Resources & kinds
A resource is any entity in your world - a character, a place, a faction, an item. A kind gives a group of resources a shared shape. This page covers both, plus families and variants.
A resource is the core unit of a Chronicler world. A character is a resource. So is a city, a war, a sword, or a god. Each resource is its own page with a name, a summary, lore, attributes, and connections to other resources. Everything else in the product hangs off resources.
Kinds give a shape
Every resource has a kind: character, location, faction, item, and any others your world defines. A kind is not just a label. It carries the schema that says which attributes a resource of that kind can hold, so every character shares a shape and every location shares a different one. You author kinds in the chronicle's taxonomy, alongside relationship types and collection definitions.
A kind is chronicle-scoped. Two worlds can both have a "character" kind with completely different attributes, and neither affects the other.
Families: variants without duplication
A resource is rarely alone. A character has a younger self, an alternate-timeline version, a form they take after a curse. Chronicler models this with a family. Every member of a family is a full, first-class resource. None is a second-class copy of another.
Inside a family, one member is the primary. It defaults to the family root and is the version shown when something links to the family without asking for a specific member. The others are variants. Being a variant is a role a resource plays in its family, not a lesser type it is stored as, so a variant has every capability the root has.
A variant is a real resource
A variant has its own id, its own attributes, and its own lore. It can be revealed to players, linked, and mentioned exactly like any other resource. The family is what ties them together, not a parent-child hierarchy.
Editing, evolving, and splitting
Three different things can happen to a resource, and Chronicler keeps them distinct:
- An edit corrects or refines the resource in place.
- An evolution marks a deliberate step forward in the resource's own story. The city grows into a capital. Past states stay reachable.
- A split mints a new variant into the family. This is a new resource, not a change to the old one.
Because every change is recorded as an event, you can always look at how a resource stood at an earlier point in the story.
Identifying a resource
Every resource has a single id with a typed prefix, so an id tells you what it points at:
res_6311hvq3sgvd7vsmyxtmsh0sas
That id is stable for the life of the resource. Renaming the resource does not change it, so a link or a mention never breaks on a rename.
Where to go next
- Give your kinds their fields in Attributes & schemas.
- See how connections work in The graph.
- See how players see only what you reveal in Play, reveals & campaigns.