The Entity Codex is where you keep the creatures, machines, plants and hazards of your world — everything that is a kind of thing rather than a particular person.

A wolf. A bandit. A silver dragon. A cargo hauler. You write it once, with its stats, its abilities and a picture, and then you have it forever: to drop into an encounter, to hand to your players as a field guide, or simply because your world is more real when its wildlife is written down.

Entities and NPCs

Chronica keeps two main codexes (aside from Player Codex, which is solely for PCs):

They work the same way and hold the same kinds of information. The question to ask is simply whether you are describing a type of thing or an individual. If your players will meet six of them and none of the six has a name, it belongs here in Entities.

Getting there

Open Entities in the campaign's left navigation. You land in your first folder, or in Unsorted if you have not made folders yet.

Entities are available on paid tiers. On the free tier the Entities pages show this guide instead, and the Game Owner sees an upgrade button. See the pricing table for which tiers include it.

What the page holds

• New Entity — the green button, for Game Masters.
• Search — opens a filter panel across the top. It appears once you have at least one entity. Covered in 18.4.
• Guide — brings you back to this guidebook.
• The folder sidebar down the left, with a count beside each folder. Covered in 18.2.
• The view switcher at the top right — Card, Compact or Table. Covered in 18.4.
• Manage Folders, for Game Masters, at the top left.

Where to start

1. Make one entity you are sure you will use — the most common creature in your setting. See 18.1.
2. Make two or three folders and put it in one. See 18.2.
3. Decide whether your players should see it. New entities are hidden from players until you say otherwise. See 18.6.

Everything else can wait until you need it.

Click New Entity. Only Game Masters can create, edit or delete entities.

The form is long, but only the name is required. Everything else can be filled in later, and some entities never need all of it.

Main Settings

• Name — the only required field. "Bandit", "Bear", "Classcode 03-K64 Firefly".
• Type — a free-text grouping, if it helps. "Humanoid", "Midbulk Transport Ship".
• Disposition — how this kind of thing tends to regard the party: Unknown, Hostile, Unfriendly, Neutral, Friendly or Ally. It shows as a coloured band on the entity's card and a badge in the table.
• Folder — where it lives. See 18.2.
• Profile Template — narrows the stats that appear on this entity, so a wolf is not carrying a spellcasting block. Leave it blank and every stat is available.
• Secret? — whether players can see this entity. See 18.6.

Tags

Two tag fields, and the difference matters: Tags are visible to anyone who can see the entity, and Secret Tags are only ever visible to Game Masters. Both are covered in 18.3.

Custom Stats

Your campaign's stat groups appear here as collapsible panels. Click a group's title to open it and fill in the stats you want this entity to have.

Only plain text stats can be edited on this form. Stats that use checkboxes or other input types show "Not editable here" — you set those on the entity's profile page after saving. If a stat allows a custom number of checkboxes, you can set the count here.

If there are no stats here at all, your campaign has not set any up yet. Game Masters and Stat Managers can do that from the Stat Groups & Stats Admin button at the top of the section.

Description and Notes

Two rich-text boxes, and both are visible to players who can see the entity.

• Description — what it is. What the party sees, hears, and can find out.
• Notes — anything else about this kind of creature that is not secret. Habitat, behaviour, how it fights.

Game Master Secrets

A third rich-text box, in a collapsed panel that only Game Masters see. Nothing written here is ever shown to a player, even when the entity itself is visible to them.

Image Settings

Upload a picture, or choose one from the Image Library if your tier includes it. The file size limit is 5MB, and portrait-shaped images of about 400×500 pixels or larger look best on the cards.

Abilities

Abilities are not on this form. Save the entity first, then use Edit Abilities on its profile. See 18.5.

Folders are how the Entity Codex stays organized once it has more than a few entities created. The sidebar down the left lists them, with a count beside each one, and clicking a folder shows just what is inside it.

Sort by whatever matches how you actually look things up: by creature type, by region, by challenge, by the act they appear in. There is no wrong scheme, but the useful test is "when I need something in a hurry, what will I think of first?"

Making folders

Game Masters open Manage Folders at the top of the listing. The green New Entity Folder and New Group buttons are on that page. An entity goes into a folder from its own form, using the Folder dropdown.

An entity can be in one folder at a time. If you want it findable several ways, that is what tags are for — see 18.3.

Folder groups

Once you have a lot of folders you can gather them into groups. A group is a heading in the sidebar with folders nested under it, and you can collapse it to get it out of the way.

Chronica remembers which groups you have collapsed, per campaign, on the device you are using. Your players' sidebars are not affected by what you collapse.

Unsorted

At the bottom of the sidebar, below a divider, are two fixed entries. All Entities shows the whole codex at once — see 18.4. Unsorted holds every entity you have not filed.

There is nothing wrong with leaving things in Unsorted.

Secret folders

A folder can be marked secret, and so can a group. Players do not see them in the sidebar, and cannot open a secret folder's page.

A tag is a keyword you attach to an entity. Where a folder says where something lives, a tag says what it is like — and an entity can carry as many tags as you need while sitting in only one folder.

Type them into the Tags field separated by commas: fey, plant, magical, food. Tags already used in your campaign appear underneath as badges you can click to add.

Secret Tags

The second field, Secret Tags, works identically but is only ever visible to Game Masters. They do not appear on the entity's profile for players, and they do not appear in the players' tag filter — even on an entity the players can otherwise see in full.

