How do chapters and the Storybook work?

As your journey grows, Imagina keeps a clean, book-styled record of everything that has happened, and quietly organizes long stories into chapters. You read it all through the Storybook.

Opening the Storybook

Once your journey has more history than fits on screen, a Storybook button (the little book icon) appears in the play area. It sits with the other navigation controls and works the same whether you play in the classic scroll or an immersive view. Tap it to open the book.

The Storybook is a distraction-free reader: your story laid out in a serif book font, with your actions shown as stage directions and the narration flowing underneath. No cards, no menus in the way, just the story so far.

Chapters

For longer journeys, the Storybook's table of contents is split into chapters. Every book opens with a Prologue ("How it began"), which is the world's opening, and then lists each chapter with:

• its number and turn range (for example, "Chapter 2 · turns 41 to 78"),
• a short title, and
• a one or two line summary of what happened.

The chapter you are still living in sits at the bottom as "The story continues."

Where chapters come from

You do not create chapters by hand. Imagina watches how your story develops and, as the plot shifts (a new arc, a change of place, a fresh cast of characters), it seals off the previous stretch as a finished chapter. This happens automatically in the background while you play, so the book fills itself in as you go.

A chapter only gets sealed once enough of the story has moved past it that the boundary is settled, so very short journeys will not have any chapters yet. They simply read as one continuous "story so far" until there is enough material to divide. Roughly speaking, expect a new chapter every few dozen turns.

Titles and summaries are written for you automatically. They are meant to be plain and factual (think "Moving in with Lexi" rather than flowery prose), so the table of contents reads like a real chapter list you can scan.

Does it cost credits?

Sealing a chapter runs a quick, cheap summary in the background. It works out to roughly 1 extra credit every 12 turns, drawn from your free credits first. It never interrupts or delays your turn. In a typical journey this adds up to very little.

Chapters are part of how every journey works, so this is always on and cannot be turned off.

Getting around the book

The Storybook is built for finding things again:

• Table of contents. Jump straight to any chapter (or the Prologue).
• Search. Type a name, place, or line and the book finds every passage that mentions it, then jumps you there.
• Go to turn. Enter a turn number to land on that exact moment.
• Chapter and passage steppers. Page forward and back a chapter at a time, or hop passage by passage within one.

Every passage also has a Return to this moment jump. It closes the book and takes your main play view back to that point in the story, so you can pick up reading in context.

Rewinding and branching from the book

If you own the journey, each passage in the Storybook carries the same tools you have on the play screen:

• Start an alternate path forks a brand new journey from that moment and leaves the original untouched. See How does branching work?.
• Resume story from after this point rolls the journey back to that moment and permanently removes everything after it. See Can I edit, regenerate, or undo a turn?.

When you roll a journey back, any chapters that covered the deleted turns are removed too, so the table of contents never describes events that no longer happened. As you play forward again, new chapters form over the fresh material.

Branching leaves the original journey and its chapters exactly as they were. The new journey starts building its own chapters from the moment it was forked.

Chapters versus recaps

Chapters are not the same as the Recap that greets you when you return to a long journey after a break. A recap is a short "here is where you left off" catch-up. The Storybook and its chapters are the full, browsable record of everything that has happened. The two work well together: the recap gets you back into the moment, the Storybook lets you revisit any of it.