We're excited to announce that a new feature has just gone live for all users in Quilvo: Story Planning. Our Story Planning feature lets you create characters, timelines, locations, codex items, character relationship maps and more, all to help you plan and build your story.
Is your usual system one endless document full of lists of characters and their facts? Are you forever tearing off bits of paper and scribbling lines in notebooks to keep track of your locations? Are you crafting complex fantasy worlds, the kind of deep worldbuilding that needs a proper database of characters? Do you need to track lots of relationships between all of those characters? Then Quilvo Planning is for you.
Start with your cast
Everything begins with your characters. Each one lives in your own personal library, so you only have to build them once. All we ask for is a name. After that you can add as much or as little as you like: a role, pronouns, an alias, a one-line hook to remind you who they are at a glance, a colour, and longer profile sections for everything else.
The best part is that the same character can appear in as many projects as you want. Link them once and they're there in every book they belong to, so you're never re-typing the same backstory into a fresh document when you start book three. You can even link characters and codex items to multiple projects, allowing for seamless planning across an entire series.
See how everyone is connected
Our character relationship feature is especially useful for authors working on complex stories. You can create as many relationships of as many types as you like between all your characters: family, friends, rivals, mentors, romances and more. Give each one a strength and an optional status note (think "estranged after Ch. 12"), then view the whole web laid out on a beautiful, interactive graph.
It's not just a static picture, either. Hover over a character and their connections light up while everyone else fades into the background. The colour and style of each line tells you what kind of relationship it is, and the thickness tells you how strong it is. Drag your characters around to arrange the map however makes sense to you, and draw brand new relationships right there on the graph. You can even drop your locations onto the map to see who lives where.
A home for the rest of your world
Characters aren't the only thing you can keep track of. The codex is where the rest of your world lives: locations, factions, items, creatures, magic systems, lore, whatever your story happens to need. Entries can be nested inside one another, linked to the characters and events they touch, and shared across every project they appear in, exactly like your cast.
Build a timeline that works the way your story does
You can make events, fixed in time or without specific dates, and view them as lists, as a wall of cards, or on a fully interactive timeline.
And because invented worlds rarely run on our calendar, you decide how time works. Use plain sequence with no dates at all, free-text labels, your own numeric scale ("years since the Founding" works just as well as days or minutes), or real calendar dates. You can flip between the order your story is told and the order things actually happen, so flashbacks and scrambled chronology slot neatly into place at the press of a button.
Split your timeline by character, location, project, chapter or thread to get an instant view of who is where and when. Tag events with coloured story threads to follow a single plotline through the whole book, and drag events around to re-time them whenever your plans change.
It's all live now
Story Planning is available to everyone in Quilvo today. On the free plan you can create up to 25 characters and 20 codex entries, and the timeline is completely unlimited, so the view we're proudest of is never held back. Go Pro and the character and codex limits come off entirely.
Open the Plan section from your sidebar, or jump straight into the Cast & Story panel on any project page, and start building. We can't wait to see the worlds you create.