Workflows

Worldbuilding with Inklings

Every world starts the same way: a thought, a name, a question that won’t leave you alone. Who is Magistrate Thorne, and why does she know what you did last Thursday? From that first thread, you pull — and suddenly you have factions, history, a magic system with seventeen inconvenient edge cases, and the nagging feeling that you haven’t thought through how grain gets from Port Ash to Thornwall Keep.

Inklings is built for this kind of thinking. Not for taking notes, but for building a system of interconnected knowledge that grows as your world grows. This guide walks through a complete worldbuilding workflow — from the first blank page to a structured, searchable, linked world you can actually navigate.

Set Up Your World’s Workspace

One workspace, one world. That’s the organizing principle. Create a workspace named for your setting — “The Shattered Spire” works fine, as does something more private like “Project Thornwall” if you don’t want to commit to a title.

Everything that follows lives inside this workspace: geography, characters, factions, history, magic systems, timelines. The workspace name appears in the sidebar header; the contents are yours to organize however your world demands.

Build the Geography First

Worlds have physical shape before they have history. Start with the skeleton of your setting.

Create a page called Geography and use it as a folder for your map structure. Inside it, create pages for your major regions. If your world has continents, create those first; nest regions beneath them, then cities beneath regions:

Geography
├── The Shattered Spire (continent)
│   ├── The Verdant Undercity
│   ├── Port Ash
│   └── The Eastern Reach
│       └── Thornwall Keep

To create a child page, right-click any page in the sidebar and select New Subpage. The nesting is visual and navigable — expanding a parent page reveals its children.

Define Your Types

This is where Inklings departs from a simple notes app. Real worlds have structured entities: characters have occupations and affiliations; locations have populations and political status; factions have founding dates and ideologies. Instead of burying these details in paragraph prose, you define custom types that make the structure explicit.

Navigate to Settings → Types and create the types your world needs. For a political-intrigue setting, you might create:

Location — with properties: population (number), political-status (select: Independent, Occupied, Contested), founding-era (text)
Character — with properties: allegiance (text), occupation (text), status (select: Active, Deceased, Unknown)
Faction — with properties: alignment (text), founded (text), territory (text)

Once a type is defined, you can assign it to any page. Open a location page, click the type badge in the page detail panel, and assign Location. The property fields appear; fill in what you know, leave blank what you’re still figuring out.

Link Your World Together

A worldbuilding database is not a pile of index cards — it’s a web of relationships. Magistrate Thorne governs Thornwall Keep. She’s a member of the Iron Accord. She has a complicated history with the Lamplighters Guild. Each of these connections is a wiki-link.

In any page’s editor, type [[ to open the link autocomplete. Start typing a page name and select it from the dropdown. The link appears as an inline pill; clicking it navigates to that page. The target page automatically records the incoming connection in its backlinks panel.

Build the web as you write:

In Magistrate Thorne’s page, link to [[Thornwall Keep]], [[The Iron Accord]], and [[The Pact of Silence]]
In The Iron Accord’s page, link to member characters and controlled territories
In Port Ash’s page, link to factions operating there and notable residents

Over time, this web becomes navigable. Opening any page shows you what it connects to and what connects to it. You can trace relationships without maintaining a separate diagram.

Tag for Flexible Filtering

Types give pages structural identity. Tags give pages categorical identity. The distinction matters.

Magistrate Thorne is a Character (type). She’s also tagged Iron-Accord-affiliate, Eastern-Reach, and Third-Age — labels you can use to filter across your entire world.

Add tags via the tag bar at the bottom of any editor page. Tags are workspace-wide; the same tag can appear on characters, locations, and factions. Use tags for:

Political era (Sundering-era, Post-Pact, Current)
Allegiance (Iron-Accord, Lamplighters-Guild, Exiled-Court)
Status (Active, Deprecated, Needs-Revision)
Story relevance (Main-Plot, Subplot-A, Background)

In the sidebar, the tag filter lets you show only pages matching selected tags, using AND mode (match all) or OR mode (match any). Want to see all Iron-Accord affiliates who are active in the Eastern Reach? Filter by both tags simultaneously.

Build Collection Views

Once your pages have types and properties, collection views give you a live table of any type. Navigate to a type in Settings → Types and open its collection view — you’ll see all pages assigned that type, with their properties displayed as columns.

A Character collection view shows all your characters, their allegiances, occupations, and statuses in a single scannable table. Sorting by allegiance groups Iron Accord members together. Filtering by status: Active removes deceased characters from view.

This is the worldbuilder’s inventory system. When you need to know “who in Port Ash is affiliated with the Lamplighters Guild and still active?”, the collection view answers that in seconds rather than requiring you to skim every character page individually.

Advanced: Container Rules for Automatic Typing

As your world grows, you might want a “Characters” folder where every new page automatically becomes a Character without you manually assigning the type each time.

Set a container rule on a folder page: navigate to the folder, open its settings, and specify a type plus a depth rule (direct children only, or recursive to all descendants). Now any page created inside that folder receives the type automatically, with scope marked as container so you know it came from the rule rather than a manual assignment.

The Bestiary folder auto-assigns Creature. The Factions folder auto-assigns Faction. The Characters folder auto-assigns Character. Your collection views stay current without manual housekeeping.

Advanced: Faction Relationship Mapping

Political worlds need political maps. Inklings doesn’t generate relationship diagrams automatically, but you can build one through systematic linking.

Create a Faction Relations page. In the editor, write out the relationship matrix: for each faction pair, describe the relationship and link to both factions using wiki-links. This page becomes your political reference document — and because it links to the factions, those factions gain backlinks to it, making the political map discoverable from any faction’s page.

For something more visual: in each faction’s page, use a Properties section with a multi-select property listing allies, rivals, and neutral parties. This doesn’t generate a graph, but it makes the relationship data queryable.

A Running Example: The Shattered Spire Setting

By the end of a structured worldbuilding session, your workspace might look like this:

Geography/ — The Shattered Spire, The Verdant Undercity, Port Ash, Thornwall Keep
Characters/ — Magistrate Thorne (Character, Iron-Accord-affiliate), Captain Vex (Character, Lamplighters-Guild), the Oracle of Dust (Character, status: Unknown), Lira the Cartographer (Character, Exiled-Court)
Factions/ — The Iron Accord (Faction), The Lamplighters Guild (Faction), The Exiled Court (Faction)
History/ — The Sundering (event), The Pact of Silence (event), The Threadweave (magic system entry)

Every page links to the pages it connects to. Every type has properties. Every notable entity is tagged. Searching for “Iron Accord” returns pages tagged or linked to that faction. Opening Magistrate Thorne shows you her connections, her properties, and every page in the world that references her.

That’s the world, mapped.