🌍 Gaea Forge
Local-First, Open-Source World-Building & Lore Platform
Gaea Forge is a privacy-first, offline-capable workbench for writers, game designers, tabletop game masters and anyone building a fictional world. Write linked lore articles, map family trees and relationship webs, lay out history on timelines, pin places on your own maps, and keep it all on your machine. There is no account and no server: your world lives in a local database on your device.
⬇️ Download
Get the desktop app from the latest release:
The builds are not code-signed yet: on Windows, SmartScreen may ask you to confirm (More info → Run anyway); on macOS, right-click the app and choose Open the first time. The web version links to these installers from the bottom of its sidebar. The desktop app and the web version keep separate data; move a world between them with a backup (Import → Backup & Restore).
✨ Features
Writing & organizing
- 📖 Lore Codex & Editor: A rich-text editor (TipTap) with headings, lists, quotes and code, plus an inspector for each article's category, tags, custom key-value properties (stats, traits, status) and cover artwork.
- 🔗 Linked Lore & Backlinks: Type
[[ to link to another article, or create one on the spot. Links survive renames (and the app offers to update link text that still shows the old name), every article lists what mentions it, and links to deleted articles are flagged.
- 🧩 Category Templates: New articles start with fields and sections suited to their category (a character gets Role, Affiliation and Status, with Appearance, Personality and Background sections). Edit any category's template, or copy one from an existing article.
- 🔎 Search & Filters: Search titles, text, tags and properties with ranked results (best matches first, with the matching passage highlighted). Partial words and small typos still match. Filter by tag, and pin important articles to the top of the sidebar.
- ⌨️ Quick Switcher: Press
Ctrl/Cmd+K to jump to any article or canvas by typing part of its name, or create a new article from the same box.
- 🎭 Workspace Roles: Tailored setups for Authors, Game Designers (GDD), TTRPG Game Masters and Personal Knowledge Bases, each with its own categories, wording and accent colors.
Canvases
- 🕸️ World Web: A relationship graph of your articles with named connections (allies, rivals, mentors…). Articles that link to each other are joined automatically, and a 3D cosmos view renders the web as an orbitable star field (Three.js).
- 🌳 Family Trees: Map parents, spouses, siblings and lineages, with one-click auto-arrangement into generations.
- ⏳ Timelines: History in your world's own calendar, with events grouped into named eras, spans for wars and reigns, and links to articles. Give each timeline its own months (names and lengths), year labels like 412 AR / 30 BR, and optionally count years from each era (Year 3 of the Restoration).
- 🗺️ Maps: Upload a map image, pan and zoom it, and drop pins that link places to their articles. Every article shows which timelines and maps it appears on.
Import, backup & safety
- 📑 Document Import: Import
.pdf, .docx, .doc, .md, .txt and .json. Multi-topic documents are split into separate articles by their headings, Key: Value lines become properties, and [[Title]] references become links. Entries are sorted into your categories by keyword rules you can edit, and you review everything before it is saved. Imported HTML is sanitized.
- 📝 Markdown Export: Export your world as a folder of Markdown files (one per article, with properties as front matter, working links and images; opens in Obsidian) or as a single story-bible document with a table of contents. Timelines, maps and relationship webs come along as lists.
- 📦 Full Backups: Export your whole world (articles, artwork, canvases and workspace role) to one
.json file and restore it later, or merge just its articles.
- 🛟 Safety Snapshots: Before any import or restore that replaces your world, a snapshot is saved automatically; the last five can be restored in one click.
- ↩️ Undo Deletes: Deleting an article or canvas shows an Undo button for a few seconds; undoing an article also restores its places on canvases, maps and timelines.
- 📍 Picks Up Where You Left Off: Reopening the app returns to the article or canvas you had open, with your panels, collapsed folders and recent items as you left them.
- 🗂️ Safe with Several Tabs: If the app is open in more than one tab, one tab edits at a time so changes never overwrite each other; another tab can take over with one click.
- 💾 Autosave with Recovery: Changes save automatically (
Ctrl/Cmd+S saves immediately), and edits made just before the app closes are recovered on the next start.
Look & platform
- 🌓 Light & Dark Themes: Dark, light, or follow your system, with each role's accent colors in both modes and text that meets WCAG AA contrast.
- 🖥️ Desktop & Web: Runs as a native desktop app (Tauri v2) or in the browser (Next.js static export). Works fully offline.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
