Build a world that holds together.
CanonBoard is a world logic engine. You build your canon as connected cards on an infinite canvas — characters, locations, world rules, lore, plot threads, timeline — and the engine reads the whole thing and flags the contradictions that break stories. It works before a word of script is written.
Your world already lives in five places
Notion, Google Docs, a whiteboard, and two notebooks. A character's age lives in one file, the rule that depends on it in another, and the timeline that breaks them both in a third. Nothing is wrong, exactly — it's just that nothing is checked.
So the contradictions stay silent. When episode 4 changes a character, episode 7's writer finds out at the table read. A rule established in season one quietly stops being true in season three. The lighthouse keeper's daughter drowned at nine and came back at nine, and eleven years later somebody writes her a birthday.
Storage was never the problem. A filing cabinet doesn't tell you the file in drawer three contradicts the file in drawer nine. That's what an engine is for.
From blank canvas to a living world, in four moves
Drop cards on the canvas — characters, locations, world rules, lore, plot threads. The world takes shape before a word of script is written, every element in one place instead of five.
Map every relationship and lay every event on a timeline in in-world time, not episode order. Pull one node and see exactly what depends on it — the whole world as one navigable graph.
Run Conflict Detection across the entire world. Age inconsistencies, broken rules, dead-then-alive characters, two people in one place at once — the engine reads every card and flags each contradiction in plain English.
Lock spoilers in the Vault, rewind any decision with Version History, and run a full export in one click. The world you've built — every decision in it — stays entirely yours.
Every part of it exists to keep the canon coherent
A pannable, zoomable whiteboard where the logic, rules, characters, and threads of your world live as connected cards.
Every connection in your world, drawn. One navigable graph, every edge labeled. Pull one node, see what breaks.
Every event in in-world time, not episode order. Age inconsistencies and continuity breaks surface automatically.
Track every storyline across the world — where each thread opens, tangles, and pays off — so nothing gets dropped between seasons.
Cross-references your entire world against your canon and surfaces every contradiction in plain English, with an explanation.
It interviews you one question at a time and shapes your answers into structured canon. It never writes your story.
Drop in a script, treatment, or doc and CanonBoard builds your board automatically — characters, locations, rules, timeline, extracted and connected.
Season-two reveals, hidden motivations, the twist. Lock them in the Vault and the engine never flags them — and the crowd never sees them.
Every decision logged. Rewind the world to any previous state — including the one from three weeks ago that was right.
One click generates a complete, formatted document of every element in your world — ready for a studio, a network, or your own team.
Open a finished world to a public audience that pitches, votes, and backs ideas with real money. Optional, per project, and always on your approval.
The full breakdown lives on the features page.
And when the world is ready, you can open it
The worlds people care most about tend to grow in front of an audience — serialized fiction, webcomics, actual-play, ongoing channels. That audience has ideas, and until now there was nowhere for those ideas to go except a comment section that forgets them by morning.
Every attempt to fix that by letting the crowd write the story fell apart for the same reason: no one kept the world coherent. Votes decided canon, the crowd pulled in every direction at once, and the story turned to noise. Open participation without an author doesn't build a world — it dissolves one.
Make a project public and it gets a Board: a stage where your audience proposes and funds, an engine underneath that keeps the canon consistent, and a single author — you — who decides what becomes real.
Anyone who joins your public world can submit an idea — a character, a location, a world rule, a plot beat, a moment on the timeline.
They vote the best ideas up and back the ones they believe in with real money. Backing buys visibility in the queue, never canon — the best ideas still win on merit.
Pull the pitches you like onto the canvas to work out how they fit the world you've built. Nothing moves without your approval.
Make it canon and it joins your world logic, stress-tested against everything else. The contributor is credited, and the backing goes to you.
The support is real, not applause: you keep 85%, CanonBoard takes 15% and pays the card processing out of that, and you withdraw to PayPal once your balance reaches $25. The money flows to the person building the world. The Board is optional, per project, and off until you turn it on. More about the Board.
- A world logic engineAn open infinite canvas where the logic, rules, characters, and threads of your world live as connected cards — one navigable map instead of five scattered docs.
- A stress testConflict Detection reads your full world and cross-references every entry against your canon — dead-then-alive characters, broken rules, two people in one place at once — and flags each contradiction in plain English with an explanation.
- A single source of truthLive cursors, role permissions, change history. Your whole team — and, if you open it, your whole audience — work from one world.
- An open stage, when you want onePublish a world and it gets a Board: your audience pitches, votes, and backs ideas with real money, and you decide what becomes canon. You keep 85%; CanonBoard takes 15%, card processing included.
- Not a writing appNo manuscript editor, no prose tools, no sentence-level anything. You write where you write.
- Not a ghostwriterNothing here generates story content or suggests plot decisions. It asks. You answer. That's the whole deal.
- Not a wikiStorage is table stakes. A filing cabinet doesn't tell you the file in drawer three contradicts the file in drawer nine.
- Not a note-taking toolNotion is great at being Notion. CanonBoard is purpose-built for story architecture — cards know they're characters, rules, and threads.
It doesn't write for you. It interviews you — and organizes what you already know.
Your voice is the product. Ours would just be in the way.
Built for the people who keep canon professionally
Screenwriters and showrunners. TV writers' rooms working from one source of truth. Indie IP developers building original animation, film, and game narrative. And alongside them: novelists with series to protect, game studio narrative teams, tabletop designers, and comic creators with continuity measured in years.
The free plan is a complete structural product — canvas, relationship mapping, geography, timeline, full export, and a public Board. Not a trial. The power tools — Conflict Detection, Refine, and Smart Import — start on Core, now just $7/mo. If you build worlds, you can start today and never pay us. We're betting your world outgrows one project.