1. Who we are
The Flood Chronicles is operated by Xin He Ltd, trading also as Xin Publishing, a company registered in England and Wales.
- Company number
- 07087297
- Registered office
- Piccadilly Business Centre, Unit C, Aldow Enterprise Park, Blackett Street, Manchester, M12 6AE, United Kingdom
- Contact
- support@thefloodchronicles.net
- ICO registration
- Fee paid 29 July 2026; registration number to follow
Xin He Ltd is the data controller. We are not required to appoint a Data Protection Officer and have not done so; responsibility sits with the director, who is also the Game Master.
2. What this policy covers
This website in all its language versions; applications and waiting lists; the running of the game itself — your weekly letters, our result letters, and the record of both; and any other correspondence with us.
It does not cover other websites we link to. When you follow a link to PayPal or Wise you leave our site, and their own terms apply.
3. What we hold
When you apply, or join a waiting list. Your name, your email address, the world you are applying for, and anything you write in the optional fields. All of it reaches us as an ordinary email that your own mail program sends. This website does not collect or store it.
When you use the Realm Creation Helper. The same, plus the description of the realm you would like to rule. Again, it reaches us as an email from you; the helper only assembles the text.
When you pay. We do not see, receive or hold your card or bank details. Payment is taken by PayPal or Wise on their own pages. What reaches us is the fact of payment, the name it was made under, the amount, the date, and sometimes the email address attached to it.
While you play. Everything you write to your Game Master — your weekly letters and any attachments — and everything we write to you. Alongside these, the state of your realm as the game records it, the turns you have played, and the payments received.
When you visit this website. Our hosting provider keeps ordinary server logs, which include the IP address of your device, the time, and the page requested. They are generated automatically, used only for security and diagnosing faults, and never used to identify visitors or build any picture of them. This site sets no cookies and runs no analytics — see the Cookie Policy.
What we do not ask for. We never ask about your health, religion, ethnicity, politics, sex life or anything else the law treats as a special category, and we ask you not to include such things. Your ruler's religion and politics are fiction and are not your personal data; your own are, and we have no use for them. Anything of that kind that reaches us anyway is not used, and is removed where we reasonably can.
4. Why we hold it, and our lawful basis
| What we do | Lawful basis |
|---|---|
| Assess your application and reply | Steps at your request before a contract — Art 6(1)(b) |
| Run your game: read letters, resolve turns, write and send results, keep the record | Performance of a contract — Art 6(1)(b) |
| Take and record payment | Contract — Art 6(1)(b); legal obligation for accounting records — Art 6(1)(c) |
| Keep you on a waiting list and tell you when a world opens | Consent — Art 6(1)(a), withdrawable at any time |
| Answer general enquiries | Legitimate interests — replying to people who write to us |
| Keep the chronicle — the historical record of each world | Legitimate interests — maintaining a coherent shared creative work. See Section 9 |
| Keep our systems secure and backed up | Legitimate interests — security and continuity |
We do not use your information for advertising, we do not profile you, and no decision about you is made by automated means alone. The Game Master reads every letter and approves every result before it is sent. The AI proposes; a person decides.
5. Artificial intelligence, and what happens to your letters
The game is AI-supported. When we resolve a turn, the letters that week's rulers have written are sent to AI services outside our own systems, which help work out how the world responds and help draft the result letters. The Game Master reviews and approves everything before any of it reaches you.
That means your letters leave our machine. What is sent is the body of your letter and the state of your realm. We do not send your email address, your payment details, or the roster that links your ruler to you.
Training differs by provider, and we will not blur the difference. Anthropic and Google both exclude the material we send them from training their models, under the business terms we use. DeepSeek does not. What we send to DeepSeek may be used to train and improve their models. You should know which is which rather than be given a comfortable average.
One of these companies is in China
DeepSeek, which makes the first summarising pass over every letter and translates letters not written in English, is a Chinese company. That means:
- the body of your letter is stored and processed on servers in China;
- Chinese law can require companies there to hand material to the state, and we would have no way to resist it or to be told it had happened;
- DeepSeek's terms permit them to use what we send to train and improve their AI models;
- the UK has made no adequacy finding for China, and no contract is available to us from DeepSeek that would give you enforceable rights there.
We send the body of your letter only — never your name, never your email address, never any header. That is enforced in our own code and tested. But whatever you put in the body goes.
We have judged this acceptable because what you write is fantasy strategy correspondence about an invented world, carrying nothing financial, medical or otherwise sensitive. You may reasonably judge it differently, which is why it is set out here in full rather than buried. If it is not acceptable to you, please do not sign up.
Some of the work never leaves the house. Images for the newspaper, and answers to questions about our own archive, are produced by AI running on hardware we own and control in the United Kingdom. Nothing in that work is transmitted anywhere.