Use them for the things you need to find later but must not show yet:

• a creature's true nature — actually-a-devil
• which act or session it belongs to — act-three
• which quest it is tied to — the-red-hand

Using tags to find things

Tags shown on a card, in the table, or on a profile are clickable. Clicking one filters the whole codex to everything carrying it. The tag filter is also in the search panel — see 18.4.

Limits and tidiness

• Up to 25 tags per entity, each up to 40 characters. Anything past those limits is trimmed quietly when you save rather than shown as an error, so check a long list still reads right afterwards.
• Tags here are their own list for now. The tagging system is built to be shared with the NPC Codex, Places, Quests and the Item Library, but those have not been moved over yet — so a tag you invent here is currently reusable on other entities only.
• We recommend to keep them short and reusable, Ex: undead v.s. the-undead-thing-from-session-12.

Three views

The switcher at the top right of a folder listing offers three ways to look at the same entities.

• Card — large picture cards with the disposition band across them. Nice for browsing as a catalog.
• Compact — a smaller row-style card: a round picture, the name and type, tags, and a disposition strip along the bottom. More fit on screen.
• Table — a dense list: picture, name, type, disposition, tags and actions.

Chronica remembers the view you chose and uses it next time. Each person in the campaign has their own setting, so your choice does not change what your players see.

All Entities

All Entities, at the bottom of the sidebar, shows the whole codex in one place. It is deliberately different from a folder listing:

• It is locked to Table. The view switcher is still there, showing Table with a padlock.
• It adds a Folder column, so you can see where each entity lives.
• It is paged, 30 at a time.

Searching

The Search button in the header opens a panel of filters. You can search from any listing, and the results always arrive on All Entities — so searching is simply All Entities with the filters applied.

You can filter by:

• Name Contains and Type Contains
• Disposition
• Folder
• Tag
• Description Contains and Notes Contains
• Player Visibility — Game Masters only. Lets you list everything still hidden from your players, which is the quickest way to check what you have and have not revealed.

Combine as many as you like. Once a search has run, a Reset button appears in the panel and a Reset Search button beside the heading. Either one clears the filters and returns you to the full list.

Clicking an entity opens its profile — everything known about it on one page. Players who can see the entity get the same page without the editing controls.

What is on it

• The profile card — picture, name, type and disposition.
• Taggings — the entity's tags, each clickable to find everything else like it. Secret Tags appear in this card for Game Masters only.
• Additional Images — more pictures beyond the main one. Available on paid tiers, managed by Game Masters.
• Stats — the stat blocks, including the ones that could not be edited on the form. Checkboxes and other input types are set here.
• Abilities — what it can do.
• Links — web addresses you want to keep with it, such as a source wiki or a homebrew stat block.
• Mentions — everywhere in your campaign this entity has been @-mentioned. Notes, quests, places and more. It is the fastest way to answer "where does this thing actually turn up?"
• Description and Notes, if they have anything in them.
• Game Master Secrets, for Game Masters only, and only if you have written any.

The buttons

• Edit Entity — back to the form from 18.1.
• Edit Abilities — choose which of your campaign's abilities this entity has.
• Duplicate — the orange button with the copy icon.

Duplicating

Duplicate is the fastest way to build a family of related creatures. Make your Wolf, get it right, then duplicate it into Dire Wolf and Winter Wolf and change only what differs.

The copy brings across the entity's stat data, selected abilities, tags and picture. It does not bring across its links or additional images. It is named "<name> Copy", and you land straight on it, ready to rename and edit.

Deleting

The Delete Entity button is at the bottom left of the edit form. Deleting an entity also removes its stat data and its additional images, and cannot be undone. If the entity is used in an encounter, it will be gone from there as well.

The Entity Codex can be a private reference for you, a field guide your players browse, or — most usefully — both at once, revealed a creature at a time.

The "Secret?" switch

Every entity has a Secret? switch on its form. Set to yes, only Game Masters can see it. Set to no, everyone in the campaign can.

In Card and Compact view, a secret entity is faded out. In Table view it carries a small eye icon beside its name instead. Either way, that is how you tell at a glance what your table can and cannot see. Players do not see those entries.

Revealing things as they are discovered

Turning Secret? off after the party first meets a creature turns the codex into a record of what they have actually learned. It reads like a bestiary filling up over a campaign.

What players never see

Even on an entity that is fully visible to them:

• Game Master Secrets — never shown, and the whole panel is absent.
• Secret Tags — never shown, on the profile or in their tag filter.
• Secret folders and folder groups — absent from their sidebar.

Description and Notes are shown. If something must not reach the table, it belongs in Game Master Secrets, not in Notes.

What players can do

Players can browse folders, switch views, search, and open any entity that is not secret. They cannot create, edit, duplicate or delete anything, and they have no editing buttons on the profile.

The reason to build an entity once is so you never have to build one again. In an Encounter, you add entities from your codex, and you can add the same one many times over. Six wolves in a combat are six copies of your one Wolf entity, each tracking its own damage and its own turn, all sharing the stat block you wrote.

How it works in practice

1. Build the creature once in the Entity Codex, with its stats and abilities.
2. In your encounter, add it as many times as the scene needs.
3. Track each one separately during the fight.

The numbers are copied across when you add the entity, so editing its stats later does not rewrite a fight you have already run — that encounter keeps the numbers it was fought with. The name and type are read live, though, so renaming an entity does change how it reads in past encounters.

Running the encounter itself is covered in the Encounters guide.