A guide to the chronicle.

The Drafting Table is the cabinet behind the screen. Every NPC the party has met, every tavern they've stayed in, every faction whispering in the corners — one item type, bent to the way you actually prep, linked the way the world actually connects. Type a name in any field and a name they've heard before pops up before you finish.

Each item carries a flag for who can see it. Mark a place public and your players see it on their side of the screen. Keep an NPC GM-only and the players never know they exist until you decide they do. The line between the screen sides is one switch on each item, and it is always visible.

Most GMs arrive with years of notes already written — a Google Doc, an Obsidian vault, a World Anvil export, a folder of session logs. Retyping that is the reason people bounce off a new tool. So the Drafting Table has an Import drawer: paste the notes in, and Storywright reads them and proposes what it found. On a brand-new account the same flow is the “Bring my notes” path straight off the front door.

There are two ways to read your notes, and the switch sits right above the paste box. AI parse handles freeform prose — paragraphs about a tavern, a rambling session log, no structure at all. Pattern parse uses no AI and no allowance: it looks for # headings, Name: description lines, and **Name** — description lines, with bullets underneath folding into the entry above them. If your notes are already tidy, the pattern parser is faster and free.

The review step also watches for things you already have. If a proposed entry matches an existing one exactly, it arrives unchecked and set to Skip — pasting the same notes twice does not duplicate your world. If it merely looks like one you have (“Choir Spire” against your “The Choir Spire”), it arrives set to Update existing, which appends the new material to that entry's GM notes rather than creating a twin. Either can be overridden to Create new anyway when the match is wrong. With a long list, the controls above the table let you select all, clear all, or skip everything already in your world in one click.

[[Double bracket]] and @mention names in your notes become suggested connections on the Weave, listed on the entry that mentions them. A session block — a # Session 4 heading, or a Date: line — is detected and offered separately, with its body kept as the session's notes. One session per paste; if your document holds several, Storywright says so and you bring the rest in a second pass.

Two limits worth knowing. A single paste proposes at most 200 entries — past that you import these and paste the rest. And on the free plan, where a world has a fixed item allowance, an import that would exceed it lands what fits and then tells you exactly which entries did not land, by name, rather than failing the whole batch or silently dropping the tail. Imported entries are GM-only until you make them public.

What we do not have yet is a connector that logs into Kanka or World Anvil and pulls your world across for you. That is still on the roadmap. Paste is the supported path, and it works with anything that can put text on your clipboard.

Most world tools are filing cabinets. Storywright has one too — but the Tracker is different. Load the session and the Tracker pulls up the objectives on the table tonight, the NPCs your players are likely to meet, and the locations in play. Search is one keystroke: type half a name, jump to the page. Mark an objective hit and it's logged with a timestamp for the recap.

GM-only notes drop into the same surface, side by side with the public scene. "Morren is lying about the coin." Players never see it. When the session ends, the notes you took are already linked to the entities and already on the session page; there is no cleanup.

A story arc is a thread between people, places, and time. Storywright treats it the same way your party does — as a knot of references that have to come due eventually. Mark it active, completed, or cold. Drop it into the Tracker when it's on the table tonight; pin it to a session when it advances; close it when the table is done with it.

Players only see the arcs and objectives you've shared. The rest stay in your pocket, ready for the night they finally matter.

Every player gets a journal. Rich text, their words, their voice. They can pin annotations to NPCs and places they've met, so next session they're not asking who the steward was. If they had a hunch about Lady Verrin in session 11, the hunch is right there, dated and theirs.

They see only what you've chosen to share — a faction here, a rumor there, the map when they find it. No accidental spoilers, no "wait, don't read that yet."

Players can also set goals for their character — what they're chasing, who they want to become. Goals flow up to you as the GM, quietly, so you can weave them into the story and pay them off sessions later. It's the answer to "why would my players open this": their character's own thread through your world lives here.

When the session ends, your notes are already linked to the people and places they mention — so Storywright drafts the recap for you from what actually happened at the table. You read it, cut what doesn't belong, strike anything that was GM-only, and publish. Nothing reaches your players without your sign-off; the draft is a starting point, never the final word. That's the deal throughout: the tool drafts, the GM decides.

Published recaps become each player's "previously on…" briefing — the two-minute read that replaces the first ten minutes of every session spent re-explaining the last one. Before the next game, Storywright assembles a pre-session briefing from the campaign's memory: what's open, who was met, which promises are still on the table.

Storywright is a place to keep the world, not a place to lock it up. A JSON account export — your profile, the worlds you own, your own journal entries and annotations — on every plan, free included. It is not yet a full world archive: sessions, characters and World Builder entities aren't in it today. And if Storywright ever winds down, you'll get at least sixty days' notice before anything changes.

Mid-session you're not clicking. Search already works from the keyboard — one keystroke, half a name, jump to the page. The rest of the set (private notes, objectives, the whole Tracker as a two-hands-no-mouse surface) is still landing: once it's in, the Tracker will show each binding at the bottom of the screen and stay out of the way until you reach for it. Consider this chapter half manual, half roadmap.

A quick reference for the terms used throughout Storywright, so nothing in the manual, the app, or a briefing reads like jargon. The full list — 15 terms — now lives on its own page.

Weave

The view that shows how the people, places, items, factions, events, and Story Arcs in a World connect.

Strand

One thing shown in the Weave — for example, a Character, Place, Item, Faction, Event, or Story Arc.

Thread

A connection a GM draws between two Strands in the Weave. A Thread can stay private or be revealed to players.

Drafting Table

The GM’s cabinet of linkable people, places, factions, items, and lore.

See the full glossary →