Characters

The record most projects lean on hardest, and the one worth setting up carefully.

What a character holds

A name, a biography, an image, and whatever fields you decide matter. The biography is a rich-text field — the same editor as a chapter, so it takes formatting, and it can be edited live by two people when collaboration is on.

Beyond that, a character is as thin or as thick as you make it. There is no required field except the name.

Custom fields

Rather than a fixed form, you add the fields your story needs: height, allegiance, the thing they will not talk about. Fields are defined per project and apply to every character in it, so once you have decided a character has an allegiance, they all do.

Fields can draw from custom values — a list you define once, like the five houses or the four schools of magic — which keeps them consistent and makes them worth filtering on.

Relations

A character can be connected to other records: another character, a location, an organization. A relation has a type and a direction, so "mentor of" reads correctly from both ends.

This is what stops a cast list from being a list. See relations.

Dates

If your project has a timeline, a character can carry dates — born, died, and whatever else you define. Dates can be relative to another record's date, so moving a war moves everybody who fought in it.

Images

A character can have a portrait. Images are stored per project and count against the project's storage; the same image can be used by several records without being uploaded twice.

An image in an unpublished project is served through a link that expires, so a URL cannot outlive your access to the project. In a published story the images are public, like the story.