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[Araph]

What is Untold Lore?
Untold Lore is a web app that helps organize setting information. It's essentially a wiki that's specialized for worldbuilding, but it also has a few useful tools like NPC generators. And by that I mean one useful tool: an NPC generator. More will be added over time.

How does it work?
You organize by civilizations, then by locations within civilizations, then by people and places at specific locations, and so forth. You can also link between entities (people and places and such) in descriptions, just like a regular wiki.

Currently it allows you to track people, places, civilizations, organizations, items, and events.

Can it do <thing>?
Probably not, but tell me if you think it'd be useful and I'll add it to the to-do list.

Link to project.
Link to Trello board for project.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

very cool! Checking it out as I type.

EDIT: Are all settings public as soon as you make them? JK, I should read more.

EDIT2: Dude thank you so much for this, even for non pen and paper stuff, this is incredibly useful to keep my world building attempts organized!

EDIT3: Please keep working on this AND could we get a map category?

[Araph]

Glad you like it! I'm definitely planning on adding in maps - in fact, there are already fields in the database for location coordinates. I just need to create a UI to display them in relation to other locations.

...And now that I type that out, I just realized that I'm actually going to need to change the database schema if we need the ability to create multiple maps. It'll be a simple fix, though.

[Harry Baldman]

I did the signup thing and noticed that when I log in, the Oriel setting doesn't appear to have anything on it anymore.

EDIT 1: As for features that'd be handy, perhaps a feature that puts events on a timeline based on a time value assigned to them? That'd be pretty cool to put after-session reports on for later review.

EDIT 2: Also when you edit something and press Apply everything disappears within the entries? I dunno what happened there but it'd be good if it didn't.

EDIT 3: Yeah, it looks like the Apply button broke the thing entirely - I can't see anything I've written in after the first time I pressed it, and when I make it public everything reappears, but I can't edit or add anything.

EDIT 4: Fixed itself by logging in and out? Suppose that's all right then.

But yeah, I think what I'd like to see from this is the ability to organize locations, people, items and events, maybe give them tags and so forth that I can then search by to get what I need. It'd only need to outcompete Roll20's note-taking functionality which is fairly trivial, but it'd be great if it was actually efficient to work with in some capacity when a campaign of a certain length is likely to have dozens upon dozens of disparate entries to look through.

[Cathar]

....wow. My only concern is ; is it stable ? This is the thing I need for my own projects; so I'm likely to spend a lot of work in, and I would really hate to see it disapear. Being able to show pictures would be really good too

[Araph]

I did the signup thing and noticed that when I log in, the Oriel setting doesn't appear to have anything on it anymore.

Thanks for the heads-up, I'll get that taken care of. I think it's a bug with user permissions being checked wrong.

EDIT 1: As for features that'd be handy, perhaps a feature that puts events on a timeline based on a time value assigned to them? That'd be pretty cool to put after-session reports on for later review.

That's something I want to get added in as well! Every entity type already has a hidden start year and end year field in the database - eventually I'd like it to be possible to scroll along a timeline and see civilizations, cities, and fortresses spring up and disappear across the map, as well as events happening on a smaller timescale.

EDIT 2: Also when you edit something and press Apply everything disappears within the entries? I dunno what happened there but it'd be good if it didn't.

EDIT 3: Yeah, it looks like the Apply button broke the thing entirely - I can't see anything I've written in after the first time I pressed it, and when I make it public everything reappears, but I can't edit or add anything.

EDIT 4: Fixed itself by logging in and out? Suppose that's all right then.

I've been unable to recreate that one, but I'll look into it in more detail this week.

But yeah, I think what I'd like to see from this is the ability to organize locations, people, items and events, maybe give them tags and so forth that I can then search by to get what I need. It'd only need to outcompete Roll20's note-taking functionality which is fairly trivial, but it'd be great if it was actually efficient to work with in some capacity when a campaign of a certain length is likely to have dozens upon dozens of disparate entries to look through.

Tags would be a good idea, I'll add that to the list. Another organizational tool I wanted to create was plotlines or stories. Basically you could assign different entities to a plotline and view it change over time, so you could easily see what has happened within a specific story arc. Eventually people will be able to be associated with locations, so you could click on a city to view all of the characters in that city.

....wow. My only concern is ; is it stable ? This is the thing I need for my own projects; so I'm likely to spend a lot of work in, and I would really hate to see it disapear. Being able to show pictures would be really good too

It's pretty much stable. We won't lose any information stored in the database, but you may have to copy-paste things into new fields. For example, right now people have a name and a description. This week I'll be adding races, physical descriptions, personality descriptions, and a few other things to the 'people' table in the database. You won't lose your existing descriptions, but you might want to move parts of the descriptions into more appropriate fields.

In other news, I created a Trello board to keep track of bugs and feature requests, which should help me avoid losing track of things.

[Doomblade187]

Very interested in this.

[Araph]

Couple of small updates. I've fixed the bug that prevents users from viewing public settings while logged in, the login session time has been extended to three months (so you won't get randomly logged out anymore, hopefully), I've added two new entity types (civilizations and organizations), and I've split the 'description' field for people into profession, appearance, personality, and history.

I'm going to be going through and adding additional fields for each entity type (so a location might have a 'type' field, for example, which could say whether it's a town, city, castle, cave, battlefield, or so on). If you think there are additional points of data that would be useful to have, let me know and I'll add them to the Trello board.

EDIT: I've also added in the super-rough start of the NPC generator, which is accessible when you choose to add a new character to the setting (it's the big "randomize" button at the top). Right now it generates NPCs from a very limited selection of names, professions, and parts of physical descriptions. Next steps are to add in the ability to select what location the NPC is from, which affects professions (the default right now is a garrison, which is mostly soldiers, a few officers, and a few craftsmen), to improve the physical descriptions, and to add in personality descriptions.

