Props

A prop card is for things that move: which hand holds the token dagger in act three, how many hands it passed through, whose blackmail the forged seal is. The test is practical—it appears repeatedly, carries a narrative function, or changes hands. A background object mentioned once belongs in a description.

Props are not a script node type. The draft links to the record with an inline reference (see below), and the record tells you where it appears and who holds it.

Open Props in the left navigation; the count sits beside the title. The toolbar runs: search by name, description or alias, Narrative weight filter, Category filter, sorting, and the create button.

• Four sorts—Newest Created, Sort by Name, Appearance Count, Narrative weight. The last two put “what is busy, what cannot be lost” at the top.
• The category filter lists All Categories and each category with its card count; type into the category search when the list is long. Nothing matches, it says Uncategorized for cards with no category.
• Empty project says so; an over-filtered list tells you to loosen the search or filters instead of showing a blank page.

Cards support multi-select. A batch bar rises at the bottom: how many are selected, select all currently shown, clear selection, “set as” the five weight levels in one click, and delete—which first states how many cards it is about to remove.

1. 1
   Create

   Use the create button, or open a prop link in the draft to preview it and step into the card.
2. 2
   Fill it

   Edit Prop, top to bottom: name, prop image, Category, Narrative weight, Representative Color, Aliases/Nicknames (Enter to add), Basic Description, Appearance Features, Narrative Function, Tags, Owner & Relationship Details, Notes, Script Appearances.
3. 3
   Save

   The footer reads Save, then Saving. Leaving with unsaved work asks “Unsaved changes exist. Discard?”

Three fields are letters to your future self: Appearance Features for material, colour and damage; Narrative Function for what it does in the story (puzzle key, emotional anchor, murder weapon); Notes for hidden detail and later payoffs. Tags are free text and do not replace Category—one is the filing scheme, the other is your own search vocabulary.

Two ways to get an image: click the image area to upload, or “✦ Generate Prop Image” lets the agent draft a prompt from the card (signed-in account required; edit the prompt, then Adopt or Regenerate). Unreadable files report it plainly.

Weight runs Core, Major, Standard, Supporting, Background, each with its own colour. It is the stage time you promise the object: leaderboards, the appearance heatmap and list sorting all read it. New props start at Standard.

Representative Color is separate—it only marks the card, the map brush and the ranking row, chosen from the same 64-cell picker shared by chapter colours, foreshadow colours and place colours.

Owners come from the character roster, not from guessing names in the draft: Add Owner, Select Character..., and each owner can carry a line of relationship detail (“heirloom”, “borrowed for the night”). One prop can have several owners at once; the base value is who holds it when the story starts.

If it changes hands mid-story, turn on the per-chapter track for Owner & Relationship Details. Owner and note are recorded as one complete change, so the note can never lag behind the person; an explicit empty is a change too, not an oversight.

Write the object name in square brackets in the draft. On commit it renders as a green link and the prop card appears in the library. Clicking the link opens a light preview that does not interrupt writing; Script Appearances in the card lists every scene that uses it and jumps into the draft.

When the editor merely recognises a name in ordinary text, you get a weak hint: a faint dotted mark under the characters, and clicking offers “turn into a link”. Only after you accept does it become a real reference. Recognition is not binding, and matching text is never replaced everywhere.

Say “add something here that could pick the lock” or “the dagger now belongs to A-Zhen”, and the agent reads the project before returning a confirmation card: create a prop (name at minimum), change fields (name, aliases, description, category, narrative weight, appearance, narrative function, owners), or delete one. Up to 8 operations per card, one undo pulls the whole card back.

• A name in the draft is not a card: only the bracket link (or your “turn into a link”) writes into the prop library.
• Appearance Count measures scenes where the prop is referenced; never-referenced props stay at 0 and sink in sorting.
• Prop leaderboards do not live on this page—they are in the standing sidebar on the World page, shared by all four object kinds.
• Deleting a prop also clears the links pointing at it in the draft. This is not recoverable; read the count in the confirmation first.