Zirel Whitepaper.

Zirel is a private worldbuilding workspace for writers, game masters, screenwriters, indie game developers, narrative designers, and other creators of connected fictional worlds. It turns scattered facts into structured entities and relations, then uses explainable rules and visual maps to help creators notice possible contradictions.

Zirel is not a story generator and does not replace creative judgment. Its purpose is to make the structure behind a world easier to inspect.

Worlds rarely break because their creators lack ideas. They become difficult to manage because facts accumulate across characters, factions, events, dates, and relationships. A changed death year can invalidate a later battle. A loyalty can conflict with a character's hostility. Notes can remain individually correct while the network between them becomes inconsistent.

General note tools store information well, but they do not naturally treat fictional facts as a connected system that can be queried, visualized, and checked.

1. Structure without rigidity

   Provide useful fields and relation types without dictating how a world must be written.

2. Explain, do not judge

   Warnings show why a pattern was flagged and remain suggestions for the creator.

3. Creator control

   Users decide what to save, change, export, or delete.

4. Portability

   Project data should be exportable rather than trapped in the product.

5. Honest scope

   Distinguish working features from experiments and future possibilities.

1. Create a private project for a fictional world.
2. Add characters, factions, and events with relevant timeline facts.
3. Connect those entities using typed, directional relations.
4. Review dynamically generated Logic Warnings.
5. Explore the network through Graph Workspace and Story Tapestry.
6. Export the project as JSON for backup or portability.

• Projects contain one user's world data.
• Characters record identity, description, status, birth year, and death year.
• Factions represent organizations with creation and destruction years.
• Events represent dated or undated occurrences and locations.
• Relations connect a source entity to a target through types such as member_of, loyal_to, or participated_in.

This graph-shaped model lets one fact participate in multiple contexts without duplicating the same note everywhere.

The current engine is deterministic and rule-based. Warnings are generated when requested and are not stored as permanent verdicts. The first version checks for:

• A character participating in an event after their recorded death.
• A character participating before their recorded birth.
• A faction participating after its recorded destruction.
• One-sided hostility between two characters.
• A faction member hating a character to whom that faction is loyal.

Each warning includes severity, category, message, explanation, and possible next steps. The creator decides whether it represents a twist, incomplete data, or a contradiction.

Graph Workspace presents entities as a constellation-like network with filters, search, an inspector, direct connections, path finding, node movement, and a minimap based on the current layout. Project Dashboard also includes Story Tapestry: a compact interactive view built from the project's actual entities and relations.

These views are navigation tools for discovering dense clusters, isolated entities, and indirect paths through the world.

Creators retain ownership of their worlds and creative content. Zirel receives only the limited permission needed to host, display, process, analyze, and export that content as part of the service.

Projects are associated with user accounts and protected by ownership checks. JSON export and import provide a practical portability path. The beta still requires stronger self-service deletion, consent, backup, and account controls before broad release.

• Registration, login, password hashing, and private projects.
• Project and entity CRUD, search, filters, and bulk actions.
• A guided relation builder with typed links and live preview.
• Dynamic Logic Warnings and a consistency review dashboard.
• Graph Workspace, inspector, path finder, minimap, and Story Tapestry.
• JSON export and import.
• Feedback, contact, waitlist, and admin beta-management tools.

• Can a new creator understand the entity-and-relation model without instruction?
• Does the relation builder match how people think about their worlds?
• Are warnings useful often enough to justify structured data?
• Does the graph reveal connections that lists and notes hide?
• Which missing controls prevent creators from trusting Zirel?

Near-term work prioritizes beta reliability, onboarding, data controls, accessibility, and refinement of warnings and graph exploration. Later research may include custom world schemas, collaboration, additional export formats, and assisted analysis.

If AI-assisted analysis is explored, suggestions should be transparent, optional, and reviewed by the user before anything is saved. AI processing is not currently part of the core product.

Zirel does not promise perfect consistency, legal or publishing review, automatic story quality, permanent availability, collaboration, or AI analysis. It currently accepts no payments through the site. These boundaries keep the beta focused on one question: can structured relations and explainable checks make complex fictional worlds easier to maintain?