Ages, moons and what the reader knows

Three checks tie your story wiki to your chapters. All of them only read: they show what your dates and your text say, with a gentle note where something may be worth a look, and they never change a chapter or a page. None of it is in any export.

Ages

Give a page a date detail called Born, and Rescriptus works out how old that person is on the story date of each chapter they are in. The Character category a new project starts with has Born and an optional Died. A project you started earlier keeps its categories exactly as they are, so add the detail yourself: on the wiki page choose the gear beside the category's name, then Add field, name it Born and make its kind Date (a plain text field named Born works too). Rescriptus finds it by its name, in any capitals: Born, Birth, Birth date or Date of birth, and, for a death, Died, Death, Death date or Date of death. It works on a page of any category.

Write the date as you write them in the chapters: 3 March 1850, 1850, or in a calendar of your own, 12 Thaw 1170 AR. Where it shows:

• On the person's page, Ages in the chapters lists each chapter they are in, with its date and their age then. A chapter counts if it names them (by title or another name) or is told by them (its point of view). Chapters with no story date are counted, not listed.
• In a chapter's Details tab, under When in the story, Ages on this date lists the people in the chapter who have a Born date, with their ages on the chapter's date. The date can still be unsaved: it follows what you type.

How it counts. Whole years, in the calendar the birth is written in, and a birthday counts on its day. A leap-day birthday falls on the last day of the month in years without that day. A date that is only a year or a month leaves room for a birthday either side of it, so the age is a range: 34 or 35, or 34 to 37 when both dates are loose. A chapter dated as a season or a range does the same.

When it cannot say. If the birth and the chapter are in calendars that cannot be compared (Earth's and your own, with no line in Calendars saying how they line up), the list says can’t be compared and why, and guesses nothing. Under Calendars, How calendars line up is where you link them; then ages are worked out in years of the calendar the birth is written in, and the list says so. A chapter with no date, or one Rescriptus cannot read, has no ages.

Gentle notes. A person who is in a chapter dated before they were born, or after they died, gets a sentence saying so. It may be on purpose: a memory, a dream, a ghost, a prophecy. Nothing is changed.

Moons, weekdays and seasons

Under When in the story, a date that names a single day shows what that day is in its calendar: its weekday and season, and the phase of each moon, such as Selene: waning gibbous, about 15% lit. Earth's calendar has Earth's Moon; your own calendars have the moons you gave them (see Calendars for your world). A run of days (3 to 5 March 1885) shows its first day and says so. A month, a season or a year names no single day, so it shows nothing rather than guessing. On the wiki's timeline, a dated chapter shows the same line beside it, for example Tuesday, Spring · Moon: waning gibbous.

What the reader knows when

For each wiki page, Rescriptus finds the chapter where your book first names it. A chapter names a page where its title or one of its other names is written in the text a reader reads (not in a note or an unused version of a passage), the same way Appears in finds it. A chapter that is told by a character does not name them by that. Each book is counted on its own, in its reading order.

• On the wiki page, Appears in starts with First named in chapter 3, “The ford” (a line for each book that names it).
• In a chapter's Details tab, What a reader knows here says how many pages the book has named by the end of that chapter and lists the ones named for the first time in it. See all opens the wiki's page list at that chapter.
• On the wiki's page list, Known by any chapter limits the list to the pages named by the end of the chapter you pick. Show only the new ones keeps those named for the first time in it. The choice is in the address of the page, so you can keep or share the link; nothing is stored on your device.

A name used before it is introduced. On a wiki page, Meant to be met in (in its Details) is the chapter where a reader should meet it for the first time. Any earlier chapter of that book that already names the page gets a gentle note, on the page and in that chapter's Details tab. If the chapter you chose has since gone, the page says so. It is kept in the page's own details, beside its other names: introduced: the-thorn-road/the-long-night, the book's folder and the chapter's name in its file (the part after the number, which reordering the chapters does not change). Clear the box and the line goes.