Advanced journey authoring
Imagina gives you tools to shape your story beyond just typing actions. These features are all optional, but they're useful when you want more control over where the narrative goes.
Imagina gives you tools to shape your story beyond just typing actions. These features are all optional, but they're useful when you want more control over where the narrative goes.
The steering box
Below your action input there's a smaller italic field: the steering box. Anything you type here is a private note to the narrator about how the next turn should go, separate from what your character does.
Some patterns that work well:
- Set tone:
make it more tense,slow down and describe the environment - Introduce something:
a stranger arrives at the inn,it starts raining - Reveal a fact:
To narrator: the merchant is secretly the prince in disguise
The To narrator: prefix is especially reliable because it makes clear you're speaking out-of-character. Your character won't suddenly know the secret; the narrator just starts writing with that fact baked in.
Steering is always optional. Leave it empty for normal play.
Narrative rules
The AI can extract lasting directives from your steering automatically ("always describe combat in detail", "the shopkeeper never gives discounts"). These persist across turns so you don't have to repeat yourself. You can view and manage them in the debug panel's State tab.
The debug panel
Type /debug in the action input or open it from the slash-command menu. The debug panel shows the internal state of your journey:
- State: current trackers, active characters, NPC details, plot threads, and narrative rules.
- Turns: full history with your actions, AI monologue (short-term planning), AI memory (long-term notes), tracker changes, NPC updates, and plot thread updates. Each turn also shows token counts, the model used, and how long the turn took.
- World: the full world definition driving your journey.
If you're using a thinking model, you can see how many tokens went to reasoning versus output. Cached token percentages show how much context the model reused from the previous turn.
The debug panel is read-only for regular users. It's most useful for world authors who want to see how the AI interprets their instructions, or for players curious about what's happening under the hood.
Can turns be read aloud? (beta)
Read aloud turns a story turn into a short audiobook. A narrator reads the prose, and each character speaks their lines in their own voice. Voices are chosen once per journey, so a character sounds the same from one turn to the next.
What do Light, Medium, and Heavy worlds mean?
Every turn of a journey sends the whole world to the storyteller: instructions, lore, cast, trackers, beats, tables, all of it. That is what makes a world feel consistent, and it is also why a bigger world costs more to play. The size...