yazar.io for Epic Fantasy Writers

What makes epic fantasy hard is scale

The difference between a fantasy novel that follows one hero on one journey and a series that tells the fate of five kingdoms from ten points of view isn't genre, it's volume. In epic fantasy a minor character walks back on stage three books later, a dynastic marriage two hundred years ago explains today's fight for the throne, and your readers remember all of it better than you do. The general needs of the genre are covered on the fantasy writing software page; this one is about the crowded, long-haul side of it.

Managing a cast of a hundred

In yazar.io every character has a page, and that page fills itself in: the organizations they belong to, where they live, their relatives, the events they took part in, the other records that mention them. A character can belong to more than one organization, so a knight shows up as a member of a house, an order and a royal council at once. You filter and sort the character list by the fields in your Field Template; add a custom field such as 'House' or 'Allegiance' and a filter shows you only that house's people.

When a new minor character needs a name, it has to fit their people's sound and not collide with the rest of the cast. The free Fantasy Name Generator suggests invented names by people and style; attach the name you pick to a character record straight away and you also avoid giving two people the same name.

Dynasties and generations: the Family Tree

In epic fantasy, politics is often bloodline: who is whose heir, which marriage joined two houses, which branch the bastard comes from. The Family Tree reads these ties from your characters' profiles and draws them; choose a child's mother and father, or fill in a parent's Children field, and the tree updates by itself. Children of the same two parents hang from a single family fork. For ties that aren't blood but belong on the tree, such as sworn brotherhood or wardship, you add a custom link with a label you write yourself.

You choose how the cards look for each book: Portrait, Square Poster, Horizontal, Frame, or Compact for crowded trees. Characters with dates of birth and death show their life years on the card, and the dead are marked, so across a dynasty spanning a century you can read off the tree who lived at the same time as whom. The finer points of tracking generations are on our page for family saga writers.

A thousand years of history: ages, wars, prophecies

An epic world's present stands on its past. The wars before the Founding, the fall of the empire, the day a prophecy was spoken: you keep these in the Event Flow with their dates. If your world counts its own years, enter them as calendar years and use BC for events before your era begins; for old events with no known day, a year alone is enough. You link the participants and the place to each event. The Event Flow and entering dates are free on every plan.

The Timeline on Yazar Pro shows that history along a single axis; in the Parallel view each character has a lane, and their lifelines are drawn side by side. That's where you can watch a long-lived elf outlast three human generations, or see where two point-of-view characters were in the same month. On the Calendar you can also mark seasons and festivals that return every year. When you decide how much of your magic's rules to reveal, the distinction between soft magic and hard magic is useful.

A wiki for your readers

Epic fantasy readers love appendices: cast lists, family trees, glossaries. Turn on a book's Shareable Wiki and the sections you choose are published as read-only pages under yazar.io/@username. You decide which sections and which records appear, and you can hide a single record to protect a surprise. The Family Tree and the Event Flow can be opened as pages of their own, and your Notes are never published. The wiki is available on both plans.

Series and plans: what you should know

You can set up a series that shares one world as a single book, which in yazar.io means a single workspace; each character is recorded once, and you look at the same page for every volume. Records aren't shared between books, so if you split the series into separate books you'll have to recreate the shared characters in each.

To be honest about scale: on the free plan you can have 2 books, with up to 15 records in each of nine sections such as Characters, Locations and Organizations; the Glossary, the Event Flow and Notes don't count toward that. It's enough to start with a small cast. Yazar Pro raises those limits far higher and adds three Custom Sections you name yourself, for kinds of things the built-in sections don't cover, such as heraldry, languages or ships.