Frequently asked questions

StoryVue is a visual story planner and writing tool for fiction writers, with a Game Master suite for running the same world at the table. Record what changes in a scene once, and every later scene already knows. Planning is free with no time limit and no card; paid plans start at $5/mo and add the manuscript editor, thirteen analysis tools, and the worldbuilding surfaces. There is no AI anywhere in it, and your writing is never used to train one.

The Free plan is free forever: the full planning app (canvases, the Master Timeline, relationships, references, and export) with no time limit and no credit card. Paid plans add the manuscript editor, image galleries, analysis tools, and the World Builder suite. Version history and the seven-day trash are on every plan.

Storage counts everything held for your account: images, fonts, story data and version history.

Yes, and it gets bigger as the plan does. Writer is 10% off, Author is 15% off, and World Builder is 20% off, measured against twelve months at the monthly price. The yearly plan is billed once for the whole year.

• Writer: $54/yr, which works out at $4.50/mo. Save $6 a year (10%).
• Author: $102/yr, which works out at $8.50/mo. Save $18 a year (15%).
• World Builder: $144/yr, which works out at $12/mo. Save $36 a year (20%).

Switch either way whenever you like from Manage billing. Moving from monthly to yearly mid-month credits the time you already paid for, so you are never charged twice for the same days.

Every account has one, on the Dashboard. Share the link and whoever signs up through it gets a 30-day free trial of World Builder instead of the usual seven, still with no card. If they go on to subscribe, you get one month of their plan as StoryVue credit.

The credit comes off your next invoice automatically, and rolls over if it is worth more than that invoice. It is credit toward StoryVue and nothing else: it can’t be transferred to another account, and it can’t be paid out as cash. You don’t need to be a subscriber to earn it: if you’re on the Free plan, it waits and applies to your first bill whenever you subscribe.

A reward lands when the person you referred makes their first payment, not when they sign up, and a code can only be used by someone new to StoryVue who hasn’t paid before. You can earn up to twelve a year.

Every account gets one free 7-day trial, once, with no credit card. There's nothing to choose: the trial is always World Builder, the top plan, so you get every feature for the week. Start it from the Dashboard. When it ends you're back on the Free plan automatically: nothing is deleted, everything you saved stays yours, images you uploaded stay viewable and removable, and new uploads pause until you subscribe. We'll show you the plans once, when the trial ends; pick one then, or carry on free.

Yes. Upgrade on the Dashboard or in Account settings opens checkout, and Manage billing in Account settings takes you to the billing portal to change or cancel later. If you would rather try the paid features first, the 7-day trial needs no card, and everything you build is yours to keep either way.

Nothing is deleted. When a paid plan or the trial ends, you are on the Free plan and keep everything you made, and the planning side stays fully editable. Paid surfaces you already used, such as the manuscript, maps or sessions, become read-only: you can open, read and export them, and delete anything in them, but not edit or add. Restoring an earlier version, or replacing a story from your own backup, works on Free too. Character Timelines is the one page that locks completely. Subscribe again and editing comes straight back.

Both. Every story has a Manuscript view: chapters and scenes in a binder, with a full writing editor beside them. Type @ while drafting to drop in a live reference to any character, place, or thing you've planned; hover it for a quick reminder, click it to open the full entry without leaving your draft. Link a prose scene to its scene node and StoryVue shows you exactly what is true at that moment. The manuscript editor is part of the Writer plan; the planning side is free.

Yes; it is built for exactly that shape of month. Plan in October (the Preptober plan walks it week by week: cast and relationships, places, scenes on one timeline, and what is true at chapter one), then draft in November in the manuscript editor with the whole plan one @-mention away. The planning layer is free with no time limit, and every account includes one free trial of the top plan.

Yes. While you write, the manuscript’s status bar shows today’s words against your daily goal (the Writer plan and up), and the Dashboard shows your current streak. On the Author plan, set a book goal with a word target and a deadline, and the Outline works out how many words a day will finish it. Writing Analytics, one of the writer tools, adds your longest streak, a twelve-week activity strip and per-chapter counts. Activity counts across all your stories.

