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.

Templates and entities

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 → Entities.

Creating an entity template

1. Open Project Settings → Entities.
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.

Creating entities

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

Viewing your entities

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

Changing an entity’s template

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.

Connecting entities to your story

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