Topics & Memoranda
Underneath your characters, places, and world sits Story Teller’s memory system: topics and their memoranda. Understanding them helps you get the most out of the assistant, because they are what it reads and writes as it learns about your story.
What a topic is
A topic is a subject the assistant tracks over time. Every character, place, and world rule is a topic; you can also make topics for anything else you want the assistant to remember — a faction, a magic system, a recurring motif.
Topics have a type, shown with a distinct icon and color:
| Type | For |
|---|---|
| Character | A member of your cast |
| Place | A location |
| World | A rule or fact about your world |
| Timeline | A chronology of events (see Timelines ) |
| Memory | General knowledge the assistant accumulates |
| Fact | A discrete, stable fact |
Topics can be nested — a character can have sub-topics, and a story’s elements are organized under parent topics (Characters, Places, World, Timeline) created with the story.
The memorandum
Each topic carries a memorandum — an evolving document that is the topic’s knowledge. As you write and talk to the assistant, the memorandum for a topic grows and sharpens: a character’s memorandum accumulates what is known about them; a world topic’s memorandum records the rule and its implications.
You can read and edit any memorandum directly in the Topic Editor, or let the assistant maintain it for you. Each topic also has a short summary — a one-line description used for search and context.
Versions and rollback
Memoranda are versioned. Every change creates a new version, and the topic keeps its history. This means:
- You can open a topic’s Version History and see how its knowledge evolved.
- You can roll back to an earlier version if a change went the wrong way. Rolling back creates a new version equal to the old one, so nothing is ever lost.
Activating topics in a project
Topics are activated per project. A topic being active means its memorandum is included as context when you talk to the assistant, so the assistant knows about it.
- Check a topic to activate it in the current project; uncheck to leave it out.
- Checking a parent topic activates its children too.
- Leaving a topic inactive keeps it in your library but out of the assistant’s immediate context — useful for focusing the assistant on the part of the story you are working on.
Change log and unread markers
Each topic keeps a change log of what changed and when. When a topic changes — because you edited it or the assistant updated it — it shows an unread marker until you open it. This lets you keep track of what the assistant has been learning as you write.
Related pages
- Story Elements — characters, places, and world rules are topics
- Timelines — timeline topics and their events
- The Chat Assistant — how the assistant reads and writes memoranda