Chronicler: family trees

Chronicler turns the relationships in your lorebook into family trees. Who is whose parent, who married whom, who adopted whom: draw it once on the entries and Chronicler lays it out generation by generation, names how any two people are related, points out lineages that can't be, and can show who inherits, or what the family looked like on any day.

Chronicler adds nothing of its own to your library. Everything it shows comes from relationships and dates on your entries, so it syncs and backs up with the rest of your world, and nothing is lost if you never open it.

Open it

• On a computer: Chronicler is in the sidebar's rail, after Maps. Its panel lists your world's families; click one to open its tree.
• On a phone: open a world's Home tab and tap Chronicler in the list of screens, just below Maps.
• From the lorebook: the Family tree button (a small branching icon) at the top of the Lorebook, or Family tree beside Show in graph under an entry's Relationships, which opens the tree with that person selected.

Build a family

A family comes from three kinds of relationship: Parent of (or Child of), Spouse of and Sibling of. Add them on the entries, either side; the tree needs no other setup.

• An entry only appears once it has at least one of these ties.
• A family is everyone joined by blood or marriage. If your world has several, the Family menu in the toolbar switches between them, named after the founder.
• Sibling ties count even when no parent is known: children of two people who are said to be siblings are cousins.

Your own kinds

Chronicler reads a relationship by what it does, not what it's called. When you make a kind of your own, choose In family trees and say what part it plays:

So a kind called Lover of set to Partner of draws a dotted couple and is never mistaken for a marriage. A kind with no choice isn't read at all.

Read the tree

Each person is a card: their picture (or their category's icon, ringed in its colour), their name, when they lived (their Born and Died dates), their first title, and a ♀ or ♂ if their entry says so. Couples sit side by side with a small ring on the line between them, where the line to their children starts. Children hang below their parents, siblings in order of birth. Faint bands behind the rows number the generations (I, II, III…) and give the years people in them were born.

Pan by dragging, zoom by pinching or scrolling, and use +, − and Fit to screen in the corner.

Select someone

Selecting a card lights their line: their ancestors, descendants, spouses, partners and the people they share children with. A card opens with their Parents, Spouses, Partners, Siblings, Half-siblings and Children, each a link into the tree, and their titles. Open entry goes to their page.

How are they related?

Choose How are they related?, then select someone else. A sentence names it, and who it runs through:

Dara Voss is Tomas Voss’s adoptive sister, through Queen Isveth.

Chronicler names direct lines (parent, grandparent, 3× great-grandchild), siblings and half-siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins by degree and removal ("second cousin once removed"), spouses, former spouses and partners, co-parents, in-laws ("sister-in-law") and step-relations, and says "related by marriage" for kin further out. Once a person has a gender it uses their word, such as mother or uncle; without one it says parent or aunt or uncle.

Find someone, or read it as a list

Find someone… searches the family and jumps to a person. List shows the same family in words, a generation at a time, which is easier on a small screen:

What doesn't add up

When something in a family is impossible, a line above the tree says so ("2 things in this family don't add up"). Open it to see each one and select it to jump to the person. Chronicler flags:

• someone who is their own ancestor,
• more than two parents by birth (adoptive, foster and step parents don't count),
• a child born before a parent, or more than a year after a parent died,
• a marriage or partnership that began before one of them was born, after one of them died, or that ends before it begins,
• a title holder, with a rule for passing it on, who has no one to pass it to.

People with no dates are never flagged.

Marriages, partnerships and partings

On a Spouse of relationship, or one of your own that plays that part, the relationship sheet has a When section (Began and Ended) and How it ended: still together, divorced, separated, annulled or widowed. Dates are in your world's calendar.

• A person's marriages are listed in the order they began, with their dates: Spouses: Aldric Voss (290 AP – 318 AP, widowed).
• A couple that divorced, separated or annulled is drawn with the slashes, and each is the other's former spouse. A widowed spouse stays a spouse.
• The dates show under the relationship on the entry's page.

Gender and titles

On a character's page, a Family card sits beneath Dates. It appears for categories whose dates are a life (Born and Died), such as characters.

• Gender is Not stated, Female, Male or Neutral. It only chooses words: a woman is a sister or mother, a man a brother or father. Not stated and Neutral keep sibling and parent. Chronicler never assumes one from a name.
• Titles are whatever the person holds, such as Queen of the Ashen Reach. Add as many as you like; the first shows on their card.
• Heirs follow says how their titles pass down (see Heirs).

Adoptive, foster and step parents

When you add or edit a Parent of or Child of relationship, the sheet has Parentage:

• By birth is the default.
• Adoptive, Foster and Step say how they're a parent when not by birth, with Since for when it began, such as the year of an adoption.
• For a parent by birth, Born outside marriage marks the child as illegitimate.

