Privacy Policy

This policy describes what happens to your information when you visit thedarkwaterstudios.com. The site is operated by DarkWater Studios, an independent game studio in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. You can reach us at info@thedarkwaterstudios.com.

1. What we collect

Almost nothing. This site has no accounts, no logins, no shopping, no comments and no search box. There is exactly one place where you can type something and send it to us: the Join the Vanguard mailing list form on the home page. That is covered in section 4a. If you do not use it, we store nothing about you.

We do not run analytics. There is no Google Analytics, no Plausible, no Fathom, no Matomo, no advertising pixel and no tracking script of any kind on these pages. We do not set cookies. The site itself does not write anything to your browser's storage.

2. Hosting and server logs

The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Every request for a page, image or file passes through Cloudflare's network, and Cloudflare keeps standard server logs to deliver the site and to protect it from abuse. Those logs typically include your IP address, the time of the request, the page requested, your browser's user agent string and the referring page.

We do not use those logs to build a picture of you, and we do not connect them to anything else. Cloudflare handles this data as our hosting provider, under its own privacy practices. Cloudflare may also set a security cookie for bot protection on some requests, which is a function of the hosting platform rather than something we have added.

Cloudflare's email obfuscation feature is active on this site. It rewrites our contact address in the page source so that automated scrapers have a harder time harvesting it. Your browser reassembles the address so the link works normally.

3. Fonts loaded from Google

The typefaces used on this site (Big Shoulders, Archivo and IBM Plex Mono) are served by Google Fonts. When you open a page, your browser makes requests to fonts.googleapis.com for the stylesheet and to fonts.gstatic.com for the font files themselves.

Those requests go directly from your browser to Google, not through us. As with any request to any server, Google receives:

• your IP address,
• your browser's user agent string, which identifies your browser, its version and your operating system,
• the page you were on when the request was made, if your browser sends a referrer.

We do not receive any of that, we get no report about it and we cannot see who loaded a font. What Google does with it is governed by Google's own privacy policy. We are telling you this plainly because it is the one point at which a third party learns that you visited this site, and we would rather you heard it here than found it in a network inspector.

If you would prefer not to make those requests, a browser extension that blocks third-party font loading, or a privacy-focused browser setting, will stop them. The site will fall back to your system fonts and remain fully readable.

4. Email you send us

The only way to send us anything is to choose to write to info@thedarkwaterstudios.com. If you do, we receive your email address, your name if you give it, and whatever you put in the message and its attachments.

Our mail is hosted on Google Workspace, so your message is stored on Google's servers as part of that service. We use what you send only to reply to you and to keep a record of the conversation. Writing to us does not add you to the mailing list; that only happens if you enter your address in the signup form yourself. We do not pass your message to anyone outside the studio unless you ask us to or the law requires it.

4a. The mailing list

If you enter your address in the Join the Vanguard form, we store three things: the email address you typed, the date and time you submitted it, and the two-letter country code that Cloudflare attaches to the request. We deliberately do not store your IP address, your name, or anything else.

The list is held in a Cloudflare D1 database on our own Cloudflare account. It is not shared with, sold to, or processed by any mailing-list company, advertiser or data broker. We use it for one purpose: to send development updates and playtest invitations about The Vanguard Accords: Genesis.

You can leave at any time by writing to info@thedarkwaterstudios.com, and every email we send will carry an unsubscribe link. Ask us to remove you and we delete the row; we do not keep a suppression copy of your address.

The form includes a hidden field that humans never see and never fill in. It exists to catch automated spam. If it is filled in we discard the submission without storing anything.

5. What we do not do

• We do not sell, rent or trade your information. We never have and we have nothing to sell.
• We do not run advertising or advertising trackers, and we do not share data with ad networks.
• We do not build profiles of visitors, fingerprint browsers or follow you across other sites.
• We do not set marketing or analytics cookies.
• We do not ask for personal information anywhere on this site.

6. Children's privacy

This site is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If a child has written to our contact address or joined the mailing list and you are their parent or guardian, write to us and we will delete the message and the address.

7. Your rights

Anyone may write to us and ask what we hold about them. In practice that means email correspondence and, if you joined it, your entry on the mailing list. You may ask us to delete either, and we will do so unless we need to keep something for a legal or accounting reason. We will tell you if that is the case.

We do not control Cloudflare's server logs or Google's records, and requests about those need to go to those companies. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under local law. If you think you do, write to us and say what you want and we will work out what we can do.

8. Changes

If we change how the site works, for example by adding a form or removing the Google Fonts dependency, we will update this page. The date at the top shows when it last changed.

9. Who is responsible

This site is run by DarkWater Studios, the game development studio of Leviathan Enterprises LLC, a Missouri limited liability company based in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. Leviathan Enterprises LLC is the party responsible for the handling described above.

10. Contact

Questions about privacy can be sent to info@thedarkwaterstudios.com.