Your whole world, on one surface.
A story world outgrows a document long before it outgrows your interest in it. The canvas holds every character, place, rule and thread as a connected card — and keeps checking that they still agree with each other.
A document cannot check itself.
Prose is the wrong shape for a world that has to stay consistent. Structure is what lets software help you, and it is the only difference between a bible you maintain and a bible that maintains itself.
Every part of the world is a card
Characters, locations, lore, world rules, timeline entries and relationships are typed objects on one infinite canvas — not headings in a document that only you can navigate.
And every card knows the others
Because the cards are typed, the engine can read the world as a graph rather than as prose. That is what makes the map, the timeline and the contradiction scan possible at all.
So the world can be stress-tested
Conflict Detection cross-references the whole canon and surfaces contradictions in plain English — a character dead in one place and alive in another, a rule broken three chapters later.
Import it, draw it out, then break it on purpose.
Smart Import reads a script or a doc and builds the board for you. Refine interviews you and files what you already know. Conflict Detection scans the whole world and tells you what cannot both be true. None of them write your story.
Secrets stay sealed.
The Locked Vault holds the parts of the world nobody else gets to see — including the engine. A mystery you have already solved is not a contradiction, and it is not training data.
And it is yours to take.
Full Export produces a formatted document of the entire world whenever you want one. You own your canon, entirely and unambiguously; nothing here is a lock-in.
What writers ask about the canvas.
What exactly is CanonBoard?
Two things in one. A workspace for building, organizing, and stress-testing the logic of a fictional world — and a public writers' group where, if you choose, your audience can pitch, vote on, and back what becomes canon. You build the world here and decide what's real; you write it wherever you write.
What can you do with cards on the canvas?
Every card, image, note, and frame can be moved, resized, and locked in place; connected to other cards with labeled relationship lines; grouped and multi-selected to move or delete together; and copied and pasted between different projects' canvases. You can also pin reference images, sticky notes, free text, and labeled frames anywhere on the infinite canvas.
What types of cards can a project have?
CanonBoard's world elements are typed cards: characters, locations, lore, world rules, objects, plot points, timeline events, and relationships. Because cards know what they are, the engine can stress-test the whole world for contradictions and draw the relationships between everything.
Does Conflict Detection use AI?
Yes. Conflict Detection reads your full world on demand and surfaces direct contradictions — dead-then-alive characters, broken rules, two characters in the same place at the same time — with an explanation per conflict. Available on Core and above; each scan costs 1 Canon Credit.
Will Refine write my story?
Never. Refine interviews you — one question at a time, about ten per session — and parses your answers into structured cards on the board. It never generates story content and never suggests plot decisions. If you want a tool that writes for you, we are cheerfully the wrong product.
Can I bring in a world I've already written?
Yes. Smart Import reads a script, treatment, PDF, or doc and builds your board automatically. Available on Core and above.
What's the Locked Vault?
A sealed section for intentional mysteries — the season-two reveal, the hidden motivation, the twist. The conflict engine never flags what's in the Vault, because a deliberate gap isn't a mistake. It's kept completely separate from active canon.
Will my work be used to train AI models?
No. Your story content is never used to train AI models — not ours, not our AI provider's, not anyone's. Content only leaves CanonBoard when you trigger one of the three tools that need it: Smart Import, Refine, and Conflict Detection. Everything else — the canvas, relationship mapping, the timeline, the Vault, version history — runs on our own infrastructure and never goes anywhere. When those three do send content to our AI provider, it goes under commercial API terms that forbid training on it and cap how long it can be retained. That's a standing contractual commitment from the provider, not a promise we're making on their behalf. Changing any of this would take your explicit opt-in, never a quiet update to our terms.
Find your group. Start writing.
Tell us what you like to write and we'll show you the groups building alongside you. Free to join, free to pitch, and your name stays on whatever lands.