Open infrastructure for creative authorship on the AT Protocol.
The Ptah Protocol is a set of Lexicon schemas for the AT Protocol network. It defines fifteen record types that handle attribution, lineage, permissions, and history for creative work — from albums and franchise universes to competitive tournaments and collaborative campaigns. Create a world. Track who contributed what. Trace every sample, adaptation, and remix back to its source. Accumulate history that's permanent and verifiable.
The namespace is world.ptah.*. Production schemas are published and live on the ATProto network.
Status: Active Development — Schema Complete
Website: ptah.world Account: @ptah.world Contact: protocol@ptah.world
- Getting Started — build your first world in five minutes
- Specification — field-level reference for every record type
- Examples — four complete world record chains (RENAISSANCE, MCU, Spades, tabletop RPG)
- Glossary — terms from protocol infrastructure, world-building, and competitive play
- Roadmap — where the protocol is and where it's going
The protocol defines fifteen record types plus a shared definitions file.
The foundational record. Everything else references it. A world must exist before characters, events, or logs can exist inside it. Declares the world's name, creator, intellectual property origin, governance mode, and rendering hints.
A person, creature, or entity that exists inside a specific world. The character is not the user — the character is the world's inhabitant. Can be an original creation or an instance of a shared Template.
A shared identity template that multiple characters can embody. The type, not the instance. Iron Man is a Template — Tony Stark is a Character instance of that Template. Governs instance policy and canonical reference.
The heartbeat of the protocol. Every time someone acts inside a world, they create one of these. Captures who acted, as which character, in which world, at which location, and what happened. Supports threading via parent action references.
A structured occurrence — competition, gathering, milestone, ceremony, or conflict. Tracks participants, stakes, status, result, and witnesses. An album release is an event. A tournament match is an event. A battle is an event. Witnesses are verifiable action records, not just a count.
The world's history book. What separates the protocol from a game or a social feed. Logs trace back through source references to the actions and events that generated them. The history is attributable, permanent, and verifiable. Supports a human-authored declaration flag.
The attribution and permission layer. Tracks who contributed what, under what terms, and with what role. Carries a structured attribution chain where each entry records the contributor's DID, role, and optional split percentage. Provenance travels with the work.
A place inside a world. Gives events and actions an address. Locations nest infinitely via parent references and carry a depth index for efficient rendering without traversing the full hierarchy.
Bundles multiple works together. An album, anthology, season, or any curated set of related works. Items are ordered sequentially, chronologically, or unordered.
Temporal orchestration for content delivery. Controls when and how works surface — release schedules, gated access, sequential unlocks, ritualized drops. Supports RRULE scheduling, audience tiering, unlock conditions, and multi-surface channel hints. The world's clock.
Tracks lineage between works. The paper trail from one work to another — cover, remix, adaptation, translation, sample, interpolation, response, sequel, spinoff, excerpt, remake, or fork. Includes clearance status.
Terms and permissions for a work. What's allowed, where, for how long, and under what conditions. Covers commercial use, derivatives, performance rights, attribution requirements, territories, and license type.
Edit history within a work. Tracks the evolution from draft to published to revised to final — every version, every change. Versions link to their predecessors and carry status (active, superseded, retracted, archived).
Signaling record indicating an account participates in the Ptah Protocol. One per account, fixed key self. Named for the twisted flax glyph (𓉔), the H in Ptah — the attribution chain thread. Used by AppViews for participant discovery.
- Defs ·
world.ptah.defs— Shared token definitions (source types, canonical status tiers) referenced across all record types.
Attribution is infrastructure, not metadata. Every record carries a permanent link to its creator. The creator's DID is immutable — it doesn't change even if the record is contributed to, built on, or rendered a thousand different ways.
The protocol records; clients render. The schemas define the data. How that data is displayed — which canon tier to show, how to weight narrative significance, what visual style to use — belongs to the rendering layer. Multiple clients can read the same records and produce meaningfully different world experiences.
Witnessing is presence, not endorsement. A thousand witnesses do not make an event good. They make it witnessed. The distinction is preserved at every layer.
The log is rhetoric, not truth. The protocol makes narrative attributable and permanent. It does not make narrative true. Any log entry can be traced back to its sources, but the interpretation belongs to the author.
knownValuesoverenumeverywhere. Fields use open-ended known value sets rather than closed enumerations, allowing extensibility without breaking changes.- Consistent required fields. Core records require a creator DID, a world reference, and a creation timestamp. Most also require a name or title. Everything else is optional.
- Typed flexible properties. Freeform metadata (rendering hints, character properties, location properties) uses named object definitions with explicit optional fields rather than untyped key-value pairs.
- String length limits. Names: 640 bytes / 64 graphemes. Descriptions: 10,240 bytes / 1,024 graphemes. Log content: 102,400 bytes / 10,000 graphemes. Byte-to-grapheme ratio approximately 10:1.
- AT URI references throughout. All cross-record references use the
at-uriformat, making every relationship in the record chain resolvable on the network.
Production schemas are published as com.atproto.lexicon.schema records in the @ptah.world repository under the world.ptah.* namespace. All fifteen schemas are live and resolvable on the ATProto network.
Lexicon resolution is wired via DNS TXT record:
_lexicon.ptah.world→did=did:plc:l45z35sxxjuobp5q65a5vu22
DID: did:plc:l45z35sxxjuobp5q65a5vu22
PDS: Blacksky
The protocol supports three source types for worlds and their contents:
- Original IP — created by the world originator, with full authorship control.
- Public Domain — derived from public domain source material, with the Template/Character instance split enabling multiple performances of shared identities.
- Collaborative Commons — created under a collaborative framework with shared governance.
The controlType field on characters (exclusive, open, contested) and the instancePolicy field on templates (open, restricted, closed) govern how creative control flows through the system.
ptah-protocol/
├── README.md
├── SPECIFICATION.md
├── GETTING_STARTED.md
├── examples/
│ ├── README.md
│ ├── renaissance.md
│ ├── mcu.md
│ ├── blacksky-spades.md
│ └── shattered-reach.md
├── GLOSSARY.md
├── ROADMAP.md
├── LICENSE
└── lexicons/
├── world.ptah.action.json
├── world.ptah.cadence.json
├── world.ptah.character.json
├── world.ptah.collection.json
├── world.ptah.defs.json
├── world.ptah.event.json
├── world.ptah.flax.json
├── world.ptah.location.json
├── world.ptah.log.json
├── world.ptah.origin.json
├── world.ptah.template.json
├── world.ptah.trace.json
├── world.ptah.usage.json
├── world.ptah.version.json
└── world.ptah.world.json
MIT OR Apache-2.0, at your discretion. Following the dual-license convention used by the AT Protocol reference implementation.
The Ptah Protocol is created by R. Michael Thomas.
Named for Ptah, the Egyptian god of craftsmen and architects — the one who conceived the world in his heart and spoke it into existence. The protocol's three-letter hieroglyphic name maps to its architecture: 𓊪 (P) is the foundation layer, 𓏏 (T) is the record layer, 𓉔 (H) is the attribution chain.