Story and world

Story and world

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A story is one self-contained document: who tells it, who you play, how it should read, and everything that is true in its world. Its chapters are separate documents; the story is the thing they all share.

Two modals hold all of it: Story and World. The scene, the narrator, the persona and the cast are also in the chapter panel, beside the page, for the edits you want to make without leaving the story.

Story → Mode

Narrator

One voice tells the whole story. You say what you do; it writes what happens, what is said, and what the world does in return. The default instruction asks for third person, past tense, clear literary prose, and for it to end on something you can answer — and never to write for you.

Write my own replaces that instruction entirely, for this story. The default is shown so you can see what you are replacing, and it stays in the box, greyed, until you write over it — so an empty box is never a story with no narrator instruction at all. Whatever the box shows is what the request is sent, here, in the chapter panel and under What the model sees alike.

Role-play

The model plays the other characters and answers in their own words. Add them here — a name and a description each — and switch any of them off without deleting them, either here or on the row in the chapter panel.

Each one gets a colour from a palette of ten, the moment it is added. Nobody is asked: the first ten characters in a story are all different, and an eleventh shares with the first. The dot beside a name opens the palette, and one more click changes it.

There is no colour picker there on purpose. Every one of the ten clears WCAG AA against both papers and was chosen to stay as far as it can from the other nine once a common colour-vision deficiency has flattened them — a free colour promises none of that. If you want one anyway, Preferences → Colours lists the cast with a colour input each; that colour is used in both themes, and Back to the palette undoes it.

A story written before any of this opens coloured, worked out from each character’s place in the cast, so it opens the same way every time.

There are two ways to cast it, and the choice sits under the mode.

Ensemble is the default and what the app has always done. The model plays every character in the scene and answers as whoever the moment calls for. The prompt becomes “You are playing X and Y” followed by each description. Pick it for a room: a scene where several people talk to each other as much as to you, and you would rather the model decide who speaks than tell it.

One at a time gives the model a single character to be. The rest are named as present — it may describe what they do, as your character sees it — but it never speaks for them. Pick it for a conversation: one person across a table, whose voice you want to stay put. The prompt becomes “You are playing X, and nobody else”, and the rule about never writing for your persona extends to everybody else on stage.

How the characters are played is the instruction above the cast, folded away under Add a character. Either casting sends it first, before the names and the descriptions, with every request of a role-play story. A description says who a character is; this says how a role-play is played — that each of them knows only what they would know and is not there to please you, that they may disagree, refuse, lie or say nothing, that every reply should move the scene and leave you something to answer, and that nothing steps outside the fiction to comment on it. It asks for nothing about tense: role-play reads well in either, and your own prose is what settles it.

Write my own role-play instructions replaces it for this story, on the same terms as the narrator’s. The switch starts you from ours rather than from a blank page, so it is an edit; the words stay in the box, greyed, if you switch back; and an emptied box is never a story with no instruction — ours is sent, and the box shows what is being sent.

Switching is in the chapter panel’s Cast section: click a row and the model plays that character from there on. The row that is being played is marked, and the little switch on each row takes a character in and out of the scene.

The model is told when any of that changes, at the point in the chapter where it changed:

From here you play Tomas. Nell is no longer the character you play; everything above in Nell’s voice was Nell, not you.

Isa has left the scene. / Isa joins the scene.

Nothing already written is rewritten — the model is told what it was, and the chapter reads exactly as it did. The notes are in What the model sees under This chapter, and each answer remembers who wrote it: closing the chapter summarises it with the right names attached, and the page says who is speaking above each passage.

Story → Persona

Who you are in this story: a name and a few lines. It is sent with every single request, in both modes, because it is the one thing the model cannot infer from the text.

Both fields are optional. Both are worth filling in.

Story → Style

Two settings, and both of them become a sentence in the style rules the model is sent:

• Ask for each spoken line on its own paragraph.
• Reply length — short, medium or long.

Then one that is not sent at all. Let the model choose the page colours from each chapter’s scene is off unless you switch it on, and a chapter set in a snowbound monastery and one set in a jazz club at two in the morning stop being read on the same cream paper. When it is on, confirming the scene sheet sends one short request — the scene, and the ten palettes as a name, a line about each and the moods it is for — and the model answers with a single name. The chapter is read on that page from then on, keeps it when you come back to it, and switching chapters switches pages. It never sees a colour, only the moods, and its answer can only be one of the ten. A failure of any kind changes nothing. It is a request of its own and so a bill of its own, made once per scene and never during a turn; what it cost is in the scene sheet’s footer beside what the scene costs every turn. Whatever it picks, the palette row in Preferences → Colours is where you overrule it — see Reading and writing.

