The Studio, tab by tab

The world's identity: its name, what it's about in a sentence or two, genre and tone, and the event history hangs on. The storyteller reads all of it before every scene. Storyteller

• Always true here. Hard truths about the world: no resurrection, iron burns the fae, the dead walk at night. The judge that reads each action is given these and rules on them. Storyteller
• Notes for the game master. Anything else the storyteller should follow. It follows them unless they'd break the game's own rules.
• Art style. How your world should look. It styles the pictures of your peoples. Portraits and scene pictures take their own direction, and their own models, on the AI tab.

The map is drawn by the same generator that made Khorvale. You shape it in words; it adds coastlines, slopes, rivers, roads and towns, and redraws half a second after each change.

The land

• Islands puts each region on its own island; drag an island's name to move it. Travel between them is by sea.
• One land is a single landmass split into regions. Pick a shape (two great continents, one vast land, lands around an inner sea, a long peninsula, a ring of atolls and more), a size (small, medium, vast) and a climate (cold, temperate, warm, or many climates from pole to tropics). New land rolls a different one.
• The drawing opens beside the map, showing the land as a rough painting. Paint over it (sea, land, hills and mountains, with a few brush sizes) and the map becomes your drawing; From template starts again from the chosen shape, and the arrows (or Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z) undo and redo. Rough is fine: the generator adds the coastlines, slopes and rivers. Hide drawing puts it away.
• A map can mix both: a region on the mainland can be made an island, and an island joined to the mainland.

Regions

Drag a region's name to move its heart, and watch its borders follow. When you let go, what you saw is what you get: the other regions stay where they are. Click any name to open its card:

Click a town to rename it, roll a new name, or write its lore: what it's like, who runs it, what's wrong there. Its people and places are made from that lore and the storyteller keeps it, and it stays editable after publishing. The toolbar has the world's naming style, Rename all, and + Region. A map holds up to 40 pieces (islands or landmasses), and a landmass up to 24 regions.

Landmarks

Landmark puts a place of your own on the map: a ruin, shrine, tower, cave, monument, grove, standing stones or camp. Its card takes a name, a line players find out when they arrive, and whether it's Hidden until found. Any landmark can have a dungeon dug under it: see Dungeons.

The heart of each region. What makes it unlike anywhere else is the one line the storyteller builds every scene there on, so make it specific. Then its history, who holds power (factions and what they want), what's not done there (taboos the locals enforce), whether it has a harbour, and how dangerous it is: mostly safe, dangerous, deadly, or only legends survive. Storyteller

Realms beyond the map are other worlds reached through gates rather than roads. Give each a name and summary, choose which region its gate stands in, and whether the gate is sealed. A sealed gate can't be opened by anything a player tries. Engine

Who can be played, and who fills your towns. For each people:

• How strong they can get and how much magic they can hold, each a bar across your world's ranks (in its own names), from the bottom of the ladder to the very top. Drag to fill it; a fainter fill shows how far their transformations take them, and a mark shows where your world stops every mortal. Characters can't be made or grow past these limits, and a people with no magic can't use it at all. Engine
• Where they live. Towns and passers-by in a region are drawn from the peoples who live there, the common ones three times as often as the rare. Engine
• Transformations, from a nudge to a rebirth: how many a character of this people can go through, and how far each one lifts their limits, measured from where the last one left them. Each one says which rank it takes them to. Engine
• Rare: playable, but seldom met.
• What they look like. Paint one paints a typical member, full length, in your world's art style; or Upload a picture (PNG, JPEG, WebP or GIF, up to 8 MB). Players see it when they choose who to be, and it shows on your public page.

Every region is a possible starting point for any people; where a people lives shapes who you meet, not where you can begin.

The people who matter before anyone plays: the queen, the guildmaster, the rival, the thing in the lake. Each has a name, what they are to the world, where they belong, their people, who they are, what they want, a secret, and how dangerous they are in a fight (harmless to legendary).

• The storyteller always knows them. Every scene lists the figures of the region in full and names the rest, and it won't invent a second holder of a role you've filled. Storyteller
• They appear by name. When one steps on stage they're built from your description, and it's the same person every time after: met once, remembered. Engine
• Their secret is the storyteller's alone. It shapes how they act; it isn't announced.
• Their danger is held under the world's ceiling on the most dangerous thing it may create. Engine

Switch magic on or off, and name what one kind of it is called: a school, a current, a path, an art, or your own word. For each kind: its essence in a word, what it covers, the mark it leaves on those who use it, and whether it's forbidden, with what taking it up means.

What it can do describes each kind at a range of power, from a cantrip, through killing a person or filling a hall, to breaking a fortress. Leave a level blank to use the default. These descriptions teach the storyteller how your magic looks at each scale; what an effect costs is still priced by the engine. Engine

Facts the storyteller should keep straight: history, factions, legends, religion, customs, creatures, anything. Each entry has a title, a kind, and what's true. The storyteller looks entries up when a scene touches them. Storyteller

Also look this up for takes other names players might use, comma-separated. Titles and text are searched anyway; these help when someone asks for the thing by a name the entry doesn't use.

Ask your world anything (“Who rules the capital? What do the mountain folk fear?”) and get the answer the storyteller would give, from your canon alone. Each answer is marked:

• Settled by your canon: your own words answer it.
• Partly the storyteller's reading: your canon points that way; the rest is inference.
• Your canon is silent: this is invented: in play, the storyteller would make this up.

It shows what it drew on, and up to three gaps, each with Add to Lore as a start. Check the whole world reads everything and reports up to twelve contradictions, gaps and loose ends. Both run on your key.

Hob is the Studio's house-spirit, bottom right on every tab. Ask it to change your world in plain words: “give the north a witch queen and put her in the cast”, “rename every town in Volovia so they sound Norse”, “drop a ruined tower somewhere wild in the marsh”. You watch each step as it happens, and every change shows up in the Studio at once and saves like one of your own.

• Anything but the land. Peoples, magic, lore, cast, region lore, economy, power names and rules. On the map it can rename regions and towns, write each town's lore, place, edit and remove landmarks, and change a region's land type while the world is a draft.
• Not the shape of the map. Drawing land and adding, moving or removing regions and towns stay in your hands on the Map tab. Nor the storyteller model: that is on the AI tab, with its price.
• Undo under a reply takes back everything that reply changed.

It runs on your world's key, like Ask.

What money is called here. Start from gold, silver and copper; crowns, shillings and pence; marks and bits; or a single coin, then rename them, give plurals and short forms, and set how many of each smaller coin a larger one is worth (up to four coins). One coin buys about anchors your smallest coin against the world's prices, from half a loaf to a night at an inn.

• Players see amounts in your coins everywhere, and rewards are paid in them. Engine
• What things cost is a price guide the storyteller bargains around; remote or dangerous places cost more. Storyteller
• How trade works here is for anything else: barter in the hills, guild tolls, bead-money re-priced every dawn.
• Local prices are optional. A region or one town can be cheap, dear or ruinous, price particular things its own way and trade by its own customs; a town goes on top of its region. The storyteller charges what the place the player stands in charges. Storyteller Sea passage and outfitting a ship cost what the port charges. Engine

Your coins are names on one scale underneath, so renaming them never changes balance. What sells for how much, and what a repair costs, are set by the engine whatever your prices say.

How strong things get. Name your ranks (or keep the letters), say how high a mortal can climb and where new heroes start, how they grow and what they grow by, how many skills they learn and when, whether the weak can hurt the strong, what reaching past your limit costs, and how tough heroes and casters are. A ladder shows it all at once. Every choice is described in World rules. Engine