Forking This Site

Fian Ilchruinne is built to be forked two different ways. Which one applies to you changes what you keep and what you replace.

The two licences

The site engine (Eleventy config, layouts, CSS/JS, deployment scripts) and the story content (chapters, characters, lore, glossary, codex, timeline) are licensed separately:

Engine — MIT. Reuse it for anything, including a wholly original story with no connection to Fian Ilchruinne.
Story content — CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, with a standing Fan Works Policy exception for non-commercial fan fiction, fan art, and fan fiction clones of this site. See the Licence section on the homepage for the full terms and conditions.

That means two paths:

Path A — an original site, different story entirely. Keep the engine, delete and replace the content. No connection to Fian Ilchruinne is implied or required.
Path B — a Fian Ilchruinne fan fiction clone. Keep the engine and some or all of the existing content, and add your own stories in the same universe — non-commercial and clearly labeled as unofficial fan work.

What's engine vs. content

Keep (engine)	Replace (Path A) or extend (Path B)
Eleventy config, build scripts	Chapters and storyline threads
Page layouts	Characters, timeline
CSS, JS, images, audio (swap assets, keep the mechanism)	Lore, glossary, codex
Data/config mechanism (comment-board values need updating — see below)	Story bible, prompt notes

Step by step

Fork the repository on GitHub, then locally run npm install && npm start to confirm it builds before changing anything.
Decide Path A or B, then either delete the content directories above and write your own (Path A), or keep what you want and add to it (Path B — check the Fan Works Policy conditions as you go). Either way, use the project's content scaffolding command to generate each new character, lore, codex, glossary, chapter, or journal entry — it prompts for the right fields and validates them against a shared schema, so a typo'd field fails with a clear message instead of a silent bad build.
Rebrand. The site name and title are configurable without code changes — they cover the header logo, footer, and browser title. Beyond that, replace every mention of Dermot R. Cochran's name and domain throughout the repository with your own identity, since nothing about who you are can be inferred automatically.
Fix the path prefix, if you need to. This project's absolute links are rewritten at build time to match wherever you host the fork — a differently-named GitHub Pages repo, a custom domain, or local preview at root — with no manual find-and-replace needed.
Set up your own comments board, if you want reader comments at all — create your own public GitHub Discussions repo with a matching category structure, and point the site's comment configuration at it. This works the same way across local previews, GitHub Pages, and any other host, without editing the engine.
Deploy. The GitHub Actions workflow for GitHub Pages works unmodified once you set your own site domain. Any other static host (Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, a plain bucket) just needs a standard Eleventy build and your own domain set at build time. cPanel hosts use a separate deploy config with the same idea — copy the sample, fill in your own values.

The repository's own README and the FORKING.md guide in it walk through every one of these steps in full technical detail, including exact environment variable names, file paths, and commands.