The Chronicler
Your world has a history. The Chronicler lets you see it, shape it, and navigate it on an interactive timeline that connects to everything you've already built.
What it does
The Chronicler is a timeline visualization tool for your world's history. It takes the event nodes you've created on your canvas and arranges them chronologically, with colored era bands showing the ages and periods of your world.
Events on the timeline are the same nodes you write and connect on the canvas. Clicking an event opens its full detail panel. Double-clicking navigates you to the realm where it lives. The Chronicler is a lens into your existing world, not a separate system.
Two ways to work
Not every world has established dates. The Chronicler supports two modes so you can start wherever your world is at.
Visual Timeline
Arrange events by dragging them into order. No dates, no calendar, no numbers. Just a visual sequence of what happened first, second, third. Perfect for early worldbuilding, story outlines, or worlds where time is fluid.
Dated Timeline
Events have years, and optionally months and days. The axis shows real numbers, and you can zoom from millennia down to individual years. For worlds with established chronology and history you want to track precisely.
You choose which mode when you first open The Chronicler for a world, and you can switch later. Moving from visual to dated prompts you to assign years. Moving from dated to visual preserves the ordering.
Features
Eras
Define the ages and periods of your world. Each era gets a name, a color, and a start/end range. They appear as colored bands behind your events on the timeline, giving visual structure to long stretches of history.
Event Placement
Event nodes you've created on your canvas appear in an "Unplaced" panel. Click to add them to the timeline. Drag to reposition. Double-click empty space to create a new event directly on the timeline.
Zoom and Pan
Scroll to zoom in and out. The axis adapts: zoomed out you see millennia and centuries, zoomed in you see individual years. Pan left and right to move through time. A toolbar shows your current zoom level.
Significance
Events have a significance level: minor, notable, major, or world-changing. On the timeline, this maps to visual weight. Minor events are small dots. World-changing events are large, glowing markers that demand attention.
Connected to your world
The Chronicler reads from the same data as every other part of Leylines. Event nodes with their titles, content, tags, and metadata are all accessible from the timeline. The connections (leylines) between events are preserved.
Click any event on the timeline to open its full detail panel with rich text, tags, and metadata. Double-click to navigate directly to the realm where it lives on the canvas. Everything stays connected.
Your data, your world
The Chronicler visualizes event nodes that already exist in your world. Timeline positions are lightweight metadata on each node. Disable the module and nothing is lost -- your events and all their content remain exactly where they are.
Your world data belongs to you. Everything is encrypted at rest, never used for AI training, and never shared with third parties. Export your world as Markdown and JSON anytime, or delete it from our servers whenever you want.