Family Trees let you map out ancestries, bloodlines, and relationship webs for the characters in your campaign. Track a royal succession across five generations, sketch the tangled marriages of a noble house, or chart any network of parents, partners, and children. Each tree is built from leaves (the people) and the connections between them, and the canvas lays everything out for you automatically.

Where to find Family Trees

Open your campaign and head to the NPC Codex in the left navigation. From there, choose Family Trees to reach the main screen, where all of your trees are listed.

Who can build and edit trees

Game Masters and AncestryManagers can create, edit, and delete trees, leaves, and connections. (AncestryManager is a campaign admin role you can assign to a player — see Player Dashboard.) Everyone else in the party can view and explore any tree that isn't marked secret, search for people, and turn on their own Hover Focus, but they can't make changes.

The main screen

Each family tree appears as a card showing its image and name, along with two quick stats: how many leaves (people) are on the tree and how many generations deep it runs. Click "View Tree" on any card to open it. If you're a GM or AncestryManager, you'll also see a green "Edit" button on the card, and you can drag the cards to reorder them — the order saves as soon as you drop a card.

At the top of the page you'll find a few buttons. The green "New Family Tree" button starts a new tree (GMs and AncestryManagers only). The blue "Manage Folders" button organizes your trees into folders (GMs only). The "Search" button opens a search bar — see below.

Folders

If you've created any folders, your trees are grouped into folder tabs across the top of the screen, with an "Unsorted" tab for any tree that hasn't been filed into a folder yet. See Family Tree Folders for more.

Searching

Click the "Search" button to look for a tree by name, or to find a person across your trees. Searching by person matches the people you're allowed to see, so secret leaves and hidden lines won't turn up in a player's search results.

To create a tree, click the green "New Family Tree" button in the top right of the main Family Trees screen. To edit an existing one, use the green "Edit" button on a tree card, or the "Edit Tree" button at the top of any tree's page.

Main Settings

Give your tree a Family Tree Name in the first field — something like The Noble Line of House Black. If you're a Game Master, you'll also see a Family Tree Folder dropdown to file the tree into a folder, and a Secret? toggle. Setting Secret? to "Yes" hides the entire tree from your players.

Description

Use the Description editor to write up any extra detail or lore about the tree. When a description is present, a message icon button appears at the top of the tree's page that opens it in a pop-up, so it stays out of the way until someone wants to read it.

Card Display Fields

Every leaf card can show up to three extra detail lines beneath the character's title: Faction, Race, and Class. The Show Faction?, Show Race?, and Show Class? toggles here decide which of those lines appear on the cards across this whole tree. You'll still set or override the actual values on each individual leaf — these toggles just control whether they're displayed. This keeps your cards clean when you only want names, or richer when you want a full snapshot.

Image Settings

Upload your own image to represent the tree, or pick one from the Image Library if you're on the Knight, Monarch, or Deity tier. Images should be no more than 3MB; square images around 500x500px look best. An uploaded image overrides a library selection.

Deleting a Family Tree

You can delete a tree from the bottom of its edit form using the red "Delete Family Tree" button. Be careful: this deletes the entire tree and every leaf inside it, and it cannot be undone.

Click "View Tree" on a card to open a tree on the interactive canvas. Chronica arranges the leaves into generations automatically based on the connections you've made — you don't position anyone by hand.

Getting around the canvas

Drag anywhere on the canvas to pan, and scroll to zoom. In the corner you'll find zoom controls: a minus to zoom out, the expand icon to fit the whole tree to your screen, and a plus to zoom in.

Reading a leaf card

Each leaf shows the character's portrait, name, and title. If the character has a status (such as deceased or missing), it appears as a colored dot on the portrait. The optional Faction, Race, and Class lines show beneath the title when you've enabled them in the tree's settings. If a leaf is tied to a character in your Codex, clicking the name jumps to that character's full profile.

Hover Focus

Use the "Hover Focus" toggle at the top of the tree to make exploring large trees easier. When it's on, hovering over a leaf highlights that person's closest connections and fades the rest of the tree, so you can trace a line at a glance. This setting is personal to you and applies to every family tree you view, so flip it on or off whenever you like.

Tree links (signposts)

Some trees include signpost nodes that read "This line continues on" followed by another tree's name. These are pointers to a connected family tree elsewhere in your campaign — click one to jump straight to that tree. They're handy for splitting a sprawling dynasty across several trees. See Managing Connections for how to add them.

Editing from the tree

If you're a GM or AncestryManager, each leaf card has a green pencil icon for jumping straight into Edit Leaf, and the buttons at the top of the page let you "Edit Tree", add a "New Leaf", or open "Manage Connections".

A leaf is a single person on the tree. Add one with the green "New Leaf" button at the top of a tree's page. To change a leaf later, click the green pencil icon on its card, or open it from Edit Leaf.

Main Settings

You can build a leaf two ways. Either pick an existing character from the Character dropdown to pull them in from your Codex, or skip that and type custom details in the next section — useful for a minor or unknown figure you don't want to add to the Codex. You can also do both: select a character and override specific details so the tree shows a different name, title, and so on.

The Generation Nudge field is an optional fine-tuning tool. The canvas places everyone automatically, but in rare edge cases (like a lone single parent who lands a row too high) you can bump a leaf and its descendants down by a number of rows. Leave it at 0 for normal automatic placement.

