Sources & copyright
A game about arguing from the sources ought to say where its own came from. Most of what a player reads in Scholar’s Dream is somebody else’s sentence, quoted and cited. What is left is written — much of it drafted by an AI and edited by a person. This page separates the two, lists every work behind the game, and names the handful still under copyright.
Counted from the game’s own citations, as of the data sync on 2026-08-29.
Who wrote what you are reading
The quotations are quotations. When a book in the game says something in quotation marks with a citation under it, those are the words of the work named, in the translation named. They are not paraphrases, summaries or reconstructions. Nothing in the game is a quotation a model produced from memory: every patristic and classical quotation is checked character by character against a stored copy of the source page, and every verse of Scripture is fetched from a public Bible API rather than typed by anyone.
Most of the writing around them was drafted by AI. The flavour text, the notes explaining a book’s stats, the glosses on what a heresy claimed and how it was answered, and the explanatory prose in this wiki were largely drafted by Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic, working from primary sources it had been made to fetch and read.
Andrew Noble edited and shaped it, and is responsible for it. The design, the historical judgements, the decisions about what the game claims and what it declines to claim, and a great deal of line-level rewriting are his. Where the game takes a position — on what a father meant, on whether a book is genuine, on how generously an opponent should be read — that position is his, not a model’s. Errors are his too.
That combination is worth stating rather than leaving to be guessed at. Language models are good at fluent prose and unreliable at exact quotation: a 2026 study of 33,000 observations found that even when a model was handed the passage and asked only to copy it, 7% came back altered — dropped clauses and quiet truncations rather than inventions. The game is built on the assumption that this is true. Hence the rule that no model types a verse, and hence the checking.
The works still under copyright
The great majority of what the game quotes is out of copyright — nineteenth-century translations of works written between roughly 800 BC and AD 430. A few works are not, for one reason: they were lost and only recovered in the twentieth century, so every English translation of them is modern and in copyright. There is no public domain Melito, no public domain Gospel of Thomas, no public domain Gospel of Judas.
Those are quoted in short excerpts — a sentence or a short paragraph, never a whole section — always naming the modern translator, and always flagged as such in the citation the player sees. That is a fair use claim, and it is made deliberately rather than by accident. If you hold rights in one of these and would rather the game did not quote it, get in touch and it will come out.
Primary and secondary sources
The distinction the rest of this page turns on. Primary sources are the works themselves: what a father, a heretic, a Roman critic or a forger actually wrote. They are what the game is made of — a book in the game is one of these. Secondary sources are modern scholars writing about that period. They shaped what the game claims; they are almost never quoted, and where they are, it is short and named.
The number beside each work is how many times the game cites it. Click a work to read its citations exactly as a player sees them.
Primary sources
The works the game is built out of, in the translations it quotes.
The Apostolic Fathers
The first generation after the apostles — mostly letters, mostly short, and the backbone of the early game. Lightfoot’s 1891 translation throughout.
The apologists and the anti-heretical writers
Second- and third-century Christians arguing outward at Rome and inward at the Gnostics. The Ante-Nicene Fathers translations, 1885–96.
The later fathers
Origen, Eusebius, Athanasius, Augustine — the writers who inherited the argument and settled a good deal of it.
Disputed, apocryphal and rejected books
The books the church argued about and the books it turned down. They are in the game because the fight over them is the history, and because a student who has never read one has only heard about them secondhand.
The opponents
Almost none of Christianity’s early critics survive on their own. Every word the game gives them is quoted from the Christian author who wrote it down in order to answer it, and the citation says so at both ends.
Greece and Rome
What an educated second-century reader had already read. The apologists quote these writers constantly, and so the game does too.
Scripture and manuscripts
Bible text in the game is quoted from two translations only, both machine-verifiable against a public API — which is the whole reason they were chosen.
Secondary sources
Modern historians and theologians, and the modern editions the recovered texts had to come from.
Modern scholarship
Living historians and theologians. These shaped what the game claims about the period; where one of them is quoted rather than followed, the excerpt is short and named.
Modern critical editions and translations
Where a work survives but no public domain English translation of it does, the game quotes a modern scholar’s translation in short excerpts under fair use. These are those translations.
Rights in Scholar’s Dream itself
The game’s own material — its design, code, sprites, stat lines, flavour text and the writing on this wiki — is by Andrew Noble, and the game is free to play at andrewdnoble.itch.io/scholars-dream ↗. The typefaces are IM Fell, Literata and VT323, all under the SIL Open Font License.
Scholar’s Dream is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Nintendo or The Pokémon Company. It borrows a familiar shape — creatures, types, a chart of matchups — to teach church history, and nothing more.
Music and sound
All of it is from Pixabay, under the Pixabay content licence, which asks for no attribution at all. These credits are here because a page arguing that you should name your sources ought to name them even where nobody is making you.
Samples from many contributors, among them BryanSantosBreton, SoundReality, PremswaroopKasukurthi, DRAGON-STUDIO and koiroylers ↗.
If something here is wrong
A misattributed quotation, a citation pointing at the wrong chapter, a translation credited to the wrong hand — these are worth fixing and the fix is quick. Say so, with the book or move it appears on, and it gets corrected in the game and here.