Characters and Entities

Entities give the world reusable actors, places, objects, and knowledge. Open Entities in the World Editor sidebar and choose the most specific label available.

Connected records give the runtime more useful context. A character becomes easier to use in scenes when their place, goals, and relationships are clear.

Start with a small connected set

A strong first pass might contain:

• Two Characters with competing goals.
• One Faction that can exert pressure.
• One Region and two or three playable Locations.
• One Item, Fact, Myth, or Event tied to the central conflict.

Add more entities when they create choices, consequences, or context the runtime can reuse.

Entity limits

For now a world holds at most this many entities of each label:

Label	Limit	Label	Limit
Character	50	Region	15
Location	30	Race	8
Creature	30	Item	30
Object	30	Faction	10
Ability	30	Event	20
Myth	15	Fact	20
Lore	15	Unknown	10

When a label is full, New, paste and a label change into it are refused in the editor, and World Helper and AI agents connected through MCP add no more of it. Delete one you no longer need to make room. A world that already has more keeps them all.

Why there is a limit:

• It guards against context rot. Each turn the AI reads the world's entities. Past a point it loses track of them, and people and places start to blur together. This is the limit for now.
• More entities don't make a deeper world. A few people with wants, a past and ties to each other carry a story further than a crowd of names.
• Other tools do what another entity would. Someone's later self is a variant of the same entity, which a phase switches to (Phase Changes). A phase also changes the world as the story moves on. Minor people fit in relations or in a place's description.

Core identity fields

Name

The human-readable name shown in the editor and during play.

ID

The stable internal identifier used by relations, map markers, and other references. Use letters and numbers without spaces. Avoid changing an ID after other data points to it.

Label

The world category. Prefer Character over Creature when a being speaks, plans, and acts with full agency. Prefer Item over Object when ownership, power, or quest progress depends on it.

Tags

Use a few compact retrieval words, such as role, faction, species, threat, or theme.

Brief

Write one specific hook line explaining why the entity matters. Keep full history and behavior in the detailed fields.

Character depth

A reusable character usually needs:

• Persona: stable psychology, voice, behavior, body language, and triggers.
• Appearance: fixed visual traits that remain recognizable across scenes and images.
• Back Story: causes, losses, obligations, training, debts, or shame that shape current behavior.
• Long Term Goals: concrete objectives that keep the character active.
• Knowledge: what the character knows of the world, and where that knowledge ends.
• Secret Infos: hidden facts capable of creating a future choice or reversal.

Character knowledge

In play, every character also plays their own part. Before each turn they decide what to do next, the way the player does, and after the scene they learn what came of it. They decide from who they are (persona, goals, appearance), what they have lived in the story so far, and Knowledge. They never see the premise, its hidden truths, or anyone else's page: no one in the world knows all of it. What Knowledge leaves out, and they have not lived, they do not know.

So Knowledge decides how big each person's world is. A village healer and a court spymaster live in the same world, but not in the same picture of it.

Write it from where the character stands, from near to far:

• Their ground: the places and people of their daily life, its prices, customs, debts, and dangers.
• Their trade and schooling: what their work and teachers taught them, and whether they read.
• The wider world, as it reaches them: rulers, laws, wars, powers, and peoples they know of, and how they know them: seen, taught, read, or heard at market.
• Rumor and false belief: what they know only as a story, and what they believe that is wrong.
• The edges: places they have never been and things they have never heard of.

Give a hidden truth of the world only to a character who really holds it, and say how they learned it. Keep their own secrets in Secret Infos and their past in Back Story. Use years and named places rather than "last year" or "up north", so the field stays true at any point in the story. The field holds up to 1,500 characters.

Knowledge is what the character knows when the story opens, before turn 1. What they learn after that reaches them in play, so the field never holds what the story will show them.

Knowledge can change over the story: a later variant of the character can overwrite it, for a student who graduates or a soldier back from the war. See Phase Changes and the Phase Lens.

World Helper and AI agents connected to your worlds have a craft guide for this field: ask them to write or review a character's knowledge.

Example, for a dockworker:

Born and raised on the Saltmarket docks of Vey: knows every pier, which captains pay on time, which customs clerks take bribes, and the smugglers' signal lamps. Reads numbers and ship marks, not books. Knows the Harbor Guild runs the port and that the Duke raised the salt tax in 1203; believes the Duke is ill because the guild says so. Knows the sea witches of the Shroud Isles only from sailors' stories and does not believe them. Has never left Vey, knows the capital only by name, and has seen magic used only by the temple healers.

Main Character

Mark a character as Main Character only when readers may enter that character as a viewpoint. Keep the set small and provide a starting scene for each one.

Players act through these characters. They do not automatically become every creature, item, or concept in the Codex.

An entity does not have to be in the world from the start. The entity page shows when it enters the story in each branch, and a later phase can bring it in or give it a new look. See Phase Changes and the Phase Lens.

See Entity Types and Field Reference for label-specific guidance.