Yes, and that is close to what the planning layer is. A story bible is the record of everything that has to stay consistent, and StoryVue keeps it as a living graph: record a change once, in the scene where it happens, and every later scene lists it automatically, so who knew what, and when, is never a separate document to maintain. When you want the artifact itself, the World Bible export compiles your world into a print-ready PDF. For a series, start a sequel and the bible carries into Book 2 as it stands at the end of Book 1. More on keeping a story bible in StoryVue.

Yes, without AI. On the Author plan, Chronology flags scene dates that run backwards, undated scenes between dated ones, and characters on stage before they are born or after they die. Loose Ends lists what is still open at the last scene: conditions never resolved, relationships left hanging, open margin notes. Reader Knowledge finds characters mentioned before the reader has met them. On every plan, hovering a character shows their age at the scene you are in, and every entry lists where it appears. The checks count and cross-reference what you built; they never rewrite a word.

Yes. Choose Start from… on the Dashboard, then A sequel to one of your stories, and tick what comes along. Each one arrives as things stand at the end of the earlier book, with what is still true about it on the sequel’s first scene. They’re copies: changing them in the sequel never changes the earlier book. It works on every plan.

Yes. Prep the session from your own scenes, run it at the table, and the night writes itself into the campaign record you hand your players. That loop is the World Builder plan's Game Master suite, in effect a campaign manager built on your story graph: session prep with a live table log, an encounter builder with initiative tracking, both 5e SRD bestiaries built in, dice and weighted rollable tables, and GM secrets with a player-safe handout export. Game stats on characters and creatures are free for every account, so you can stat your cast before subscribing.

Split it forward. A half-played scene moves onto a later session carrying your note on what was played and what is left, and that note lands in the receiving session's log, so the next night opens where you actually stopped. The scene picker only offers scenes that are not already planned somewhere else, so two sessions can never quietly claim the same one.

No. The log you keep while you play is the recap. Star the beats that mattered and StoryVue assembles a chapter per session: what happened, who the party met for the first time, and what they learned. Nothing is generated for you; the chapter is your own log, read back in order. Mark an entry player-facing, reword it if the table version should read differently, and print the player copy with your secrets left out.

Ten are ready to roll: six adapted from the 5e SRD under CC BY 4.0 and four written for StoryVue, and a copy keeps its attribution. You can also paste a table you already have. StoryVue reads plain lines, numbered lists, and markdown rows, and turns a printed range like 01-20 into the weight, so the odds come across with the entries. Roll one from the session composer and the result lands in that night's log.

Always. Compile in the manuscript binder turns your whole draft into one file, in binder order, with references flattened to plain names: Markdown or Rich Text, or Word and a styled PDF on the Author plan. Word comes out in standard manuscript format (Times New Roman 12pt, double-spaced, the layout agents and editors expect), as a single-spaced book-style draft, or exactly as written on screen, on US Letter or A4, and its Contents page arrives with each chapter’s page number already filled in. Markdown and Rich Text open in Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, and just about everything else. Your story's planning data exports separately as JSON from the Dashboard. Underline, highlight, colour, alignment and your own fonts survive the compile into Word, PDF and Rich Text; only Markdown is plain.

Yes, on the World Builder plan. The Theme Studio builds export themes for your World Bible, campaign printouts and manuscript PDFs: your own uploaded fonts, colours, how each character or place sits on the page, divider ornaments, page borders, drop caps, and page art, from built-in parchment, blueprint and gilded designs or images you upload. A theme is saved to your account, so every story can use it, and Export theme saves it to a file, fonts and art included, that you can import into any StoryVue account. The Studio flags text that may be hard to read on your page colour and warns before you send a full-page background to a print service. Word files always use a fixed manuscript format, never a theme.

You, and only you. Every story is private by default and access is enforced with row-level security in the database; other accounts can't read your work, full stop. Images you upload are stored at unlisted URLs so they render in your own exports. The Privacy Policy spells out exactly what we store and why.

