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Entities

Entities are the building blocks of your story world — characters, locations, events, items, factions, anything. Each entity gets its own page with structured properties, rich-text content, images, and dates.

The entity system has two layers:

  • Entity templates define a type of story element — “Character”, “Location”, “Event” — including which fields it has.
  • Entities are the actual instances — “Elena”, “The Sunken City”, “The Battle of the Ford”.

New projects come with sensible default templates; customize them or create your own in Project Settings → Bible.

  1. Open Project Settings → Bible.
  2. Create a template and set its label (“Character”), plural (“Characters”), icon, and color.
  3. Choose an image type: portrait (great for characters), landscape (locations), or none.
  4. Optionally enable date fields with your own labels — e.g. “Born”/“Died” for characters, “Founded”/“Destroyed” for cities. Dates place entities on your timelines.
  5. Add properties — the structured fields every entity of this type will have:
    • Text — free text (“Occupation”, “Eye color”)
    • Number — numeric values (“Age”, “Population”)
    • Checkbox — yes/no (“POV character?”)
    • Select — pick from a list (“Status: alive / dead / unknown”)
    • Date — a date on your project’s calendar (“Knighted”, “Last seen”)

Drag properties to reorder them.

Date properties run on your project’s calendar, the same one the template’s date fields use — same picker, same months, same eras, same time of day. So a world with thirteen months and a “Before the Founding” era gets those here too, and a date property can hold a moment the start/end fields have no room for: when a sword was forged, when a treaty was signed.

The difference between the two is what they’re for. The template’s date fields (step 4 above) place the entity on your timelines; a Date property is just another field. Date columns sort chronologically in tables and export in the same format your other dates do.

  1. In the sidebar, click and choose the entity type.
  2. Fill in the entity page:
    • Properties from the template, plus any custom properties you add just for this entity
    • A rich-text content area — the same editor as manuscripts, for backstory, description, anything
    • Cover image, custom icon and color
    • Start/end dates for timeline placement
    • Tags — free-form labels, shared with the rest of the project, for the groupings a template doesn’t cover

Entities show up in several places:

  • Entity page — the full editor with properties sidebar, relationships, and content
  • Card and list views — browse all entities of a type
  • Tables — spreadsheet view filtered by template, great for bulk editing
  • Timelines, mindmaps, and maps

You can reassign an entity from one template to another (say, promote a “Minor Character” to “Character”):

  • Properties with matching names are linked automatically.
  • Nothing is lost — unmatched properties stay on the entity as custom properties.

Related conveniences:

  • Deleting a template never deletes its entities — they become template-less and keep all their data.
  • Promote a custom property to the template so all entities of that type get the field.
  • When you add a new property to a template, existing entities that already have a matching custom property are linked up automatically.

Use relationships to link entities to each other and to manuscripts — “Elena appears in Chapter 3”, “Elena rules The Sunken City”.