Kickstarter Feature - Amsel Suite | Desktop App for World Building and Session Planning
Tome is their app for storytellers to keep track of their notes and plots, allowing you to organize things into different sections and create sub-plots and branches underneath them. One part that I find very interesting and will make use of from their pitch is the ability to keep track of different decisions that the party makes and the results or consequences of those choices. One of the worries people had brought up is that it might cause a DM to railroad their story, but I look at it a different way. Since the world of Erylia is a living and connected world, something that is done in one location may have effects on different locations, or even just effect the course of events later down the line. This feature would be perfect for making notes that because the players did something in a town and then left, you can keep track of what would happen to that town if they ever come back to it and even know the reasons why that change happened.
Their Lore app is closer to things that we have seen before in things like World Anvil, Obsidian Portal, LegendKeeper, and Kanka: it is a place to keep track of your world building notes and details. Write down your worlds origin story, keep track of notes for every location, make sure to catalog who is where, and use tags and filters to keep track of it all. Aside from just somewhere to record information, Lore will include multiple categorization systems as well as a tagging system to help keep things organized and easily move from one subject to another. As someone who does a lot of spread out world building on World Anvil and OneNote, one thing that I miss out on that this will fill a niche for is the ability to seamlessly reference things in my session prep notes.
In a way, Lore will be redundant to a lot of what I already have access to, but the real power behind it for me is the integration with Tome and being able to write my prep notes in Tome while linking everything directly to their relevant pages in Lore. This will be especially helpful for me because at the start of each story arc, I start working on the prep and story for the whole area that the players are in so I am ready for whatever direction they chose. This means that often times, things that I work on get put aside or even ignored entirely for months or more than a year and being able to quickly get to all of the relevant articles from my notes will make it so much easier to refresh my memory on things as we get back to them.
Since things are still in the closed developer only Alpha, we don't have access to them for testing yet, but their Kickstarter page has given us a taste at some of the ideas they have for modules within the apps.
I have already backed the project at their Trailblazing Wolf tier at the time of writing this and they have unlocked their first three stretch goals which will get us expanded token tools for Tome, additional templates for Lore, and a money and currency module for both apps. I am really hoping they can pull of the fourth stretch goal, which will unlock custom calendars and time management modules for both apps, and since Erylia uses is custom calendar I would love for it to be supported. One struggle I have always had with keeping track of historical notes and time lines since our show has slower more real world pace is tying each event to a certain date to reference how long since something has happened or how long until something should happen.
