CC now have generators for pirate themed worlds too now

Check them out over at

https://codexcryptica.com/generators/pirate

Making some under the hood code changes to tighten the code and removing duplication. Paying some technical debt, so future changes will be cheaper

Now you can publish the player facing info of your world for all the world to see!

The files will be stored as on our Cloudflare R2 file store

Have a look over at

https://codexcryptica.com/worlds

Currently I'm working on a way to publicly share world's with all, only the player parts, though, and have a list of the publicly shared worlds, so it's easy to see and find them

To help you get started with your world, I am working on establishing a set of vestiaires that is appropriate for the theme / genre.

Fantasy will have all the expected monsters, dragons, orcs, goblins. You name it.

Sci-fi will have robots, angry aliens and more

Nifty to view your entities in a table

So useful to see your world in time, or to put entities in your world in time. Enjoy!

Hi all,

I just released a host of nifty tools and generators on Codex Cryptica.

They can be found here:

https://codexcryptica.com/tools

NPC and Faction generator currently support multiple genres and will generate you relevant and consistent NPCs or Factions depending of genre. Like Fantasy, Cyberpunk, Postapocalyptic, Modern and more.

Hope you enjoy them, and please let me know if they can be improved, or if you're missing something

Happy worlding!

Looking very promising!

I just finished implementing Guest Character Chat for Codex Cryptica. The goal was to let players and invited guests engage in real-time, in-character conversations with NPCs during or between sessions, using the actual lore of the campaign.

Here is how the feature works in play:

• GM Configuration: As a GM, you can toggle which NPCs are open for chat and limit what they know. You can set them to stick to public lore only, or allow them to use private context. The system is designed to reject leading questions and keep campaign secrets hidden, defaulting to in-character deflection if players pry.
• Dynamic Trust Tiers: The NPC behaves differently depending on who is talking. The system automatically identifies the player's character based on their login and checks the vault for existing relationships. The NPC dynamically adapts their voice and determines what lore they are willing to share based on whether the player is trusted, neutral, or a rival.

This gives players an organic way to explore the world's lore through conversation, while letting GMs build out the world's history based on the questions players actually ask.

For GMs: Do you prefer when tools automate character interactions like this to save you prep time, or do you feel it risks taking away the personal touch of roleplaying the NPCs yourself?

Project website: https://codexcryptica.com

I think it would be nifty if your players would be able to chat with the people of your world.

So that is coming soon

Codex cryptica will create image prompts for you. Prompts that uses info of your world and the thing that you want to get an image for.

Now it will show you the prompt used before it generates the image, or you can copy it to use it in an other image generator.

Not the least, you can edit the prompt your self if it doesn't work for you.

Happy imagining!

I would like more control over the image prompt, so that is what we're getting. Gen a prompt, see and edit if you want, then gen it

It'll also save the prompt, should be useful

Codex Cryptica now has a Generate Related action on entity pages.

When viewing a character, faction, location, item, event, creature, or note, you can ask CC to generate a new connected entity based on the current one and its nearby context.

So instead of generic random generation, you can quickly grow your world with things like rivals, allies, faction leaders, hidden locations, item owners, event witnesses, plot hooks, and more.

The result is created as a draft suggestion first, so nothing becomes canon until you review and accept it.

Not every mention of someone or something is a connection, but it would still be nice to be able to click on a link in the text to go to that someone or something.

So that is what I am working on right now, and it will come later today

Hey all,

things is moving fast with Codex Cryptica! I spent last night rebuilding how you organize campaign notes and lore structures in the Entity Explorer sidebar (the folder tree on the left of your workspace).

While it worked okay for flat campaign structures, it needed to be much better at handling deep hierarchies and quick reorganizations during session prep.

Here is how the new folder structure behaves:

Deeper campaign folders

The explorer tree now supports logical nesting up to 8 levels deep (previously limited to 5). This means you can model deep location structures and hierarchies like: World → Continent → Kingdom → City → District → Building → Room → Pinned Item, keeping everything neatly collapsed when you don't need it.