This changes how the family reads:

• Words. Chronicler counts kin by birth first, then names the rest for how they're kin: adoptive mother, adopted son, foster father, foster child, stepsister, adoptive grandmother. (A step-parent through a marriage is already named without any link; a step link names one when there's no marriage on record.)
• Lines. Descent by adoption is a dashed bracket, by fostering a dotted one. A child with parents of both kinds hangs from two brackets side by side.
• Checks. Only parents by birth count towards "more than two parents".
• Heirs. An adopted child can inherit; a foster or step child never does; a child born outside marriage is passed over (see below).

Heirs and succession

On a person's card, choose Heirs. Chronicler shows the line of succession to them: a crown on the holder, a number on each heir, everyone else dimmed. A bar above the tree lists the heirs in order (select one to jump to them) and says who was passed over and why.

How the line is ordered is the holder's rule, Heirs follow on their Family card, and you can change it from the bar:

Each child's own line comes before the next sibling, so a grandson is ahead of an uncle. Then:

• Someone who had died, or wasn't yet born, is passed over, but their children inherit in their place.
• Adopted children inherit; foster and step children don't; a child born outside marriage is passed over, and their line with them.
• If the holder's own line runs out, it turns to their siblings and their lines, then their parent's siblings, and so on up.
• If the holder has died, you see the line as it stood at their death, which tells you who inherited.

Watch it change with the time slider

Choose Time beside Tree and List. A slider steps through the dated events of the family: births, deaths, marriages and partings, adoptions. Each stop is one of them ("Queen Isveth dies", "Aldric and Queen Isveth marry"), so there's no year to hunt for. Use the arrow buttons (Earlier and Later) to step, or drag the slider.

The tree shows that day:

• People not yet born are faded and dashed, with when they will be.
• The living show their age instead of their dates.
• The dead are muted with a cross.
• A couple's line appears when they get together, and the parting slashes appear when they part.
• Heirs shows the line for that day: only those born and alive then.
• A bar gives the date, what happens on it, and how many are alive, not yet born and dead.

People with no dates are drawn as usual. Choose Done to go back to the whole tree.

Build the tree from the tree

You don't have to go to each character's page. Choose Edit above the tree, then select someone: round + buttons appear on their card's four edges.

• Top: add a parent.
• Bottom: add a child.
• Right: add a spouse.
• Left: add a sibling.

Select one and a card opens at the bottom. Type a name and press Enter, and the new person joins the tree, laid out for you. The field stays open, so you can type a whole family of children one after another. Change the Add a choice to add someone else's kind of relative instead, then choose Done.

• A new child can be someone's on their own, or a child of them With a spouse or partner.
• A new sibling gets the same parents, so they hang from the same line.
• New person (next to Edit) adds a character with no family yet, which is the quickest way to start a new tree. In an empty tree, choose Add the first person.

New people are ordinary characters in your lorebook, so you can fill in their details later.

Draw a relationship by dragging

Instead of selecting a +, drag it. A dotted line follows your finger or pointer, and the card it would join lights up. Let go on a card and the relationship is made: dragging from the bottom + onto someone makes them a child, the right one a spouse, the top one a parent, the left one a sibling. The card opens on the new tie so you can change it right away if it wasn't what you meant. Let go on empty space and you're asked for a new person instead, exactly as if you had tapped.

You can draw between people on the tree you're looking at. A person with no tie to it yet can be added with New person, or opened from their own page.

Change or remove a relationship

In Edit mode, select any line between people: the marriage line, a sibling line, or the line down to a child. A card opens saying who the other person is. Pick another answer to change it, for example from Child to Sibling, or Spouse to Partner. A marriage keeps its dates when you change it to a partnership. For a child you can also say how: By birth, Adopted, Foster or Step, and Born outside marriage. Remove this relationship takes the line away; both people stay on the tree.

Choose Edit again to go back to reading.

Houses and who marries whom

Choose Houses beside Tree and List (or Houses and marriages in the Chronicler panel on a computer). A house is any entry your characters are Member of: a faction, a dynasty, a city. Give someone the relationship Member of on their page and the house appears.

The houses sit round a ring with a line wherever two of them are joined by a marriage or partnership. The more marriages, the heavier the line. Under the ring, Marriages between houses lists each pair of houses, with each couple, when they were together, and their children. Select a couple to open their family in the tree.

Select a house to narrow it to its own marriages, and again to show them all.

On the tree, each person who belongs to a house wears its picture (its coat of arms, if it has one) as a small mark on their card. A person in several houses shows the first one you gave them.

• A person in two houses joins both.
• Two people who share a house marry within it, so they join it to no other.
• People who belong to no house are counted at the bottom, so you can see who is missing.

If you give a house a coat of arms (see Lore details and pictures), it shows on the ring in place of the category icon.