How Paraph works

How the pieces nest

Everything sits inside the thing above it. A chronicle holds sessions, a session holds sections, and a section is what gets illustrated.

The words

Chronicle one campaign

Everything from one campaign, at a single link you send to your table. Readers never sign in — the link itself is the key, so it is long and unguessable, and the chronicle is hidden from search engines.

Session one night of play

What you actually played. You paste in a recording or your notes and a session is what comes out.

Section part of a session

A named stretch within a session — “The Deception of Gwennifer the Bandit”. Sections are what get painted, one picture each.

Plate the picture

The illustration for one section. An old printing word for a full-page picture.

Cast the people

Your party and recurring characters. Each gets one locked portrait, which is attached to every picture they appear in so faces stay the same from session to session.

Codex, atlas, quests the reference shelf

People, places, and threads and items — pulled out of your sessions automatically so you can look up who somebody was.

Comic the same session, drawn

A session broken into panels instead of paragraphs. Several pictures per section rather than one, so it costs more than the chronicle does.

Scriptorium your workshop

The private side, where you paste sessions in, read what came back, fix anything wrong and publish. A scriptorium was the room where manuscripts were copied. Nobody reading your chronicle ever sees it.

Scribe, illustrator, archivist the three steps

The scribe writes the record, the illustrator paints it, and the archivist files the people and places. Names for stages, not for separate products.

Style another telling

The same events told or drawn differently — gothic, translated, woodcut. The facts never change; only the telling does.

Paraph the app, and the mark

The little red ⁋ at the start of every recorded event. Scribes used it to separate items before the paragraph break was invented.

What happens to a session

1. You paste in whatever you have — a recording, rough notes, or old write-ups.
2. It works out which of those it has been handed, and either distils a recording or files finished writing as-is.
3. The scribe records what happened in the world and drops what happened at the table: no dice, no initiative, no rules.
4. Each section is painted, with your cast held to their locked portraits.
5. You read all of it, fix anything wrong, and publish.
6. One link. It reads properly on a phone.

What it costs

You bring your own key for the models, so that spend is yours at cost with nothing added — roughly 16p for a session. The subscription pays for the app itself.

Free plan: one chronicle of up to 20 sessions — the full record, without the comic or other styles. That is a whole campaign, not a taster — the paid plan adds the comic and the other styles rather than taking the record away. Nothing is ever generated without the price being shown first.

A note on accuracy

The scribe records; it does not invent. A retelling in another style is checked against the original beat for beat, and one that adds or drops an event is thrown away rather than saved. Comic panels may only carry dialogue where the record already says someone spoke. Counts and tallies are worked out from the record itself rather than guessed at.