Use the Display Color dropdown to tint a leaf, which helps separate branches or flag groups at a glance. It's worth checking with your GM in case the campaign follows a specific color key.

Game Masters also see a Secret? toggle here. More on what that hides in Secrecy & Visibility.

Character Details (Override or Custom)

The Custom Character Name, Custom Character Title, and Custom Character Status fields either override the character you selected above, or stand in as the details for a fully custom leaf. Below those, the Additional Details box holds Custom Faction, Custom Race, and Custom Class. A small badge next to each one shows whether the tree is currently set to display that line.

These three detail fields follow a simple rule. If you type a value, it shows (and overrides the character's value). If you leave a field empty, the card falls back to the linked character's value. And if you want a specific card to show nothing on that line, enter a single blank space — that hides the line for that one leaf.

Image Settings

If you selected a character from your Codex, that character's image is used by default. Upload or select a different image here to override it for this leaf. The same 3MB limit applies; square images around 200x200px work best.

Icons

You can attach a small icon to a leaf to add a quick visual marker. Choose one from the icon picker at the bottom of the form.

Deleting a Leaf

The red "Delete Leaf" button removes the leaf from the tree. Any connections to it are removed too. This cannot be undone — but deleting a leaf never deletes the underlying Codex character.

Adding leaves puts people on the tree; connections are how you link them into partnerships and parent-child lines. Add your people first with "New Leaf", then click the "Manage Connections" button at the top of the tree to open the connection panel. It has three tabs: Partnerships, Households & Children, and Tree Links.

A quick note on refreshing: the canvas updates as you add new connections, but re-ordering by drag-and-drop, or changing a line's color or style, will need a page refresh to show on the tree.

Partnerships

A partnership links two people as spouses or partners. In the "Add a partnership" form, pick a Person and a Partner, then optionally add a Note (married, divorced, engaged, widowed, and so on), a Line style (solid, dashed, or dotted), and a Color. You need at least two leaves on the tree to make one.

Existing partnerships are listed in a table where you can edit or remove each one. Drag the grip handle to set which relationship came first — this mostly matters when one person has several partnerships and you want them in a particular order. When a single person has three or more partnerships, only the first-position partnership stays editable for line styling; the others follow its lead, so the group stays visually consistent.

Households & Children

This tab is where you build parent-child lines. A household is either a couple (two partnered parents) or a single parent, and each one lists its children. To add a child to a couple, use the "Add a child…" dropdown on that household's card. To add a child to a single parent, use the "Add a child" form at the bottom, choosing a Parent and a Child.

Chronica won't let you create an impossible relationship — anyone who is already an ancestor or descendant of the parents is disabled in the child dropdown, so you can't accidentally make a loop.

Within a household, drag the grip handle to set the children's birth order. Each child has an edit button where you can add a Note (such as adopted, step, foster, or ward), and set the connecting Line style and Color — a dashed line is a nice way to show an adoption, for example. Removing a child just detaches the line; the leaf stays on the tree.

If your tree has more than one person at the very top with no parents above them, you'll also see a "Top of the tree" card. Drag those entries to set the left-to-right order of the topmost nodes.

Tree Links

A tree link drops a signpost node onto your tree that points to another family tree in the same campaign — perfect for connecting two large families without cramming them onto one canvas. In the "Add a tree link" form, choose the Person whose line continues (or leave it as a standalone node), pick the tree it Continues on, and optionally give it a Label (it defaults to the linked tree's name). You'll need at least two trees in the campaign to create one. Players only ever see links that point to non-secret trees.

Game Masters can hide parts of a tree from players, which is handy when a bloodline holds a spoiler. There are a few layers of control.

Secret trees

Setting a tree's Secret? toggle to "Yes" hides the entire tree from players — they won't see it on the main screen, in search, or by direct link.

Secret leaves

Marking an individual leaf Secret? hides more than just that one person. It also hides everyone descending from that leaf (children, grandchildren, and so on) and any partner attached directly to that hidden line. The hidden line stops there, so a partner's own separate branch stays visible. This keeps you from accidentally revealing a secret parentage through the people below it.

Automatic hiding

A leaf linked to a character that's marked secret in your Codex is hidden from players automatically — you don't have to remember to also flag the leaf. Likewise, a signpost node that points to a secret tree is hidden from players.

What GMs see

Game Masters always see the full tree. Any card that's hidden from players shows a small secret-eye badge, and hovering it tells you why it's hidden (the leaf is secret, its character is secret, it descends from a secret leaf, it's partnered onto a secret line, or it links to a secret tree). Search also respects all of this, so a player can never surface a hidden person by searching for them.

If you're a Game Master, the blue "Manage Folders" button at the top of the main Family Trees screen lets you organize your trees into folders. Each folder becomes a tab on the main screen.

On the Manage Folders screen, click the green "New Folder" button to add one. Give it a Name, and optionally set the Secret? toggle to hide the folder from players. Use the green "Edit Folder" button in any row to rename it or change its secrecy.

You can drag folders by the grip handle to reorder them; the order saves as soon as you drop a row. To file a tree into a folder, choose it in the Family Tree Folder dropdown on the tree's edit form.

A couple of things worth knowing: marking a folder secret hides the folder and its contents from the main screen, but unless a tree inside is also marked secret, players may still reach it through a direct link or search. And deleting a folder never deletes the trees inside it — they simply become unsorted and move to the "Unsorted" tab.