Characters and locations
Characters and locations are the two presence entities in your Book Wiki: people and places that appear in scenes. They share the same card spine and the same "Appears in" mechanism, so this page covers both.
Open them from the Book Wiki tool in the activity bar. Like the rest of the wiki, they belong to a book.
The card
Every character and location card shares the wiki spine:
| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Name | Required. |
| Aliases | Other names, nicknames, short forms. The editor uses these to highlight mentions. |
| Summary | A short gist for quick scanning. |
| Description | The full write-up. |
| Tags | Colored markers for filtering. See Search and tags. |
| Notes | Free remarks on the card. |
Each kind adds one field of its own:
- Character adds a role — for example protagonist, antagonist, supporting, minor.
- Location adds an optional type — for example city, building, region. Leave it blank if you don't need it.
Aliases
List every name a character or place goes by, separated as you type them. Aliases let the editor recognize the entity when you mention it in a scene, so the right name lights up for a one-click appearance.
Character depth (optional)
A character card holds as much or as little as you want. If you like to build a character in depth, the card has three collapsible sections — physiology, sociology, psychology, in the Egri tradition — each with its own structured fields (age, build, occupation, motivation, and more). They start collapsed until filled in; a name and a role are enough to start.
Appearances: where the entity shows up
An appearance is a confirmed link between an entity and a scene. It comes in kinds:
- Present — the character is in the scene.
- Point of view (POV) — the scene is told from this character.
- Setting — the scene takes place at this location.
POV and present are kinds of the one "Appears in" mechanism — you are always marking the same kind of link.
Marking an appearance
From an open scene, mark a character as present (or POV) or a location as the setting. You can also confirm an appearance straight from the editor: when you mention a name the editor knows, it highlights it, and one click turns that mention into an appearance. A mention on its own is just a hint — it never becomes an appearance until you confirm it, so a character can be named without being marked as present. See Search and tags.
"Appears in"
Open a character or location card to see its Appears in list — every scene with a confirmed appearance — and jump to any of them. From a scene, you can see which characters and locations appear there. This is how you answer "where does this character appear?" or "which scenes are set here?" without hunting through the manuscript.
Appearances live in the scene itself, not on the card. So if you restore an earlier version of a scene, its cast comes back with its text — you don't have to fix the cards by hand. See Safety and recovery.
Safe and recoverable
Cards are project files: they travel with the project and are backed up. Deleting a card sends it to Trash — it leaves lists, search, export, and AI context, and links to it never dangle. Restore brings it back. See Safety and recovery.
See also: Book Wiki · Plotlines · Search and tags