Below are some general rules for anyone who writes a piece for The Rutnucker Chronicle. For context, a student is an in-world character attending Rutnucker Learner's Institute, and a writer is an IRL author (you).

1. Any type of piece is encouraged, including editorials, open letters, ads, and announcements. Pieces don't need to be a particular length; a few sentences can be just as impactful as a full page if you do it right.
2. Because The Rutnucker Chronicle is an exercise in collaborative storytelling, you are free to build off of past pieces by other authors.
3. That said, you are also free to write new characters and events.
4. The Chronicle is a school newspaper. Within that scope, it’s up to how big your piece will be. Something could affect the whole school, or fourty students, or just a couple.
5. Less can be more. Not all questions need an answer.

When writing a piece that references or builds from another, use the following points as a guide:

1. If you write using an existing student, read some of the pieces from their “Author of” and “Mentioned in” entries so you can better understand them.
2. If you want to write a character/piece in a way that goes against previous events/characterization, it's probably better to use with a whole new character or series of events

Students can be wrong. Students can lie. If a student is chronicling the melodrama of a love hexagon, they're probably personally involved to some extent, and therefore unreliable to that extent. You are free to lean into this. That said:

1. Canon is fuzzy, but it does exist. It's fine for pieces contradict each other (people have different perceptions of reality). Statements of fact corroborated by many students are more canon than statements of fact published several times by only one student. You (the writer) shouldn't pretend that something never happened, but your students (the characters) can.
2. Fantastical & supernatural events can happen, but only if they can be reasonably refuted. A student may have an encounter with a ghost, but the whole school cannot see a pig grow wings and fly. If you use fantastical/supernatural elements, they must remain mysterious.