exits], [Unit:Name|size|stats|position|status]. Skip a field and the rest shift. Now every value says what it is — a labelled number, a count, a category or a plain word — so the order stops mattering: [R:3|status:cleared|library|exits:N R2, W R4]. And tags that used to have no name, like [Wealth:Gold 45], now name their owner: [Wealth:Kael|Gold 45].

> is the ASCII form of →, so you don’t need a special character. # references work for every tag type, not just NPCs. And every tag has a name, PCs included: [PC:Alex|HP 6], never [PC:HP 6].

Parallel storylines

“Thread” meant two things: a [Thread:] story question and a T1-S1 parallel line of play. The syntax stays, but the second one is now called a storyline. A storyline can declare its point-of-view character on its first scene line, so a bare @ inside it means that character:

T2-S1 *City archives, same time* @(Jordan)
@ Search for lighthouse records

When storylines merge, you go back to plain scene numbers with a note. There’s one way to do it now instead of two.

Meta-note labels and retcons

Meta notes get a starter set of labels: note:, house:, ruling:, interp:, retcon:, todo:, question:, reflection:, source:, break:. They’re suggestions, not rules; invent your own when they don’t fit. The point is that two players writing about the same thing reach for the same word.

retcon: fills a real gap. Everyone forgets a modifier now and then, and a silent edit makes a shared log untrustworthy. Leave the original line and correct it right after:

d: Stealth d6=3 vs TN 4 -> Fail
(retcon: forgot +1 from cover — actually 4 vs TN 4, Success)
=> I slip past unnoticed.

No strike-through: Lonelog notation lives in code blocks, where formatting doesn’t render anyway.

Where symbols go

The spec never said. Now it does: in the standard form, each element starts a line. In the compact form, elements can share a line as long as each symbol has a space before it. That’s all a tool needs to split S1 @Sneak d:4<5 ->F => noise, and it’s what people were already writing. One more rule keeps it reliable: -> marks an outcome and nothing else. It isn’t an arrow for prose or tags; a change inside a tag is old>new.

A specification summary, and a shorter front door

Lonelog is written as a friendly tutorial, which is right for players. But anyone building a parser had to reverse-engineer the rules from about sixty examples. The new Appendix D states them in two pages, with MUST / SHOULD / MAY, for tool builders and add-on authors. The tutorial stays as it is.

The history of the name and the migration from Solo TTRPG Notation moved to the new Appendix E, so a new reader’s first page is the notation itself. Appendix A, the legend, is rebuilt to match the spec again. I fixed the system examples in §9 and cut sections that repeated each other.

The document still came out longer than v1.6: Appendix D and the deprecated-forms table add more than the cuts remove.

The rest of the ecosystem

Every add-on and companion notation now targets v1.7:

  • Dice Notation Add-on v1.1.0. Individual results go in brackets right after the expression, before =. Any expression with a compare point takes a space before its result (5d10>=7 =3). The Savage Worlds example now keeps the higher of trait die and Wild Die. The full roller grammar moves to an appendix, so the add-on starts with what solo play uses. # and [ … ] descriptions aren’t used in Lonelog logs any more, because core already uses both; // and /* */ remain.
  • Card Notation Add-on v1.1.0. The biggest change outside core. Most draws give content, so they’re now tbl:. A draw that answers yes or no stays d:. New: deck state with [Deck:Main|×38|out:Qs, M16], hands as a hand: category on the character, and a stated rule that card identities always follow =, so 4d (four of diamonds) can’t be mistaken for dice.
  • Combat Add-on v1.2.0. Damage gets its own line (d: Damage 1d8=5), tags record HP changes rather than both change and total, and [COMBAT] always closes. Compact rolls like d:14≥15 Miss are now d:14<15 ->Miss, the target goes in the action text (@Slash Thug versus @(Thug)Slash), roll context moves before the dice, range is a pos: category, group sizes are counts ([F:Pirates|×2]), and PC tags are named. ! stays Partylog’s: in solo play, foes act through @(Name).
  • Resource Tracking v1.2.0. Quantities are counts ([Inv:Torch|×3], [Inv:Torch|×-1]), five shorthand forms collapse into core’s rules, and purses name their owner ([Wealth:Kael|Gold 45]). New owner: and where: categories cover shared and stashed gear, and charges are always charges N/M.
  • Dungeon Crawling v1.2.0. Room status is a status: category, so a cleared room is no longer also unexplored; exits are exits:N R2, E R7 secret; [R:3] is room R3 everywhere, with a level: category for multi-level dungeons. A new section covers exploration turns with core notation alone: the turn in the scene context, [Timer:Torch-1], d: Wandering d6=5 -> No.
  • Solo Wargaming v1.1.0. Unit status, formation and position are categories; [Force:] and [Scenario:] fields are labelled; campaign and hit-location rolls that give content use tbl:. The system examples were wrong in places and are corrected: BattleTech weapon damage and heat, Mordheim’s d66 injuries, 2d6 advances and exploration, Frostgrave’s d20 rolls.
  • Community Add-on Guidelines v1.2.0. tbl: sits with the core symbols, and a new §1.3 lists the reserved syntax add-ons must not reuse: #, brackets around dice, the tag update rules and the core meta-note labels.
  • Partylog v1.1.0, Lorelog v0.1.1, Maplog v0.2.2. The same alignment wherever they share Lonelog’s notation. Partylog’s [Party:] tag is named after the group ([Party:Crew|Gold 150]), its combat rounds are Rd1 like the Combat Add-on’s, Lorelog’s factions become [Faction:] so they don’t collide with Combat’s [F:] foes, and Maplog’s room examples follow the new Room tag.

The Italian and French translations will follow.

Your existing logs are fine. Nothing in v1.7 invalidates a log written for any earlier 1.x version. If you want your old logs to match the new examples, Appendix E has the full list of deprecated forms next to their current equivalents.