Plotting

Storylines & plots

How storylines, plots, and plot events fit together — and how to switch between a linear outline and the spatial storyline canvas.

How story structure is modeled

Vellerune’s plotting tools are built around three layers, each one nested inside the last:

Storyline — a high-level narrative thread or arc. A storyline can span any number of books in the world, which makes it useful for long-running threads — a character’s inner journey across a trilogy, a romance that begins in book one and concludes in book three, a political machination that takes the whole series to resolve.
Plot — a specific narrative unit inside a storyline. Each plot has a name, an archetype, an optional summary, and an ordered list of events. A plot can be associated with a subset of its parent storyline’s books — useful when a storyline spans three books but a particular plot only plays out in one of them.
Plot Event — a single beat inside a plot. An event has a description, a position in the plot’s sequence, and (optionally) coordinates on the canvas.

All three live at the world level, so you can reuse the same storylines and plots across every book that draws on them.

Storylines

From the world sidebar, choose Storylines. The tree on the left shows every storyline in the world; each storyline expands to reveal its plots.

To create a storyline, click the + at the top of the panel. Click a storyline to edit its details — name, description, and the books it touches. Setting books here is what makes them available to that storyline’s plots.

Plots

Inside a storyline in the tree, hover the storyline node and click Add Plot to create one. Click a plot to open its detail view.

A plot has four parts:

Archetype — pick from twelve built-ins (Comedy, Heist, Hero’s Journey, Mystery, Overcoming the Monster, Pursuit, Quest, Rags to Riches, Rebirth, Romance, Tragedy, Voyage and Return) or type your own — the field is a searchable combobox.
Books — a subset of the parent storyline’s books. If the picker is empty, set books on the storyline first.
Summary — free-form description of the plot.
Events — an ordered list of beats. Add, edit, drag to reorder, or delete each event from the bullet list.

Two views, one set of data

The same plots and events show up in two different places, each suited to a different way of thinking about story:

Plot detail — a linear, beat-by-beat list. Best for outlining the order things happen inside a single plot.
Storyline canvas — a 2D plane at the storyline level, where events from any plot in the storyline can be placed and connected. Best for thinking spatially about cause-and-effect, dependency, or thematic links between events across plots.

You can move between the two freely — every event on the canvas is the same event you authored on the plot detail page; placing it on the canvas just adds coordinates to it.

The storyline canvas

Click a storyline (not one of its plots) to open the canvas.

Events you’ve added in plot detail start out as unplaced — they’re listed in the right-hand panel, grouped by plot. Drag any unplaced event onto the canvas to place it. Drag a placed event back into the panel to unplace it.

Once placed, events can be:

Moved — drag anywhere on the canvas. With Snap to Grid on (default), they snap to a 16-pixel grid.
Connected — draw an edge from one event to another to mark a relationship or dependency. Select an edge and press Delete or Backspace to remove it.

The canvas toolbar (top-left) gives you:

Filters — show only events from selected plots or books. A small accent dot indicates a filter is active.
Edit storyline details — opens the same dialog you use from the tree.
Capture visible area — exports a single PNG of what’s currently on screen.
Export full diagram — exports a PNG of the entire diagram.
Canvas settings — toggles for Snap to Grid, the dotted background, and the mini-map.

When the canvas has no events yet, the side panel will tell you so. Add a plot, add events to it, then come back and start placing them.