All entities you can imagine deserve a proper record, and YAPRS provides a powerful tool for that! The heart of YARPS is a dynamic encyclopedia that automatically creates intelligent links and gives you an intuitive overview of your entities as well as all corresponding relations.
The dynamic Encyclopedia at the very core of YARPS encompasses every single piece of your game world. This place, shaped by your personal memories, is a network of closely connected elements, stories, and details. YARPS manages all of them and updates them automatically when your heroes interact with them. With the Timeline feature you can also observe how each entity changes over the time of your game. Interactive maps illustrate how political influences change back and forth, and background articles supply all necessary information. Dynamic links create a closely connected network between the different entity types. This network is able to depict the correlations between elements in your game with all their minute details and helps you navigate your imaginary world.
Whether you want to research events in your game world’s distant past or to briefly recapitulate the last game session, the YARPS Encyclopedia is the right place for you.
Together as a group of friends you created an unique world. It doesn´t matter if you came up with it on your own, or if it´s an official roleplay-system – the places you´ve visited, the battles you fought and the people you met, made this world special. Made it your own. With YARPS all these memories have their place, as well as all the history, the lifeforms and the places you call home. All the characters can see, taste, feel or hear have their own entity in YARPS, where they are listed and linked.
With the search function you always find what you are looking for and you can filter pre-existing categories as easily as create new ones on the go. Everything you can think of can be created and organised here: worlds, vehicles, cultures as well as PCs, NPCs, everyone and their monster-in-law. Equipped with an intelligent linking system all your creations’ relations are visible to you and your players – unless you don’t want them to. But there’s more: Not only will YARPS provide a broad set of predetermined entity categories, no! You can also create your own and nothing will restrict your imagination!
Basic Entity Types
The Encyclopedia encompasses all creatures, objects, and information of various kinds within your game world. Because you’ll need different kinds of information for a creature than for a building YARPS uses different entity types. You can adjust the appearance of these entities with just a few clicks and apply your changes to all entities of this type. Here’s a brief overview of the basic entity types:
- Characters: This entity type includes every living being in your universe that can perform actions relevant to your adventure. Among these can be anything, a dwarven guard, a hostile cyborg, or even a regular human.
Subtypes: Player Characters, individual NPCs, generic NPCs - Lifeforms: This category includes all creatures, from single-cell organisms to omnipotent deities.
Subtypes: Animals, plants, monsters, deities (and divine creatures), magical creatures - Locations: A place or area in the dimensions of your choice.
Subtypes: Rooms, buildings, settlements, landmarks, planets, galaxies, etc. - Groups: This includes all groups of beings that are bound together by a common purpose, from sheer survival to the desire for community, or a shared goal.
Subtypes: Nations, political groups, religious organizations, military groups, important families, etc. - Objects: Objects that warrant an entity of their own are important for your game in some way. Maybe they’re valuable, useful, or exceptionally beautiful. Usually, you won’t create an entity for every pebble stone—unless one of your characters is a geologist.
Subtypes: Common items, armors, weapons, jewelry, etc. - Means of transportation: During their travels your characters will frequently change their means of transportation. Horse-drawn carriages, skateboards, space shuttles—anything faster than walking speed falls into this category.
- Background articles: These articles describe abstract concepts, theories, or relevant knowledge. Entities of this type are most valuable for scientists or scholars.
Subtypes: Species, religions, professions, ecosystems, scientific fields, etc. - Collections: In collections you can link different entities together in a well-organized overview. For instance, a collection could comprise of all NPCs that engage in trade of some sort.
Of course, this list of entity types will grow much larger over time, especially because the YARPS community will also be able to create their own subtypes.
Intuitive Structure
Maybe you’re not sure where to begin describing your game world. YARPS helps you get into things smoothly. No matter where you begin, whether your first entity is important or just a little cog in the machine, you can already make the first connections without interrupting your writing. As soon as you have a name and a classification for something, YARPS can create an entity for you that you can populate later.
Maybe you’re describing a rural area and decide it produces excellent wine. Simply type the name of your new entity into the link box, select the appropriate category, and there’s a new entity for your game world. This way, you can expand your universe quickly and effortlessly. When you get back to populating your new entity, it will already have its first link to the region you described earlier. It is already rooted in your world.
YARPS also offers features to support those GMs whose game worlds are already vast and extensive. You can import premade tables in YARPS to transfer the structure of your world to this instance. For example, you don’t have to enter all NPCs in your collection manually. Instead, you can have YARPS create individual entities for them automatically.
Finally we are also considering the possibility to automatically import world and story content from other tools you used before. For which 3rd party tools these importers will be available does however depend on the user voting in our idea hub, the structure of the available import data as well as on the technical feasibility of the import process.
Hierarchical Entity Structures
The entities you create are more than just a long list. Through manually and automatically created links YARPS understands the structure of your game world and is able to visualize it. A city is located within a country. This country is on a continent, the continent is on a planet, and so forth.
Through these hierarchies YARPS also knows that the inhabitants of this city are also living on the planet. YARPS is able to draw logical connections within your game world that you in turn can make use of.
Tagging and Collections
There are three collection categories to facilitate your entities’ organization. First of all you might simply tag them. This comes in handy when done consistently – by tagging entities with certain attributes like ‘unused NPC’ or ‘space monster’, YARPS will summarize them accordingly. There is also the option to create sets manually, by grouping the corresponding entities any way you like. But there’s an even easier way to do this: Automatic Collections. By feeding YARPs with just a few key attributes it will automatically filter for the desired entities with the corresponding attributes. Need all cyborg characters that live under the sea? Every elf that follows the salfanyan goddess of fragile pottery? No need to sweat it, YARPS does the searching and collecting – every time you return to your automatic collection.
