Living World Timeline

The Living World Timeline is an interactive visualization of how your campaign world changes across sessions. Events are displayed in a swimlane grid where each entity (character, faction, location, item) gets its own column and each session is a row. At a glance, you can see what happened to whom and when.

Opening the timeline

From your campaign detail page, click the Timeline tab. The timeline loads automatically using the facts and events that Campaign Memory has extracted from your saved content.

Reading the swimlane grid

The timeline is laid out as a grid:

• Columns represent entities -- characters, factions, locations, and items that appear in your campaign.
• Rows represent sessions, sorted chronologically. Session 0 is reserved for backstory and prologue events.
• Event cards sit at the intersection of an entity column and a session row. Each card shows what happened to that entity during that session.

Color-coded lane headers help you distinguish entity types at a glance: characters in red, factions in violet/orange, locations in cyan, and items in yellow.

Events that involve a relationship between two entities (e.g., "Thorg joined the Iron Wolves") show a link to the related entity. Click it to scroll to that entity's column.

Desktop vs. mobile

On desktop, the full swimlane grid is visible with all selected entity columns side by side. Scroll horizontally if your campaign has many entities.

On mobile, the timeline shows one entity at a time. Swipe between entities or tap an entity chip in the toolbar to switch focus.

Filtering the timeline

The toolbar at the top of the timeline gives you three filtering controls:

Entity chips

Each entity appears as a clickable chip. Active chips (highlighted with their type color) are visible in the grid. Tap a chip to toggle that entity on or off. This lets you focus on specific characters or factions without the noise of everything else.

Session range slider

Drag the range slider to narrow the timeline to a specific span of sessions. Useful for focusing on a recent story arc or reviewing what happened in the early campaign.

Conflicts-only toggle

Turn this on to show only events that have an associated contradiction. This is a quick way to find timeline inconsistencies that need resolving.

Adding manual entries

Not every event comes from generated content. You can add events directly to the timeline for things like backstory, doom clocks, retcons, or off-screen developments.

1. Click the + button in the toolbar.
2. Select the entity this event involves (from any entity in your campaign, not just those already on the timeline).
3. Enter a description of what happened.
4. Optionally set a session number (use 0 for backstory) and a temporal anchor (a descriptive time reference like "during the siege" or "three days after the festival").
5. Click Save.

The event appears in the grid immediately. Manual entries are marked so you can distinguish them from auto-extracted events.

Use cases for manual entries

• Backstory events that happened before the campaign started
• Doom clocks -- record the ticking consequences that players don't know about yet
• Retcons -- add corrected events when you change established lore
• Off-screen developments -- what the villain was doing while the party was shopping

AI enrichment

The timeline includes optional AI-powered features that add depth to your event data:

• Polished descriptions -- raw extracted facts are rewritten into readable prose. "alignment: chaotic evil" becomes "Thorg revealed his true nature, abandoning any pretense of honor."
• Gap detection -- the AI identifies suspicious jumps in an entity's story. If a character was "alive" in session 3 and "deceased" in session 8 with nothing in between, you'll see a suggestion to fill in the gap. Click the suggestion to pre-fill a new manual entry.
• Causal chains -- the AI links related events across entities into narrative chains, showing cause and effect. For example: "The theft of the crown jewels (session 4) led to the faction war (session 6) which caused the siege of Ironholt (session 8)."

These enrichments appear alongside the base timeline data and are regenerated when the timeline refreshes.

Tips

• Use entity chips to prep for specific NPCs. Before a session where you know the party will meet a particular character, filter to just that character to review their entire arc.
• Add doom clocks as manual entries. This turns the timeline into a GM-only planning tool -- you can see what's building in the background alongside what the players have experienced.
• Check gap suggestions regularly. They often surface moments where something important happened off-screen that you forgot to document. Filling gaps now prevents contradictions later.
• Combine with the Campaign Bible. The Bible gives you the current state of the world; the Timeline shows you how it got there. Together, they're a complete campaign reference.