[LyricalAura]

Originally Posted by kirbykid

I'm still confused, however, as to how certain things work.

1) Red truths; Do they carry on through every chapter? Or are those certain red truths pertainable only to the chapter that those actions happen in? IE there are only 17 people on the island in 1 chapter, but what about the next?

It depends on the particular statement and context. Generally they apply only to a single episode unless they state otherwise. For instance, the red for the person limit specifically says it refers to all games: There are no more than 17 humans existing on this island!! This includes an 18th person. In other words, no 18th person X exists!! This applies to all games!!!

Originally Posted by kirbykid

2) General chapters in general; how do they work? Is each chapter a new scenario? And in each scenario different culprit(s)? And in each culprit different motives? Is each one a completely new *dimension* (i use that term loosely and inefficiently)

Most people believe that the initial condition of each game is the same up until the game starts on October 4th, and then variations occur afterward based on Battler and Beato's moves. The number and variation of culprits are all unknown at this point.

Bernkastel has suggested that there are Rules governing the chessboard, similar to the ones that drove the variation in Higurashi. You might want to check out the Bernkastel's Letter extra TIP for her theories about those.

Originally Posted by kirbykid

Relating back to Higurashi, <snip>. Does Umineko work the same way? From what i understand the whole event is a game that Beatrice plays with Battler where he tries to disprove scenarios using logic instead of giving into magic. In that sense, however, nothing is really "true" or "actually happening" since the game board can be reset and players can be added and subtracted in order to advance or gain advantages, but other than that I don't see clear divisions.

Whether the different chessboards are "real" and how they're connected isn't well-understood yet. The term "Fragment" has shown up in the story several times, but it may or may not mean the same thing as it did in Higurashi, and we don't know if game boards represent real alternate worlds or are just fake constructions on top of a single real Rokkenjima. Reaching an understanding of the nature of the chessboard seems to be one of the central parts of the mystery though.

Spoiler for Higurashi solution:

While Higurashi did have different "sub-culprits", those were all generated deterministically according to the initial board conditions, the character's personalities, and the game's three Rules. They served as noise to obscure the identity and crimes of the single real culprit, Takano. The fact that Umineko also has three rules, one of which is known to serve a noise-generating purpose, suggests that approaching Umineko the same way might be helpful, but your mileage may vary.