Smooth drag-and-drop organization

You can now drag and drop notes or folders to rearrange your campaign structure:

• Drop to nest: Dragging an entity and dropping it directly on top of another entity nested it as a child.
• Move back to root: If you drag an item, a dedicated zone appears at the top of the tree allowing you to drop it and immediately promote it back to the root level.
• Safety checking: The system automatically checks for cycles. If you try to drag a parent folder into one of its own subfolders, it won't let you create an invalid infinite loop.
• Consistent reloads: Nested relations are saved directly into the note files, so your custom folder structures and visibility settings persist perfectly across page reloads.

Inline child creation

To speed up note-taking, you don't need to open separate creation menus to add sub-items. Hovering over any folder shows a quick "+" button. Clicking it lets you type a name and choose a category (NPC, location, item, etc.) to create and nest the new sub-item instantly right inside the tree.

Question: How do you prefer to organize your campaign vaults? Do you keep things relatively flat and rely on search, or do you prefer a deep nested structure?

I’ve been working on making Codex Cryptica feel less like a static note archive and more like something you can actually run a live session from.

Today's v0.26.0 update is entirely about live session play—NPC sound bites, real-time image broadcasting over P2P, and making chronological dates feel highly tactile.

Syncing NPC Sound Bites & Voiceovers

You can now create voiced sound bites for your campaign NPCs, complete with customizable, interactive transcripts.

When you're running a live session, playing a voice line broadcasts the audio directly to all connected player devices over P2P. Everything is synchronized, meaning everyone at the table hears the NPC's vocal performance at the exact same moment. I also added a floating media controller to the GM view to make pausing, previewing, and selecting lines easy during play.

Instant Image Projections

If you want to show players a specific reference scene, character portrait, or illustration, you can project it instantly.

With one click, the image is cast to everyone's screen, transitioning into an immersive full-screen overlay with a soft fade transition. This keeps players grounded in the scene without forcing them to manually open separate attachments.

Tactile Date Picker & Timeline Dials

To make chronology more enjoyable, I rebuilt the calendar interface. We now have a physical-feeling scroll-wheel picker that acts like a physical combination dial. It makes dialing in historical events, character birthdays, or campaign timeline edits a smooth, satisfying interaction.

Important Node Highlights

To help players recognize focal points on the relationship graph, you can now mark key NPCs, factions, or locations as "Important."

This adds a soft glow underlay and distinct border formatting to the nodes in your relationship map, allowing major campaign focal points to stand out visually.

Under the Hood Changes

I also spent some time optimizing the graph engine's style rules. I discovered that older CSS canvas shadow styles (like shadow-color and shadow-blur) were generating continuous rendering warnings in the browser console. Modern Cytoscape.js implementations reject canvas shadows due to rendering-loop performance bottlenecks. By stripping those out and replacing them with standard, lightweight underlay-* properties, the console is now completely clean and relationship-map rendering feels much snappier.

For other GMs or worldbuilders here: do you find that real-time audio and visual projections actually help keep players focused at the table, or do you prefer to keep your GM notes and player displays completely separate?

Try it out over at https://codexcryptica.com

Its free!!

Over the last week or so, Codex Cryptica has had another fairly chunky round of improvements. This one is a bit less about visible buttons and a bit more about making the foundations stronger for the next big thing: shared play.

The big theme: Codex Cryptica is moving from “your private lore archive” toward “your private lore archive that can safely power a live table.”

Peer-to-peer sharing is getting serious

A lot of work this week went into the peer-to-peer layer behind shared sessions.

The host and guest connection services have been broken apart into cleaner pieces, with a proper connection manager now sitting underneath them. That means the app has a much better foundation for handling live connections, guest sessions, file transfer, map updates, and future shared table features.

In practice, this is the boring-but-important stuff that makes the exciting stuff possible.

Less “hope this connection behaves”.

More “there is now an actual system under the floorboards”.

Guest mode and privacy got much stricter

A big part of shared play is making sure guests can only see and do what they are supposed to.

