Hello, I hope this is the right area to post this in. My question: which freeware program do you recommend for maintaining a complex, non-linear story? I have already searched and found nothing but commercial products, i.e. Storybase. Until now, I have everything written down on paper or text documents, which is okay, but not easy to manage, for example when I want to change side-events in the beginning which might have unpredictable consequences for situations in the future. As an alternative I thought of a mind-mapping software. Is this a good idea and which would you recommend? Or is there a better non-commercial software which is specialised in maintaining a storyline? Thanks, Phex [Edited by - Phex on May 21, 2006 2:02:59 PM]

(Yes, this is the "write" place. Get it? Write... haha... Yeah, I know. Shut up.) :P

This discussion actually came up in another thread a while back, and it seems the general consensus here is that there is no such free or readily available program to do such a thing (except for the one in Neverwinter Nights; that program is actually very nice, but it's integrated into the game and cannot be used separately).

Eventually, I think I'll make my own open source application to do just what the writing community and I are asking for (I program as well as write), but it'll be a while until then...

For now, I just keep all of my writing in Word documents within organized and properly named folders. It kind of is a pain with larger projects, I know, but that's just how it is. :( Someday...

Personally, I've used a wiki in the past with a fair degree of success. It allows you to have one page per character, or per place, or per major event, and everything is very easily crosslinked.

I used to run OpenWiki on my PC, mainly because it's ASP-based and as such I could run it on Windows XP Pro without having to download and install any web servers or anything.

How about just a generic tool that does hyperlinks ???

Regular HTML (free editors).....

A hypercard clone (one with forms ???)


A more complicated tool that does automatic cross-referencing or pulldown selection of data from 'forms' might be programable without too much effort
(VB etc...)