Worlds & pages

Files are truth

Each world is one self-contained, portable folder. Pages are plain .md files you could open in any text editor — Chronicle Keeper is the comfortable way to work with them, not a lock-in. The app keeps a fast index alongside the files (full-text search, links, tags), but that index is derived: delete it and it rebuilds from the files. Your words live in the files.

Creating or opening a world

From the New-World screen you can create a fresh world (empty, or seeded with a starter template) or open an existing folder in place — including an Obsidian vault you already keep. Opening adopts the folder as-is; nothing is moved or rewritten. Worlds are discovered by their .ck/config.toml, so you can keep several side by side.

Each world opens to an Overview: the story so far, the party, and a peek at the codex.

Pages

A page is Markdown for the body plus a little YAML frontmatter at the top for the structured bits:

---
kind: npc
summary: Gruff dwarven smith who owes the party a favour.
aliases: [Bram, The Smith]
tags: [ashfall, allies]
location: "[[Ashfall]]"
---

# Bram Ironhand

Bram keeps the only forge in [[Ashfall]]…

• summary: — the one-liner the AI remembers. This single line is what gets injected into prompts when other features mention this page, so keep it crisp.
• kind: — what the page is: pc, npc, place, faction, item, lore, event, or your own custom kinds. Kind drives the infobox and the icon.
• aliases: — other names this page answers to, so wikilinks and search find it.
• tags: — free-form labels for filtering and queries.

Wikilinks & backlinks

Connect pages with [[Name]]. Links are alias-aware and case-insensitive, so [[bram]] finds Bram Ironhand. Point at a heading with [[Page#heading]], or relabel with [[Page|the old smith]]. Link to a page that doesn't exist yet and Chronicle Keeper offers to create it.

Every page shows a Linked-from panel — who points here — so the web of your world is always navigable in both directions. Rename or move a page and every link to it is rewritten automatically.

Infoboxes & kinds

Each kind has a small field schema — the labelled box on the right of a page (an NPC's race and age, a place's ruler, and so on). Fields can be text, lists, numbers, checkboxes or dates. Add your own fields per kind, or invent whole new kinds, in .ck/config.toml:

[kinds.npc]
fields = ["race", "age:number", "status"]

[kinds.ship]
fields = ["captain", "crew:number", "home_port"]

Templates & new pages

Creating a page (⌘N, the Explorer's + menu, or the command palette) asks for a title and a kind, then starts you from that kind's template — a sensible heading skeleton (an NPC gets Appearance / Motivation / Relationships / History, a place gets At a glance / Notable people / Hooks, and so on).

Templates are plain Markdown files in a _templates/ folder at the top of your world — one per kind (_templates/npc.md, _templates/place.md …), surfaced in the Explorer's Templates section. They're yours to edit, and you can add your own: drop a new .md file in there and it shows up as a starting point. A {{title}} placeholder in the body is replaced with the page's title on create, and a kind: in the template's frontmatter sets the new page's kind. Once you've touched a template, the app never overwrites it — only an untouched, still-default one gets upgraded when defaults change.

Capture now, shape later

Jotting fast? Drop a rough note and promote it later: pick a kind and Chronicle Keeper rewrites the frontmatter, fills in the missing schema fields, appends the kind's template headings, drops the #inbox tag, and (optionally) files it in the right folder — links and all. Capture stays frictionless; structure comes when you're ready.

Bringing in existing notes

Already have lore? Two routes:

• Open an Obsidian vault in place — adopt the whole folder, links intact.
• Paste-import — drop in a wall of notes and an LLM distills them into clean, kinded pages. You preview the proposed pages and commit the ones you want; nothing existing is ever overwritten.

Finding things

Press ⌘K for the command palette: jump to any page by name or alias, run a full-text search, filter by tag, hop to recents, or fire an action. The dedicated Search screen adds facets — narrow by kind, tag, folder, or edited-date, and toggle scope between pages, session summaries and transcripts.

Live queries & relations

Drop a query block into any page and it renders as a live, always-current list — a roster that updates itself as the world grows. Fence it as ck-query (query and dataview work too):

```ck-query
LIST FROM #ashfall AND kind:npc WHERE status != dead
```

The grammar is small and read-only:

• FROM — narrow the set by #tag and/or kind:<kind>, joined with AND (e.g. FROM #ashfall AND kind:faction). LIST is optional.
• WHERE — filter on frontmatter fields with field = value, field != value, or field contains value, again joined with AND.
• Values are wikilink-insensitive: location = [[Ashfall]], location = Ashfall and location = "[[Ashfall|the city]]" all match the same place.

A typo explains itself inline rather than failing silently. Each hit links straight to the page.

Relations are the typed links you put in frontmatter — a field whose value is a [[link]], where the field name is the relationship: location: "[[Ashfall]]", patron: "[[Lady Voss]]", members: ["[[Bram]]", "[[Sera]]"]. Those predicate-typed links are what query WHERE clauses match on, and they show up as labelled edges in the graph view — so "who reports to whom" is something you can both query and see.

History, trash & backups

Everything is reversible, and the AI's edits are auditable.

• Version history — every save snapshots the page first, tagged by who made it (you or the Keeper). See a line-by-line diff of any version and restore it. "The Keeper changed 12 pages — show me" is a single filter.
• Trash — deleted pages and folders land in the world's trash, restorable for 30 days before auto-pruning. Nothing vanishes by accident.
• Backups — zip the whole world to a Backups/ folder on demand, and automatically when you close the app. The newest ten are kept.