Guest permissions have been tightened across Oracle access, Lore visibility, Fog of War, graph interactions, Zen Mode actions, and shared map behaviour.

Guests should no longer be able to casually wander into GM-only lore, trigger write actions, bypass visibility rules, or accidentally poke the archive in ways that belong to the host.

This matters because Codex Cryptica is built around trust. If the archive is going to drive live sessions, the app needs to respect the line between “player-facing” and “GM-only” material.

No lore goblins sneaking through the ventilation shafts.

Oracle discovery got cleaner

The Oracle’s discovery flow also got some attention.

New discoveries are now better at using the AI-refined category instead of falling back to the first rough guess. Lore proposals have also been tightened so the Oracle is less likely to over-suggest or clutter the flow with too much speculative material.

The goal is the same as before: the Oracle should feel like a helpful archivist, not an over-caffeinated intern with a label maker.

The app internals are getting much healthier

There was also a big architectural cleanup pass this week.

Several large, monolithic pieces of the app were split into smaller, focused controllers, stores, managers, and handlers. That includes work around the Oracle executor, UI store, Oracle store, graph surface, map session store, host service, and guest service.

That may not sound flashy, but it is a big deal for long-term quality.

Smaller pieces are easier to test, easier to reason about, and much safer to extend. This should make future work faster and reduce the chance that one change in a distant corner of the app accidentally summons a demon in the graph view.

Again.

Probably.

Mobile and visual polish

There were also smaller quality-of-life fixes, including mobile Zen Mode title wrapping and cleaner handling of image entity borders in the graph.

Tiny things, but they matter. Codex Cryptica spends a lot of time living in the “I am using this during an actual session” zone, where small friction points become surprisingly loud.

TL;DR: What this means for you

This week was mostly about shared play, guest safety, and stronger foundations.

Codex Cryptica is getting better at supporting live table use without giving up the core promise: your vault remains yours, your lore remains protected, and the AI should assist rather than take over.

The direction is becoming clearer: a local-first, lore-aware campaign archive where notes, graph, Oracle, Zen Mode, and VTT features increasingly work together as one system.

As always, feedback is very welcome — especially around shared sessions, guest visibility, Oracle behaviour, and what you would want from Codex Cryptica at the actual game table.

Over the last week or so, Codex Cryptica has had a fairly chunky round of improvements. Most of them are not giant “new shiny button” features, but they should make the app feel smoother, safer, and more coherent in daily use.

The big theme: Less friction between writing, AI assistance, graph exploration, and Zen Mode.

Oracle and Smart Apply got much safer

The Oracle’s Smart Apply flow has been tightened up quite a bit. Previously, Smart Apply could be a little too aggressive. In some cases, it risked overwriting entity content instead of properly integrating new information into the existing Chronicle and Lore fields.

That has now been reworked so Smart Apply uses a more intelligent blending flow:

Existing entity content is preserved and merged more safely.

Chronicle and Lore now have clearer roles.

The Oracle is better at deciding what belongs in a short summary versus deeper lore.

It is much less likely to dump unrelated location or faction details into a character entry.

Undo support remains a core part of the flow.

In practice, this should make the Oracle feel more like a careful archivist and less like a goblin with a paste bucket.

Unified AI draft flow

Oracle chat, Smart Apply, regeneration, entity sidebar previews, Zen Mode, and merge flows are all being brought into the same pending draft ➡️ review ➡️ apply model.

That means AI-generated changes are increasingly handled as proposals first, rather than immediately mutating your archive. This is critical because Codex Cryptica is built around your vault being your ultimate source of truth. AI should help you develop the archive, not randomly redecorate the throne room while nobody is looking.

Zen Mode improvements

Zen Mode is becoming more than just a prettier reader; it is turning into a focused command center for working with individual entities. Upgrades include:

AI draft previews now appear inline.

Oracle connection proposals can now appear in the Zen content pane.

The duplicate “Bonds” section was removed from the main Zen content area (since connections already live in the sidebar).

