World Builder

Worlds vs projects

A world is the universe one or more of your books takes place in. You can build a world before you know which book it is for, and you can attach the same world to a single book, a series, or a shared-universe set of separate sagas. Books have covers; worlds have maps. The two never get confused.

Build, the World Index

The Build tab is the spine. It is your World Index, organized into twelve default domains: Cosmology, Natural Laws, Geography, Locations, Bestiary, Peoples, Tongues, Faiths, Polities, Economics, Knowledge, History. Add custom domains when the defaults do not fit. Each entry inside a domain carries:

• Name and domain. The identity. The fact that this entry exists.
• Objective description. The canonical truth. What is true about this entry, regardless of which character is narrating.
• Concept tags. Short keywords like blood-magic, ash-plain, oath-giving. These drive retrieval. When Penny composes a scene, entries with matching tags surface as context.
• Rules. Two flavors. Constraints are hard limits the world enforces (no Scorcher uses the gift twice in one day). Descriptions are tendencies and color (most Scorchers wear leather). Constraints are inviolable; descriptions shape voice.
• Article body. A long-form rich-text article that lives alongside the structured fields. Use [[name]] to cross-link other entries; backlinks update automatically. Apply a template (Character, Settlement, Deity, Magic System, and others) to start with a focused outline.
• Belief layers. Different audiences may understand the same entry differently. The truth is not always what every character believes. Belief layers let you record those readings without changing the canonical fact.

Map, your world's cartography

The Map tab generates a bare illustration of your world and gives you an overlay editor for the place names, regions, roads, and labels. Generation reads your world's template foundation (parchment fantasy, star chart sci-fi, weathered post-apocalyptic, cosmological multi-world) and the concept tags on your Geography-domain entries. It does not pass your prose description to the model, because Earth-historical vocabulary like "continent reshaped three centuries ago" or "old kingdoms" pulls the rendered shape toward Mediterranean and European training data. The stronger your Geography domain (with concept tags like coast, archipelago, ash-plain, volcanic-spine), the more the rendered landmass reflects the world you actually want.

Typography lives in the overlay editor, not on the rendered image. Diffusion models render fake-looking text; the overlay's vector annotations stay crisp at any zoom and remain editable forever.

Encyclopedia, your world's search

The Encyclopedia tab is the read mirror of your World Index. Search by word, browse by tag, see what you edited recently. A search query, a domain filter, and a tag filter all narrow the results together. Click any result to jump back into Build for that entry. Once a world has more than fifty or sixty entries, the encyclopedia is how you find anything.

Calendars

Calendars lets you design custom in-world calendars. Define months, weekdays, leap rules, eras, and current year. Add holidays that recur yearly or one-off events. Multiple calendars per world are supported, useful when an empire and a sundered kingdom number their years from different events. Pendraic answers the date math you would otherwise count by hand: what weekday is the third of Aurora year 412, what calendar date corresponds to year 0 of the rival's calendar, how many days between two events.

Languages

Languages is for conlangs and linguistic flavor. Each language carries a phonology (the consonants, vowels, and syllable patterns it uses), a status (living, dying, dead, sacred, forbidden, reconstructed), sample phrases with gloss and translation, and an optional uploaded image of its script. The phonology drives a deterministic word generator: the same seed always produces the same words, so a name you coined in chapter one is reproducible in chapter twelve.

Timelines

Timelines is for calendar-aware event sequences. Bind a timeline to one of your custom calendars and the rendered dates respect that calendar's leap rules and era. Bind to nothing for a free-form chronology. Each event carries a name, date, importance, optional color, optional track for parallel-saga rendering (Empire above, Faith below, Mages on a third row), and an optional cross-link to a World Index entry. Deleting the entry leaves the event intact; the link gets nulled, not the chronology.

Whiteboards

Whiteboards is the free-form scratch canvas. Sticky notes, rectangles, ellipses, diamonds, headers, and connectors with arrows. Use it for plot maps, magic-system trees, faction-relationship graphs, anything that does not fit a form. Nodes can carry an optional cross-link to a World Index entry or a timeline event, so a sticky labeled "the Moon Court" remembers the entry it stands in for.

Family Trees

Family Trees is the genealogy editor. Persons sit on a canvas, draggable into whatever layout helps the story. Relationships are typed: parent_of, spouse_of, sibling_of, adopted_parent_of, partner_of. Each kind has its own line color and style, so blood ties, marriages, partnerships, and adoptions all read at a glance. Persons can cross-link to character entries in the World Index so renames stay in sync.

Theme

Theme is per-world skinning. A color palette of eight slots, a heading font, a body font, and any custom CSS variables. Pick a preset (Heraldic Sapphire and Bronze, Sandsworn and Obsidian, Midnight Lapis, Neon Hex, Pendraic default) and adjust, or dial each color in by hand. Theme changes are reversible; re-save the old palette to undo.

AI assist on every tab

Top right of every worldbuilder tab is a sparkles button. Each tab carries a small set of quick actions tailored to the work you do there. Build offers expand a domain, find thin domains, audit concept tags. Map offers seed geography from description, suggest settlement pins. Calendars offers suggest five holidays. Timelines offers suggest five events, fill empty decades. Family Trees offers add a generation, name from a language. Below the canned actions is a free-form custom-prompt field and your saved prompt library for the worldbuilder, which you author and edit yourself.

Pendraic stages every prompt for you to review in chat before sending. No tokens spend without your explicit submit. Save the prompts you reuse most often to your library and they appear on every world's AI assist popover.

Per-project projections

A world can morph through a series. Eiden the godking in book three might be Eiden, deposed in book four. Per-project projections override an entry's objective description, rules, tags, parent, or notes for one specific project, without changing the base. The context resolver picks the projection over the base whenever the active project matches, so book four reads "Eiden, deposed" while book three still reads "Eiden the godking."

When to use the World Index vs. the Story Index

The World Index is for standing facts about the universe. Places, cultures, faiths, magic systems, languages, holidays, relics. The Story Index, a separate surface, is for the characters who move through that universe and the arcs they carry. A character lives in the Story Index. The empire she serves lives in the World Index. The two indexes cross-link, so a scene about her dethronement of the emperor pulls in her arc from one side and the empire's collapse from the other.