Everything CanonBoard does.
One tool for building a story world and keeping it coherent: an infinite canvas of connected cards, tools that stress-test your canon, and a Board where writers draft the next beat.
- 1998Eli takes the light
Keeper of the Harrow Point lighthouse, age 25.
- 2009Maren drowns
Eli's daughter, age 9. Body never recovered.
- 2015The signal is built
Eli finishes the array that reaches the drowned.
- 2020Maren returns
Still 9. Has not aged a day in eleven years.
- 2020Crew roster: Maren, 20
Logged against the same year she returns unchanged.
Maren is recorded as 20 in the same year she returns unchanged at 9. One of these is wrong.
Your entire world, one living canvas.
Every tool below lives in one workspace — an infinite canvas, a relationship graph and a timeline, all connected and continuously stress-tested.
“Every writer has found the hole
in the third act
— and had to rewrite the first.”
CanonBoard is where you build a world, connect it, and find where it breaks.
Tools that compress weeks into minutes.
Import a whole world in minutes, draw the canon out of your own head, and catch every contradiction before it ships. They never write your story — they just get you there in a fraction of the time.
Smart Import
Drop in a script, treatment, or document and CanonBoard reads it and builds your board automatically — characters, locations, world rules, lore, plot points, and a starting timeline, all extracted and connected.
Refine
It interviews you one question at a time and shapes your answers into structured canon. It never writes your story — it draws out what you already know and files it where it belongs.
Conflict Detection
Cross-references your entire world against your canon — dead-then-alive characters, broken rules, two people in one place at once, age inconsistencies — and surfaces every contradiction in plain English with an explanation.
An infinite canvas, and cards you actually control.
Everything lives on a pannable, zoomable, dot-grid canvas. Cards, images, notes, and frames go anywhere — and there's a lot you can do with them once they're there.
Move & arrange
Drag any card, image, note, or frame anywhere on the canvas. The world is spatial — lay it out however you think about it.
Resize
Scale cards and images to give the important things room. Resize a whole selection at once.
Pin in place
Pin a card, image, note, or frame so it can't be moved or resized by accident — hold the parts of your layout you've settled.
Copy & paste between canvases
Copy cards from one project's canvas and paste them into another. Reuse characters, rules, and structure across worlds.
Connect
Draw labeled relationship lines between cards. Pull one node and see exactly what depends on it.
Group & multi-select
Select many cards at once and move, resize, pin, or delete them together as a single group.
Images, notes & text
Pin reference images, sticky notes, and free text anywhere alongside your cards — the canvas holds more than structured elements.
Frames
Group related cards inside a labeled frame to carve the canvas into regions — acts, factions, locations, arcs.
Typed cards for every part of a world.
CanonBoard's cards know what they are — which is what lets the engine stress-test the whole world and map how everything connects. Every project is built from these element types.
Characters
The people of your world — traits, roles, ages, and arcs. Connect them to each other, to locations, and to the plot points they drive.
Locations
Places and geography, from a single room to a continent. Anchor events and characters to where they happen.
Lore
History, myth, background, and the deep context that makes a world feel lived-in — kept consistent as it grows.
World rules
The laws of your world — magic systems, technology, politics, physics. The constraints everything else has to obey.
Objects
Artifacts, items, and things that matter to the story — track where they are, who holds them, and what they do.
Plot points
Storylines across the whole world — where each one opens, tangles, and pays off, so nothing gets dropped between seasons.
Timeline events
Moments in in-world time, not episode order. Age inconsistencies and continuity breaks surface automatically.
Relationships
The connections between everything — who knows whom, what belongs where — as an explicit, labeled part of the canon.
See how the whole world fits together.
Beyond individual cards, CanonBoard gives you the views and stores that keep a growing world legible — the graph, the timeline, and the assets and documents behind it.
Relationship mapping
Every connection in your world drawn as one navigable graph, every edge labeled. Pull one node and see what breaks.
Timeline
Every event laid out in in-world time. Continuity breaks and age inconsistencies surface automatically.
Media Library
Every image, reference, and asset for a project in one place — drag any of it straight onto the canvas.
Documents
Keep scripts, treatments, and notes attached to the world and full-text searchable right alongside your canon.
Keep secrets in, mistakes out, and the world ready.
Hold spoilers back from the engine and the crowd, rewind any decision, and hand off a formatted export whenever you need one.
The Locked Vault
Season-two reveals, hidden motivations, the twist. Lock them in the Vault and the engine never flags them as conflicts — and the crowd never sees them.
Version History
Every decision logged. Rewind the world to any previous state — including the one from three weeks ago that was right.
Full Export
One click generates a complete, formatted document of every element in your world — ready for a studio, a network, or your own team.
Your whole team on one world.
Invite collaborators at the access you choose, see each other work in real time, and build from a single source of truth instead of scattered, drifting documents.
Roles & invites
Invite collaborators as viewer, editor, admin, or owner. Everyone works in the same world at exactly the access you choose — distinct from your public audience.
Live cursors
See your teammates' cursors move on the canvas in real time. One shared world, everyone on the same page.
One source of truth
No scattered docs or drifting copies. The whole team builds from and checks against a single, current canon.
Your world lives in five places — that's the problem.
Notion, Google Docs, a whiteboard, and two notebooks. When episode 4 changes a character, episode 7's writer finds out at the table read.
| Capability | Writing apps | Wikis & docs | CanonBoard |
|---|---|---|---|
| Works before anything is written | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Actively flags contradictions as you build | — | — | ✓ |
| Cross-entity relationship graph | — | — | ✓ |
| One canvas the whole team works from | — | — | ✓ |
| Intentional mysteries the engine won't flag | — | — | ✓ |
| Formatted full export for studios | — | — | ✓ |
Writing apps start when the world is already supposed to hold. CanonBoard is the layer before — and the stage that funds what comes after.
Private by default, and airtight either way.
Feature questions
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.
What's actually in the free plan?
An account, and the Media Library, Documents and Full Export on every plan. Canon Canvas and the tools that live in it — the card types, relationship mapping, geography, the timeline, Smart Import, Refine and Conflict Detection — start at Core, along with the Locked Vault and Version History.
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 canvas. 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.
What do Smart Import, Refine, and Conflict Detection do?
These are the power tools, available on Core and above. Smart Import turns a script or treatment into a built-out board; Refine interviews you to draw canon out of what you already know; Conflict Detection reads your whole world and flags contradictions with an explanation. They organize and pressure-test your world — they never write your story.
Can I map my world geographically?
Yes. Geography lets you pin locations to a real-world map or build a fictional one, connected to your locations and timeline. It is part of Canon Canvas, which starts at Core.
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.
Build a world that holds together.
Free to build, with every structural tool included. Upgrade when you want the power tools or a bigger team.