From Account settings in the account menu: Delete account…, then type your email to confirm. Deletion is immediate and permanent: every story, including those in Trash, every image, font, export theme and piece of uploaded page art, and all version history is removed. Any subscription is cancelled with no refund for the rest of the period, and unused referral credit is lost. There is no grace period and no undo, so export the stories you want to keep first. The Privacy Policy covers what happens to backups.

No AI features, anywhere. Nothing in StoryVue generates prose, suggests plot points, or rewrites a sentence: the thirteen analysis tools are deterministic, counting and cross-referencing what you actually built, then reporting. One honest footnote: we do use AI coding tools to help build the app itself. That happens on our code, never on your writing: nothing you write is sent to an AI, and nothing you write trains one. The same is true of the Game Master's campaign journal: it is assembled from the log you kept, never written for you.

No. Your stories, notes, and manuscripts are never used to train AI models, never sold, and never shared for advertising. They exist to be synced back to you, and that's it. The Game Master tools are the same: dice come from a random number generator, encounter balance is arithmetic, and nothing is generated for you.

Every story exports from the Dashboard as a story file (.json) or as a backup with images (.zip), which also carries its images, custom fonts and custom export themes. Export all stories downloads every story with its images, in one file or, for a large image library, in several parts. Keep them in any cloud drive you like. Importing restores the story exactly, manuscript included, with its images copied into its own storage. Your stories also sync continuously to the cloud as you work; the export you keep yourself is the extra copy we recommend for anything you'd hate to lose. Version history is separate from the export: the file carries the story as it is now, and your account keeps the versions.

Yes, on every plan including Free. While you write, StoryVue saves a version at most once an hour, and again when you close StoryVue or sign out (switching tabs doesn’t count). After a day, only the last automatic version of each day is kept, so the list stays short. Open Version history at the bottom of a story’s sidebar to see every version, name one you want to keep, or put the whole story back the way it was. In the manuscript, History shows the versions in which that one scene changed, compares it to the current text word by word, and restores that scene alone. Restoring saves your current state first, so you can always change your mind. Choose how long automatic versions are kept, from a week to three months, or turn them off, in Account settings. Named versions stay until you delete them, and you can delete any version, automatic or named. Versions count toward your account storage and are not included in the JSON export.

It waits in Trash on the Dashboard for seven days, images and version history intact, with a Restore button. After seven days it is removed for good. To remove it sooner, use Delete now beside it. The Trash only appears when there is something in it.

Open Photos on the Dashboard. It lists every image you have uploaded, to your stories or to the Theme Studio, with where each one is used and its size. Delete names everything that uses the image, takes it off all of them, and frees its storage. Fonts, beside it, lists your uploaded fonts in their own typefaces, each with its own Delete. Deleting your own uploads works on every plan, including Free and after a downgrade, and a story that has grown past its size limit can still save changes that make it smaller. A deleted image or font cannot be restored.

Yes: stories sync through the cloud, so sign in anywhere and pick up where you left off. If the same story is somehow edited in two places at once, the stale window gets a clear warning banner instead of silently overwriting your newer work.

Yes. Every tool works on a phone now: the canvases, the manuscript, the timeline, all of it. Panels slide in as drawers, tap targets are finger-sized, and nothing runs off the edge of the screen. That said, plotting a sprawling canvas or writing chapter nine is still nicest on a desktop-sized screen with a keyboard. Plan on the bus; settle in at the desk.

Yes. A manuscript in Word (.docx), Markdown (.md) or plain text (.txt) imports as a story split into chapters and scenes, with your characters' names linked; Scrivener (through Compile), Google Docs and most writing apps can save one of these. A world saved from World Anvil's export page imports too, with its images. Both run in your browser and show a review before anything is saved. The import guide lists every source and walks through each. If an import you need is missing, tell us which one.

Characters, yes. Pick the character-sheet PDF from D&D Beyond's "Export to PDF" and StoryVue turns it into a character node with stats, features, and spells. The file is parsed entirely in your browser and never leaves your device, and nothing is sent to D&D Beyond. Spell rules text is filled in from the bundled SRD where its license allows. There is no public D&D Beyond API for monsters, so the compendium bundles both 5e System Reference Documents instead; when you add a creature to an encounter, you can also paste a stat block as JSON. Step by step in the import guide.