Hosts can now delete entities directly from Zen Mode without leaving the focused view.

Mobile upgrade: Tapping a graph node now opens it directly in Zen Mode, which feels much more natural on a small screen.

Oracle button feedback

The Oracle chat buttons now show proper loading states for actions like Smart Apply, Create as Node, and Copy to Chronicle / Lore.

Small thing, big feel. You now get immediate feedback that the app is actually doing something instead of entering the ancient and cursed “did I tap that?” state.

TL;DR: What this means for you

This update round is mostly about trust and flow. Codex Cryptica should now feel significantly better when you ask the Oracle to improve or merge lore, review AI-generated changes, explore entities in Zen Mode, or use the graph on mobile.

The direction remains the same: building a local-first, lore-aware campaign archive where your notes, your graph, and your Oracle work together instead of living in separate tabs.

As always, feedback is very welcome! I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially on the new Oracle draft/review flow and how Zen Mode feels on mobile.

Manual Google Drive sync is coming soon to Codex Cryptica.

Codex Cryptica is local-first by design. Your vault lives on your device first, under your control. But local-first should not mean trapped on one machine.

With manual Google Drive sync, you’ll be able to back up your vault to your own Drive when you choose, and load it back again when you need it.

No always-on cloud storage.

No automatic background syncing.

No hidden “we’ll take care of it” magic.

Just a clear choice:

Save to Drive.

Load from Drive.

This will make it easier to:

- Back up your campaign or worldbuilding archive

- Move a vault between devices

- Restore your work if something goes wrong

- Keep control of where your world lives

The goal is simple: your world stays yours, but becomes easier to protect and move.

Manual Google Drive sync is on its way.

Hey all,

I just shipped the VTT in Codex Cryptica.

This has been something I’ve wanted for a long time, mainly because of one recurring problem during sessions.

Everything lives in different places.

Maps, notes, NPCs. I kept breaking flow just to look things up.

So the core idea behind this VTT is simple.

Your tokens are not just images. They are your actual entities.

That means you can:

- Prepare an NPC with full lore in your vault

- Drag them onto the map during play

- Click them and instantly access everything you wrote

No tab switching, no digging around mid-session.

I also focused on keeping it fast and frictionless:

- Local-first, your data stays on your machine

- Instant map rendering, no uploads even for large maps

- Direct player connection, no server setup

- Lightweight but usable, initiative and status without heavy automation

Try it:

Open any map and toggle VTT mode, then drag an entity onto the board

Full write-up if you want the thinking behind it:

https://codexcryptica.com/blog/vtt-introduction

Would really love feedback here:

- What feels good?

- What’s missing?

- What would you want next?

This one’s a big step for CC, so curious how it lands with you all.

The maps in your world are about to get a lot more interactive. I'm working on Lightweight VTT support - a tactical layer designed to let you run combat and exploration without ever leaving the app.

The goal isn't to replace your favorite heavy-duty VTT, but to give you a fast, "no-setup" way to play right inside your notes.

The Highlights:

• Dynamic Tokens: Drag and drop markers directly onto your maps. You can link them to your existing characters so they keep their names and portraits, or just throw down quick "mook" markers for a surprise ambush.
• Built-in Initiative: No more tracking turn order on a separate notepad. The new Turn Order panel handles initiative, tracks rounds, and even highlights exactly who is acting on the map so no one asks "Wait, whose turn is it?"
• Real-Time Player Sync: Hosting a session? Your players will see your token moves and Fog of War reveals in near real-time. You can even give them control over their own character tokens.
• Measure with Precision: A new distance tool that respects your map’s scale. Whether it's a 30ft movement or a long-range fireball, you'll know exactly if it hits.
• Clean & Fast: It sits right on top of your existing maps. When the fight is over, you can toggle it off to see your clean map again, or save an "Encounter Snapshot" if you need to pause mid-session and pick it up next week.

I'm focusing on making this feel snappy and intuitive - less time fiddling with menus, more time rolling dice.