If you would rather your writing were not processed this way, we cannot offer you a place. The AI is not an optional extra bolted onto the game; it is how a single Game Master gives six rulers a properly-considered week. We would rather say so plainly than bury it.
6. Who else sees your information
| Who | What they do for us | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Namecheap, Inc. | Hosts this website and our email; carries your letters | United States |
| Anthropic PBC | The Claude models that help resolve turns and draft letters | United States |
| Google LLC | The Gemini model that draws maps; storage of our encrypted backups | United States |
| DeepSeek | First-pass summarising of every letter; translation of letters not in English | China |
Payments. PayPal and Wise handle payments as independent controllers in their own right, not on our behalf, and their own privacy notices apply. PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. et Cie, S.C.A. is in Luxembourg; Wise Payments Limited is in the United Kingdom.
Backups. Every night an encrypted copy of our records goes to Google Drive. It is encrypted on our own machine before it leaves, with keys held only by us. Google stores a file it cannot read.
We do not sell your information and we do not share it with advertisers. Other players never receive your personal details — they know your ruler, not you. We never disclose your real name, email address or country to another player without asking you first.
7. Sending your information outside the UK
For the United States — Namecheap, Anthropic and Google — we rely on the UK Addendum to the standard contractual clauses contained in each provider's data processing terms, together with our own assessment of the risks.
For China — DeepSeek — we rely on the transfer being necessary to perform our contract with you: the game you have paid for is an AI-supported game, and these services are named before you pay. We have assessed the risk and recorded our reasoning in writing. We will say plainly that this is a weaker footing than the arrangements above, which is precisely why Section 5 sets out what it means for you in full.
Where you live does not change any of this. We welcome players from anywhere, and everyone gets the same protections and the same disclosure, whether they are in Glasgow, Hamburg or Shanghai.
8. How long we keep it
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Applications that do not lead to a place | 12 months |
| Waiting list entries | Until you ask to come off, or 24 months with no contact |
| Your contact details as a player | While you play, plus 24 months |
| Payment and accounting records | 6 years from the end of the financial year, as tax law requires |
| General correspondence | 24 months |
| Your letters and the record of your realm | Part of the chronicle — see Section 9 |
| Server logs | As kept by our hosting provider |
9. The chronicle, and the limits of deletion
One thing about this game needs saying honestly, because it affects your right to erasure.
Each world is a single shared history. Your realm's wars, treaties, betrayals and legends are written into other players' letters, into the newspaper, and into the world's record. We cannot remove them without unmaking part of somebody else's game.
So when you leave a world, or ask us to erase your information:
- We remove you. Your name, your email address, your payment records once the tax period has passed, and anything you told us about yourself are deleted from our systems.
- Your ruler stays. The realm you ruled and the world's record of what happened remain in the chronicle under your ruler's name, not yours — at which point they are no longer connected to you.
If you would prefer your ruler's story removed as well, tell us and we will discuss what is possible. We will always do what the law requires; we are telling you now what is practically difficult so it does not come as a surprise later.
10. How we look after it
Your game lives on a server we own and control in the United Kingdom, not on rented cloud infrastructure. It is not reachable from the open internet; access requires a private encrypted network and a passcode. Each world's records sit in a separate database, so one world cannot reach another's. Backups are encrypted before they leave the machine. Access is limited to the Game Master.
No system is perfectly secure and we do not claim otherwise. If a breach occurred that was likely to put your rights at risk, we would tell you, and we would report it to the Information Commissioner's Office within 72 hours as the law requires.
11. Age
The Flood Chronicles is for players aged 18 and over. It involves payment and a continuing contract, and we do not accept players below that age. If you believe a child has given us their information, write to us and we will delete it.
12. Your rights
Under UK data protection law you have the right to be told what we hold and why; to see it; to have it corrected; to have it deleted, subject to Section 9 and to records we must keep by law; to restrict what we do with it while a question is resolved; to object to processing carried out under our legitimate interests; to take it with you in a portable form; and to withdraw consent at any time where consent is what we rely on.
To exercise any of these, write to support@thefloodchronicles.net. We respond within one month. If your request is complex, or you have made several, we may extend that by up to two further months and will tell you if we do. There is no charge. We may need to check who you are first, so that we do not disclose your game to somebody else.
13. Complaints
Complain to us. You have a statutory right to complain directly to us about how we have handled your personal information, under section 164A of the Data Protection Act 2018. Write to support@thefloodchronicles.net with “Data protection complaint” in the subject line and tell us what has gone wrong. We will acknowledge it within 30 days, investigate, and tell you the outcome without undue delay.
Complain to the regulator. You may also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at any time, whether or not you have complained to us first:
Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF
Helpline: 0303 123 1113 · ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint
14. Changes, and how to reach us
We update this policy when what we do changes. The version and date at the top tell you which one you are reading. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we tell current players by email rather than relying on you to notice.
support@thefloodchronicles.net — for anything in this policy, and for any request about your information.