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A Character Management System.

Feature Request

I have a series that I am working on which involves about a dozen major characters where I am detailing them in their own multi-volume series that merge and diverge; this covers them from birth to death or similar final resolution.

The characters undergo major changes and developments from infanthood to childhood to young adulthood to adulthood to older age to seniority to death. With post-human and similar sci-fi conditions involved.

The need to merge and fork versions of the character is pretty important for correctly managing the series, and a model that assumes characters are static across the entire series simply does not work for a character-driven narrative. Particularly a Rashomon.

Posted by Ian Mclean ·
6 comments

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Comments6

  • Ian Mclean

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    Sep 27, 2025

    The ability to rewrite a character entry after they have been generated would be desirable; the idea is to not replace the character entry but preserve what there is and build up on it or make changes with AI assistance.

  • Jack

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    Sep 11, 2025

    Key feature. Being able to define project and page specific characters and places would be helpful for context management

    • Ian Mclean

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      Sep 11, 2025

      Yeah, I’ve been struggling with the problem of how to keep the writing tools consistent about chronology, place, and characters. Like, many of my stories take place in a single building over a prolonged period of time with a relatively fixed number of characters, but the writing tools will often fail to understand and consistently articulate the geometry of the dwelling or introduce characters that didn’t exist before or forget characters.

      I have one example where the character starts out walking into an unassuming org building, and somewhere inside of it the context suddenly thinks it is in a cafe on like a street corner. This works really well for the more surreal landscapes like the City of Endings, but it doesn’t work as effectively as when I’m writing hard sci fi with high resolution and zoom on the characters and immediate situation.

  • Wendy Quon

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    Sep 9, 2025

    yes this would be good. my story covers at least 3 generations… so having a system where character develop dynamically and sudo picks it up would be great.

  • JT Kaelen

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    Sep 7, 2025

    I would LOVE a more robust Character Management System!

    • Use the "in book X" just like the BIBLE's Outline utilizes! (Characters ARE listed under Series after all),

    • Option to copy character from Book 1 to Book 2,

    • Much better export/import support. I am now spending 4+ hours just to export, create, import - THEN FRIGGIN CORRECT all the mistakes and mis-imports.,

    • Support YAML, Markdown, JSON formats for export/import. CSV is way too easily broken.,

    Example:

    • After Import:,

    (edited)

    Image

    * After corrections,

    Image

    This is just the bottom fields for each character. Mostly default fields above this plus a few more key fields for my series. Every book I expect changes to each character as their individual Character Arcs progress. 10 main characters * 18-20 books = far too many to easily manage.

    • Ian Mclean

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      Sep 10, 2025

      Your suggestions about data portability made me think about integration with various character creation and management formats and systems. Particularly, an obvious integration would be for SRD and similar open gaming character sheets and models.