This is the half of “style” that is a request to the model. The half that is about how the text is drawn on your screen — text size, theme, whether quoted lines are visually broken out — lives in Preferences → Reading and changes nothing about the prompt. See Reading and writing.

Voice, and why there is no switch for it

Some writers put their character’s actions in the first person — I open the door — and some in the third — Mara opens the door. Some want a narrator that talks to them: you open the door.

There is no setting for any of it, on purpose. A model reads the frame from what it is given and follows it, and the first turns of a chapter set it more firmly than a checkbox would. Write your opening line the way you want the answers and you will usually get them; a switch that says one thing while your prose says another is a fight the prose wins.

If you do want to say it outright — or it has drifted and you want it back — every one of these is sent with the request, and every one of them is yours to edit:

• Your own first turn. The cheapest and the strongest. The model has your line in front of it and a pattern to continue.
• The scene — sent verbatim with every request of the chapter, and the first thing the model reads about it. A scene written in the voice you want is a strong and quiet instruction.
• The narrator’s instructions, in narrator mode: Story → Mode → Write my own, or the Narrator section of the chapter panel. The default’s second sentence is “Write in third person, past tense, in clear literary prose.” Replace that one sentence — “Address Mara as you and write in the second person, present tense” — and keep the rest of it as it is. The text starts out as the default, so this is an edit rather than a blank page.
• How the characters are played, in role-play: Story → Mode → How the characters are played. It asks for nothing about tense on purpose, so there is nothing there to argue with your prose; add a sentence to it if you want to say it outright.
• Your persona’s description, which is sent in both modes: “Mara, a marine biologist. Her lines are written in the first person.”
• An author direction, for a change part-way through a chapter: [AUTHOR] From here, write in the second person. It is followed, it is never mentioned, and it stays in the chapter behind every later turn. See Reading and writing.

Whatever you change, What the model sees shows the assembled request, so you can read what the model is actually being told rather than guessing why it answered as it did.

World → Story so far

One page of prose that is always sent, no conditions. It is the memory of everything before the current chapter.

You can write it yourself — it is just a text box — but mostly you will not have to: close chapter rewrites it for you, folding the chapter just finished into it. See Chapters.

How a chapter is folded in is the instruction that does that rewriting, and this is where you replace it for this story if the default is not to your taste. Folded in so far underneath lists which chapters have been folded in.

When a chapter closes, propose lore entries from it is the switch under that, off by default. On, closing a chapter makes a second request after the summary — the same chapter, read for what it established rather than for what happened — and the review sheet shows what came back as a checklist. Nothing is written without a tick, an update to an existing entry arrives unticked, and a failure is one muted line rather than a blocked close. See Chapters for what the sheet looks like; the button there does the same thing once, whether or not this switch is on.

World → Lore

Lore is everything that is true in the world but only worth sending when the story is about it. People, places, facts. Entries collapse to a single line — title, keys, state — so a world can hold dozens and still be read at a glance, grouped by kind.

Open one to edit it:

Field
Title	What you call it. Also the label in the collapsed list.
Kind	Fact, person, place or other. Only groups the list.
Keys	Comma separated. Any one of them fires the entry.
What is true	The sentence the model actually receives. Required — an entry without it is flagged rather than quietly skipped, because an entry is the sentence it contributes.
Enabled	Off means it never fires. Useful for something not true yet.
Always on	Skip the keyword scan; send it every time.

How the scan works

Before each request the app searches a window of text for every enabled entry’s keys. The window is:

• the chapter’s scene,
• what you have just typed,
• and the last N messages of the chapter.

N is Scan depth at the bottom of the tab (4 by default). Matching is case-insensitive substring by default; Case sensitive and Whole words only are there if a short key is firing on the wrong thing.

Entries that fire are sent as a “What is true in this world” block. Entries that do not fire cost nothing. You can always check which fired, and on which key, in What the model sees.

Several stories

The story name in the top bar opens the story menu: switch between them, Rename, Duplicate, Delete, or New story….

Each story is self-contained — persona, cast, world and all — so Duplicate is how you reuse a setup for a new run without a shared library to maintain. Deleting a story deletes its chapters with it, and asks first.