Hand your treatment to the department

A logline works; a paragraph works better. Era, place, and what your characters actually do: that is what turns a guess into a grounded fact.

What the department reads for

Your treatment is read once, and six things come out of it: a title, a logline, the era, the locations, the genre, and the key entities — the people, professions, organisations, technologies and activities the story leans on. Every question the four researchers go and ask is written from those.

So name the era to the year if you can, the places to the building, and the things that have to be real. A treatment that says "1964, Heathrow, a session drummer replacing a Beatle for thirteen days" gives the department more to work with than three paragraphs about what the drummer is feeling.

Tone, theme, and a character's interior life are not read out and produce no questions. They cost you nothing to include and they buy you nothing either. The sci-fi, the invented conspiracy, the thing that never happened: leave it in if you like, but the research comes back on the parts of the world that were real.

Your treatment itself is not stored — only the profile the department extracts from it, and the research it produces. Both are filed under the identity you are signed in with, so you can come back to them.

Been handed somebody else's research?

A room's Research as CSV or The story as CSV files straight back in. Nothing is searched and nothing is spent — the verification travelled with the file. The room will say it was imported rather than researched here.