Original mysteries.
Real source habits.

Every case, person, place, institution, and document in Foliofathom is original fiction. No real crime, living person, or existing archive is depicted. What is borrowed is a method: identify the document, place it in context, inspect authorship and purpose, and corroborate across independently created records.

How the method appears in play

• Identify. Every record carries a reference, creator, intended audience, repository, provenance, and a reliability note, because those fields change how much weight a reader should give it.
• Contextualise. Timeline order and record-type filters rearrange the file without interpreting it. The game never sorts records by how useful they are.
• Corroborate. The comparison tray reports whether two bookmarked records came from the same production chain. Two documents written by the same office repeating the same claim are marked as shared, not independent, because repetition inside one chain is not corroboration.
• Cite. A finding closes only when the decisive records are pinned. Selecting the right option with an incomplete citation chain is treated as an unsupported theory.

Where the fiction begins

Real archival research involves incomplete finding aids, damaged items, restricted access, translation, handwriting, and long waits. None of that is simulated. Foliofathom compresses a research question into five records so a reader can practise the reasoning, not the labour. Nothing in the game should be cited as historical evidence.

Background reading on source literacy

• U.S. National Archives: Analyze a written document
• Library of Congress: Using primary sources
• The National Archives (UK): How to use archives

These pages informed vocabulary and reading habits only. Nothing is quoted from them, and no institution endorses this game.

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