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Lesson 3 of 9

Sketch your lorebook

Add characters, places and species, fill in their details, and give them pictures and dates.

The Lorebook is your world's encyclopedia: the people, places, species, factions, events and objects your stories draw on. Every book in the world shares it, so a character you invent for book one is waiting for you in book two. In this lesson you'll sketch your main cast and setting.

What you'll do

  • Add a character, a place and a species.
  • Fill in their details, dates and notes.
  • Organise the lorebook with categories and tags.

1. Meet the lorebook

Open the Lorebook tab. Entries are grouped by category, with the ones your writing mentions most at the top. Search and the category and tag chips narrow the list.

The Lorebook: search, category and tag filters, the most linked entries, then characters

2. Add your first entry

  1. Tap + (New entry).
  2. Choose a Category, such as Character.
  3. Give it a Name.
  4. Optionally fill in:
    • Also known as: nicknames and titles. Mentions and search find the entry by these too.
    • Tags: your own labels, such as #pov or #house-varn, for grouping entries across categories.
    • Summary: one line to jog your memory.
  5. Tap Create.
The New entry sheet, with Species chosen and a summary

3. Fill in the details

An entry's page has room for everything you know about it.

A character's page: category, tags, summary and details
  • Details are short facts, one per line. Each category starts with fields that suit it, with a hint in each: a character has Age, Role, Appearance and Goal; a place has Region, Population, Climate and Known for; a species has Appearance, Habitat, Lifespan and Nature. Tap Add field for anything else.
  • Add a picture gives it a portrait, an emblem or a map. The picture replaces the category icon wherever the entry appears.
  • Dates, such as Born and Died, put it on the timeline (you'll set those up in Time and history).
  • Notes are written in the same editor as your scenes: backstory, secrets, anything.

On a laptop, the whole lorebook sits beside the page you're reading, so you can move from entry to entry:

The lorebook beside an entry on a wide window

Behind the scenes, each entry is one markdown file, so your lore is as portable as your prose:

---
type: character
name: Kaela Voss
aliases:
  - Kaela
tags:
  - pov
  - emberfall
summary: A pyre-keeper's daughter who walks south to undo a vow.
fields:
  Age: '19'
  Origin: Emberfall
when:
  year: 293
  era: Age of Pyres
---

Raised among the pyres of [@Emberfall](lore:emberfall).

4. Build out your world

Add a few more entries so your story has somewhere to happen. A good starting set:

Category Start with
Character Your protagonist, the person in their way, and one ally.
Place Where the story starts, and where it's going.
Species Any people or creatures that aren't human.
Faction The group with power over your protagonist.
Event One thing in the past that everyone still talks about.

Page is the catch-all for anything that fits nowhere else: a magic system, a religion, a glossary.

5. Make the categories your own

Tap Categories (the sliders button) in the Lorebook. Add your own, such as Spell or Ship, with an icon and colour, rename or recolour the built-in ones, and choose the Fields each category's entries start with.

Categories: Character, Species, Place, Faction, Event, Artifact and Page

Try it

Next

Your lore and your story are still strangers. Next you'll connect them: Connect lore and story.

Go deeper: The lorebook · Lore details and pictures