How do Story Arcs work? (beta)

A Story Arc is a staged plotline you author in one place: a mystery that opens up as the player earns trust, a corruption that deepens act by act, a romance that moves through phases. Before arcs, building this meant juggling an instruction block, a tracker, and a handful of story beats across three editor sections. An arc puts the whole thing behind one card with a tab per stage.

Story Arcs are in beta. You'll find them in the world editor under Advanced, right above Story Beats.

How an arc works

An arc is a sequence of stages. Exactly one stage is active at a time, and its text is what the narrator follows.

• Stage 1 is the arc's starting instructions, active from the first turn of every journey (unless you gate the start, see below).
• Every later stage has advance conditions. When they pass, that stage's text replaces the arc's instructions for the rest of the journey. Stages always advance in order: stage 3 cannot activate before stage 2 has.
• Each stage can carry a transition note, a one-time message to the narrator on the turn the stage activates, so the change lands as a story moment instead of a silent gear shift.

Advance conditions are regular beat conditions: tracker thresholds or values, turn numbers, or a narrative condition the AI judges (for example "the player openly accuses the Master"). Combine them freely, they all have to pass together.

Writing good stage text

Each stage's text fully replaces the previous one, so write every stage as if it stands alone. Restate what still matters and change what changed.

The narrator never sees your arc's structure, stage numbers, or future stages. That is deliberate: models that know "this is phase 2 of 4" tend to telegraph the shape of the story. If a stage needs pacing, put it in the text itself: "This is the mid-point of the investigation. Escalate suspicion, but do not reveal the culprit yet." That gives the narrator exactly the awareness you want and nothing more.

Starting an arc later (sequencing arcs)

On the stage 1 tab, the Active from the first turn switch controls the arc's start. Turn it off and stage 1 gets its own starts when conditions. Until they pass, the arc contributes nothing at all to the story, the narrator does not even know it exists.

This is how you chain arcs. Have your "Act 1" arc set a tracker in its final stage (see the next section), then gate your "Act 2" arc's start on that tracker. Arcs are otherwise fully independent: you can run an investigation, a romance, and a rivalry side by side, each advancing at its own pace.

Showing progress with a tracker (optional)

If you want the arc's position visible, to the narrator, the player, or another arc, give a stage a tracker write. Arcs compile to ordinary story beats (see below), so open the stage's beat in the Story Beats section and add a Set tracker value effect: Investigation: rumors, then Investigation: open inquiry, then Investigation: endgame on later stages.

Word values work better than numbers here. "Open inquiry" tells the narrator something it can act on, "2" does not. Mark the tracker hidden if the player should not see it, and other beats (or another arc's start) can gate on it with the tracker conditions, including "does not equal".

Under the hood

An arc is not a new engine feature. It compiles to things you already know:

• One named instruction block holds the current stage's text. It shows a "Story arc" tag in the Instructions section, and its delete button is disabled there (the arc manages it, deleting the arc removes it).
• One story beat per stage performs the text swap when its conditions pass. These beats stay visible in the Story Beats section with an arc label, and you can open them there to add extra effects to a stage, like the tracker write above, an outfit change, or a lore reveal.

The Lore Map shows each arc as its own node, connected to its stage beats, so you can see your plotlines' wiring at a glance.

Because arcs are just beats and a block, everything composes: beat groups, secret lore reveals, character description changes, all of it can hang off an arc's stages.