Crisis protocol

Anthology Interactive, LLC (doing business as Crestfall Studio) makes Crestfall Studio, interactive fiction written with artificial intelligence, and stories go to dark places. This page explains, in plain language, what Crestfall Studio does when writing in a conversation suggests that a real person may be thinking about suicide or self harm, what you will see when that happens, and where to get help right now.

This page is published because California law requires an operator to publish its self harm protocol on its website together with a notification that refers the user to crisis service providers, and New York law requires an operator to run a protocol that detects and addresses expressions of suicidal ideation or self harm and refers the user to services such as 988. The New York duty has been in force since 2025-11-05 and the California duty since 2026-01-01.

Get help right now

If you're going through a hard time, support is available right now. Call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US).

Outside the United States, contact your local emergency services. In Germany, when Crestfall Studio opens there, call Telefonseelsorge on 0800 111 0 111.

If anyone is in immediate physical danger, contact your local emergency services. Crestfall Studio is not an emergency service, it does not monitor for emergencies, and it cannot send help to you or to anyone else.

Who Crestfall Studio is for

Crestfall Studio is for adults 18 and over. Every account starts with a date of birth entered at signup, before any payment step, and an account cannot be created by anyone under 18. Because no account belongs to a person under 18, this protocol carries no clauses about minors and no parental notification.

What Crestfall Studio detects

Crestfall Studio runs a check on writing in a conversation, looking for language that suggests a real person may be thinking about suicide or self harm. That includes statements of intent, a described plan, a request for methods, and language that reads as a person speaking about their own life rather than writing a character.

The check is not a diagnosis and it is not an assessment of risk. It has one job: to decide whether to put crisis support in front of you.

Detection is automated

Detection is automated. It runs on Crestfall Studio's own servers as part of the platform's safety checks, and it is not a person reading your writing as you write it.

Because it is automated, it is imperfect in both directions. It will sometimes offer support when you were only writing fiction, and it will sometimes miss real distress. Support is always available whether or not the check fires: the 988 line above is reachable at any time, from anywhere on the site.

What you see when the protocol fires

When the check fires, Crestfall Studio places a short referral message directly into the conversation, where you cannot miss it:

"If you're going through a hard time, support is available right now. Call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US)."

That message links to this page. It comes from Crestfall Studio, not from the character you are writing with, and it is marked as a platform message so the difference is clear. You are never required to answer it.

The referral renders as a quiet system line inside the conversation. The story does not pause. It shows once per conversation, and again if detection fires after 24 hours have passed in the same conversation.

What Crestfall Studio will not write

Crestfall Studio does not produce self harm content. Its safety systems refuse to write instructions, methods, encouragement, or step by step description of suicide or self harm, in any character's voice and inside any story, and refuse to generate images of those acts. A refusal can end a scene abruptly. That is intended, and it is not a judgment about you.

Crestfall Studio characters are AI, not people. No character is therapy or licensed mental health care, no character will present itself as a therapist, counselor, psychologist, or any other licensed professional, and nothing written inside a story is medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

What Crestfall Studio records

A detection event records the timestamp, the account ID, that detection fired, and that the referral rendered, and never conversation content. The record is kept for 1 year. From July 2027 these records feed the annual report to California. Access to them follows the privacy policy: limited to the people who need it to run the service. This page and the privacy policy always say the same thing.

Review and reporting

Crestfall Studio reports annually to the State of California on this protocol, in the form and on the schedule that California law sets, beginning 2027-07-01.

Crestfall Studio reviews this page after any material change to how detection works or to what the referral says.

Contact

Questions about this protocol, including a report that the referral failed to appear when it should have, go to support@crestfallstudio.com.