HelpGuides
Help & guidesThe Player's Handbook
Your agents read HANDBOOK.md. These guides are for you: how a team of agents shares one memory, why some facts are confirmed and others unverified, and where your decisions come in.Your agents get HANDBOOK.md. This one is for you: how a party of agents shares one memory, why some facts are canon and others only rumor, and where your word comes in.
Basics
What Hippocampus is, and the rules every fact follows.What Hippocampus is, and the rules every fact plays by.
- Guide 1How Hippocampus worksThe loop at the heart of it all. Agents remember, the party sleeps, canon is written, and you rule on what's contested.
- Guide 2Facts and their statusCanon, rumor, disputed and retconned. Where each fact came from, how rumors earn canon, and when canon goes stale.
- Guide 3Precedence and disputesWhose word wins when reports disagree, how a dispute opens, and how you rule, from the Council or from Obsidian.
Goals, agents and secretsThe table
Goals, your agents and what each one handles, and the secrets you keep.Quests, the party and its lanes, and the secrets you keep.
- Guide 4Quests and clocksGoals with objectives, owners, statuses and deadlines, plus Blades-style clocks for progress that isn't a checklist.
- Guide 5Party and lanesEvery agent gets a character sheet with a lane and authority domains. How authority is computed, and what happens to strangers.
- Guide 6SecretsPassport numbers, case numbers and passwords are age-encrypted, one file per field. The curator can lock them away but never read them back, and on the hosted app the key is made in your browser.
Running it
Connecting agents, the nightly update, and the dashboard.Connecting agents, the nightly sleep, and the dashboard.
- Guide 7Connecting agentsThe MCP tools, keys and connectors on the hosted app, serving MCP locally, how a new agent introduces itself, and how to write memories the curator gets right.
- Guide 8The curatorWho sleeps on the party's notes, and how. Agent-run sleep with a curator key, schedules, the Claude Code plugin, the Actions curator, hippo sleep with your own model, house rules, and why nothing is ever lost.
- Guide 9A tour of the dashboardEvery page and what you can do there. Where the data comes from (local, GitHub, MCP, the hosted app, the demo), setup on both, the curator panel, and how the dashboard stays private.
Under the hood
The command line, and how your memory stays yours.
- Guide 10The command lineEvery hippo command, the global options, the environment variables, and the search index, on one page.
- Guide 11Two repos and your privacyThe public tool and your private vault live apart, and data only flows one way. What stays private, what a hosted app's operator can see, where your data does travel, and why the demo is fiction.
Reading order
New here? Read the Basics first; the rest works in any order. Each guide links to the next.New to the table? Read the Basics first; the rest works in any order. Each guide links to the next.
- How Hippocampus worksBasics
- Facts and their statusBasics
- Precedence and disputesBasics
- Quests and clocksGoals, agents and secretsThe table
- Party and lanesGoals, agents and secretsThe table
- SecretsGoals, agents and secretsThe table
- Connecting agentsRunning it
- The curatorRunning it
- A tour of the dashboardRunning it
- The command lineUnder the hood
- Two repos and your privacyUnder the hood
Built in:Edit-free: these guides ship with your version of Hippocampus, so they always match the tool you run. They describe the tool, never your vault.