Knowledge Ledger

The Knowledge Ledger tracks what every character knows, in story order, scene by scene. It also tracks what they have, what condition they're in, and what is true in the world at that point. Its main job is stopping the classic AI drafting failure where a character reacts to a secret nobody has told them yet.

What a ledger entry is

An entry says: as of this chapter and scene, this is the case. There are five kinds:

  • Knowledge, a character learns a fact.
  • Possession, a character gains or loses an object.
  • Condition, injury, illness, a curse, anything about their state.
  • World state, something true about the world itself: the bridge is out, the king is dead.
  • Event, a thing that happened and is now part of the record.

Facts change, so entries supersede each other instead of being edited away. When Mara loses the amulet in chapter 14, the chapter 3 entry that gave it to her isn't deleted, a new entry supersedes it. Ask the ledger about chapter 8 and she still has it. Secrets carry the short list of who's in on them, and a reveal entry points back at the secret it exposes.

How drafting uses it

Before Pendraic drafts a scene, it computes the state of the ledger as of that exact scene and hands the drafting model two lists for every character present: what they know, and what they do not know yet. That second list is the important one. It names the future reveals the model must not leak.

After the scene is drafted, an extraction pass reads the prose back and checks it. New facts the scene established get recorded. If the draft made someone act on knowledge they shouldn't have, the scene is redrafted once with the violation spelled out, and if it still slips through, it lands in your review queue instead of silently shipping.

When you generate a book from a logline, the ledger seeds itself from the outline before drafting begins, so chapter one starts with the reveals already mapped.

Where you see and edit it

  • The Knowledge Ledger panel in the Registry shows the whole ledger for a book, anchored to your Story Index and World Index entries, with a pop-out dialog and click-to-edit rows.
  • Story Index entries have a Knowledge tab showing everything that character learns, gains, and suffers across the book.
  • World Index entries get a Knowledge section for world-state facts tied to that entry.
  • Pennycan read and write the ledger in plain language. Tell her “record that Mara learns the duke's secret in chapter 12” and it's an entry. The same operations are exposed over the MCP server if you bring your own AI.

Corrections and supersessions are different operations on purpose. Fixing a typo in an entry edits it in place. Changing a fact because the story moved on creates a supersession, which keeps the timeline honest.

Web and desktop

The ledger works identically in the web app and Pendraic Desktop, including the drafting integration and the Penny operations. On desktop it lives in your local database like everything else.