The story bible
The one page of project-wide truth that every AI request reads, and how to keep it useful.
The story bible is a plain-text page, one per project, in the right dock's Bible tab. It is shared like everything else in the editor: two people typing in it see each other's words. Viewers get a read-only copy and the field says so.
There is no structure enforced on it. When you open an empty bible as an editor, Narratomi seeds a skeleton from your cast:
## Premise
## Tone
## Characters
### Mira
### The Curator
## World factsDelete those headings, rename them, or ignore them. The bible is text, and the model reads text.
Why it exists
Every AI request is stateless. The co-writer sees the scene you have open and the graph around it. The agent reads chapters through its query tools. Neither of them remembers the last conversation, and neither of them knows the things you have never written down: that the station's gravity is a lie, that Mira never swears, that the second act is meant to be colder than the first.
The bible is where that lives. It is the only piece of context you write for the AI directly, rather than by writing the story.
It sits at the front of the system prompt for both surfaces, ahead of anything scene-specific. That position is deliberate: it is the part of the prompt that does not change between requests.
What to put in it
Things that must stay true, and things that are easy to contradict by accident.
- Premise, in a sentence or two. What the story is about and what the player is doing.
- Tone. "Dry, understated, no melodrama" is worth more than a paragraph of adjectives.
- Characters. One heading per cast member: voice, what they want, what they will never say or do.
- World facts. Rules the fiction cannot break, names spelled the way you want them spelled.
Keep it short enough that you would actually re-read it. A bible that has grown into a wiki stops being a prompt and starts being a haystack.
Write the constraints, not the plot. "Kesh lies about the cargo until act three" is a fact the AI can respect. "Act two is exciting" is not.
Filling it from the story you already have
The co-writer's Update bible action reads the story so far and drafts a replacement bible. It does not need a scene open.
- Type a direction if you have one, for example "add the new characters and keep my tone section".
- Press Update bible. The draft streams into the draft column.
- Read it, then Accept to write it into the Bible tab, or Discard.
Update bible drafts a full replacement, not a patch. Accepting it replaces the whole page, so read it before you accept. If you only want part of it, discard and edit the bible by hand instead. As with any accept, Revert puts the old text back for everyone.
Where the AI reads it
| Surface | What it does with the bible |
|---|---|
| Co-writer, all five actions | Sent with every request, at the top of the system prompt |
| Agent triage and planning | Read from main before a run is planned |
| Agent, every phase of a run | Same text, in the system prompt of each phase call |
| Agent query tools | readBible lets the agent re-read it mid-run |
One consequence worth knowing: the agent's bible is read from your main branch when the run is planned. If a run edits the bible on its review branch, the edit is part of the draft you review, and it reaches main at merge like any other change.
When it drifts
Nothing keeps the bible in sync with the story automatically. A bible that still describes a character you cut will happily push that character back into your script. Two habits fix this:
- Edit it by hand whenever the story contradicts it. It is a textarea, it takes seconds.
- Re-run Update bible after a big restructure, then read the diff with your own eyes.
If the co-writer keeps making the same mistake, the bible is usually the place to fix it once instead of correcting it in every prompt.