[Asgarus]

When you create a new world, there are not buttons yet. You have to go back and into the world again for them to appear. (Using Firefox 59.0.2 (64-bit))

edit: and with world I mean setting.

[Araph]

When you create a new world, there are not buttons yet. You have to go back and into the world again for them to appear. (Using Firefox 59.0.2 (64-bit))

edit: and with world I mean setting.

That's an issue with load orders that I need to fix - at the moment, if something should be there but isn't, refresh the page and it'll almost certainly work.

The NPC generator is somewhat better now (all of the basics are there, I just need to do a bunch of writing and data entry, along with some research on medieval professions), so I'm gonna ramble at length about that.


The Reason I Made the Thing
I'd noticed that most character generators are for players rather than NPCs, which makes it difficult to quickly get believable descriptions of a dozen different peasants. That's a bit of an issue I've had as a DM.

The primary goal I had when going into this was to create a generator that could throw together a character that's moderately detailed and realistic for the location my players are in at a moments notice - I've had to make up random new NPCs on the spot too many times. With that in mind, the entire generator is designed to bias character creation towards locations.

Locations
You can select from a few locations. In villages, you'll probably just find peasants and the odd craftsman. In fortresses, primarily soldiers. In cities, a mix of all kinds of people. Eventually I want to add a multitude of specific locations, like cathedrals and abbeys, guildhalls, docks, and other distinct places rather than just "cities" or "markets".

Descriptions
Character appearances are randomized combinations of heights, weights, eyes, hair colors, hairstyles, facial hair, and clothing preferences. Character personalities are generated from pride levels, social preferences, and environmental preferences.

Some descriptions stray outside of those bounds in order to create less repetitive descriptions (for example, one of the weight options is "doesn't appear particularly healthy", which is separate from "is grossly obese" or "is lean to the point of emaciation").

Eventually I'd like to go back and randomize the wealth of the character in question based off of their profession, then randomize the descriptions based off of their wealth. I'll get to it eventually.


All in all, it needs some work and it needs a lot more options. At the moment, however, it can create 385,875,000 distinct characters. A few of them might even be good characters.

[Araph]

You can now add links into descriptions using a format similar to BBCode. It's based off of IDs, which show up in every entity's URL.

Code: (URL Example) [Select]

https://www.untoldlore.com/setting/1/person/6

In this example, you can see that the setting ID is 1 and the person's ID is 6. So, we would use 6 as the ID for the link.

Code: (Link Example) [Select]

This is a link to [person 6]Jack Harcourt[/person].

You can do this with any entity - just swap "person" out for "location", "event", and so forth.

This was, unfortunately, much simpler to do with PHP than it is with JavaScript in Vue. Turns out there are some advantages to using server-side rendering of HTML.

[Sensei]

Punched in some partial information for the setting from the Arms Race forum game just for a lark. As it is, I have a few thoughts:

-Once there's a lot of entries, creating links by number could get really confusing. It would be good if entries could be given a text tag used to link them, like [person steve]foo[/person].
-It would be nice to be able to re-order the list of entries for each topic
-Maybe topics could have sub-topics they're organized into as well, created by the user. For example if I have the continent of Forenia, all the regions in forenia could be sub-headings or something. It might be nice be able to organize NPC's by location and items by item type, or whatever else. Right now "Forenia" would just appear in a list right next to "Forenian Jungle" or whatever.

Edit: I also like how the NPC's have data fields that are unique to them. It would be really cool to see dates for events (although allowing for fantasy calendars could get complicated), or map coordinates for locations.

[Araph]

-Once there's a lot of entries, creating links by number could get really confusing. It would be good if entries could be given a text tag used to link them, like [person steve]foo[/person].

You're absolutely right about that. Rather than allow linking via names, however, I'm planning on adding in a widget that lets you look up an entity and create a link to it.

The issue with linking to names is that it leads to link rot. If you link to "Dumplington the Great" and later you decide to change his name to "Dumplington the Magnificent", suddenly all of the links to "Dumplington the Great" break. It would technically be possible to automatically update links embedded in text when a name changes, but it's easier to stick with using canonical IDs.

-It would be nice to be able to re-order the list of entries for each topic

Added to the Trello board!

-Maybe topics could have sub-topics they're organized into as well, created by the user. For example if I have the continent of Forenia, all the regions in forenia could be sub-headings or something. It might be nice be able to organize NPC's by location and items by item type, or whatever else. Right now "Forenia" would just appear in a list right next to "Forenian Jungle" or whatever.

I've got a rudimentary version of that working as of just now. Locations can now have a parent location, which lets you say "this city is within this region" or "this castle is within this city." Similarly, you can assign locations to people as well, and viewing a location page will tell you what locations and people it contains. That should make it easier to organize things as well, but there's going to have to be a UI overhaul at some point in the near future.

[Araph]

You can now connect locations to civilizations, so you can say "this city is part of this kingdom" or what have you.

Now that we've got some semblance of organized data (locations can be grouped by civilizations and parent locations, people can be grouped by location, and soon both people and locations will be able to be grouped by organization (guilds, secret societies, and so forth)), I think I'm going to take some time to redesign the UI to be more aligned with the direction the app is headed.

[Araph]

After a week of slacking, I finally sat down and redid some of the basic UI stuff. Now you start navigation from civilizations, then see locations within civilizations, then locations and people within locations, and so forth. It's still not complete: I need to add in organization affiliations, item ownership/locations, and a few other connections between entities.

Since it's finally starting to look like something other than a poorly organized, slightly more specific than normal wiki, I'm gonna slap a label of "v0.1" on this as a way to mark my progress.