Who can do this?
Owners and co-authors with the right permissions create events, edit them, move them to the trash and restore them. Guests do not see events.
World history and chronicle
Under “World history” you collect the events of your world on a shared timeline.
What is it for?
Before your story begins, a lot has already happened in your world: wars, foundings, catastrophes. Under “World history”, you record these events, each with a title, a world time point and a description. The world time point sits on the same timeline as everything else in Illumentis.
Every event has an epistemic status. It says how well-established the event is in the narrated world: an established fact, a common belief, a secret truth or a false myth. That way you can also record legends that people in the world believe but that are not true.
In the description, Illumentis recognizes names of characters and other entries and shows them below the field. The engine uses this: it reports a character who appears in an event before their birth, and an event that reaches in time into the actual plot.
How it works
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In the project, open the “World history” area and choose “New event”.
What you see afterwards: A dialog asks for the title, the world time point and the epistemic status.
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Enter a “Title”, optionally a “World time point (optional, default: 0)”, and choose the “Epistemic status”.
What you see afterwards: The event appears in the list.
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Open the event and write the description. Mention characters, locations or factions with the mention function.
What you see afterwards: Below the field, “Detected: …” shows the detected names.
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Choose “Save”.
What you see afterwards: “Saved.”
Your data
Events belong to the project and are backed up and exported with it. An event in the trash is kept for 30 days.
Limits
For the consistency checks, only the status for an established fact and “Secret truth” count as hard canon. The title has at most 255 characters. The engine checks an event only if world time points and dated scenes exist. There is no limit on the number of events in the Free plan.
Frequently asked questions
What do the four epistemic statuses mean?
The status for an established fact means the event is undisputedly true in the world. “Secret truth” is true but unknown to most. “Common belief” is assumed but not established. “False myth” is believed and false.
When does the engine report something about an event?
If a character is mentioned in the description and the world time point lies before their birth, it reports an age inconsistency. If an event lies after the earliest dated scene time point, it reports a timeline structure violation, because world history is meant to come before the plot.