Frequently Asked Questions

Archive Arcana is a worldbuilding and campaign management platform for tabletop roleplaying games, including Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder and Call of Cthulhu. It combines wiki-style lore pages, interactive maps with fog of war, custom calendars and timelines, and character sheets, and it puts player participation front and centre through granular permissions and personal journals.

Archive Arcana is free to use. The free Wanderer's Mark tier is free forever and includes one realm, unlimited pages, premium maps with pins and fog of war, character sheets, granular permissions and 512MB of storage, with no credit card required.

Archive Arcana costs nothing on the free Wanderer's Mark tier. Paid Seals are $5 per month for the Archivist's Seal, $10 per month for the Lorekeeper's Seal and $15 per month for the Archmage's Seal. Paying yearly gives you two months free, and every Seal grants the same core worldbuilding tools while raising limits on realms, members, storage and active systems.

Archive Arcana does not require any specific TTRPG system. The platform is system agnostic at its core, with ready-made templates for popular systems like D&D 5e, Pathfinder and Call of Cthulhu, and you can request additional systems or build your own custom ones.

Archive Arcana supports any tabletop roleplaying system, because character sheets run on a system-agnostic engine with system-specific templates layered on top. Templates ship for D&D 5e, Pathfinder and Call of Cthulhu, and homebrew systems are supported by creating your own sheet definitions.

A Realm in Archive Arcana is one setting, which may encompass multiple worlds or universes depending on your game. Each realm stays fully logically separated from every other realm, so worlds never bleed into one another.

Pages in Archive Arcana are rich wiki-style entries for your world's lore, characters, locations, factions and items. They support rich text, embedded media, interconnected links with automatic relationship tracking, category tagging, full-text search, and custom styling per page.

Archive Arcana supports two map types: tiled maps, which connect multiple images for large worlds, and singular maps, which use one large image for smaller areas. Both support granular fog of war, custom markers linked to pages, annotations, distance measurement and multi-level layering for things like underground floors or alternate planes.

Fog of war in Archive Arcana hides parts of a map until you reveal them, and reveals can be scoped to a specific player or an entire campaign. That means two parties exploring the same world can each see only the ground they have covered, and individual markers can stay hidden even inside a revealed region.

Character sheets in Archive Arcana use a system-agnostic engine with system-specific templates layered on top. This architecture supports any system, including homebrew creations, and allows multiple layouts per system.

Linking two pages in Archive Arcana automatically creates a bidirectional connection visible on both pages. You can then label those connections to gain more insight, marking relations as family or vassals, and the resulting web of links builds itself as you write.

Archive Arcana supports multiple campaigns inside a single realm, so you can run the same world for several tables with each group seeing only its own story. The free Wanderer's Mark allows one active campaign per realm, the Archivist's Seal allows ten, and the Lorekeeper's and Archmage's Seals allow unlimited active campaigns.

Players can access the world you build in Archive Arcana through realm invitations. Once invited, they get access to pages and their own journals, with configurable visibility settings controlled by both game masters and players.

Granular visibility in Archive Arcana applies to every element independently, from maps and timelines down to a single content section within a page. Access can be set to everyone, game master only, specific players, or campaign groups, which lets you reveal a page, a paragraph, or a single point on a map exactly when the story calls for it.

A realm on the free Wanderer's Mark tier supports five additional members beyond the owner. Every paid Seal removes that cap entirely, allowing unlimited realm members.

Players do not need a paid account to join a realm in Archive Arcana. A realm's available features depend on the subscription tier of the realm owner, not on the individual players, so only the game master needs to hold a Seal.

Archive Arcana stores your data on servers within the European Union, owned by a European hosting provider and fully compliant with GDPR. Multimedia is hosted by Cloudflare.

Archive Arcana provides structured data formats so you can keep a local backup or migrate elsewhere if you ever need to. Export access continues even if you cancel your subscription.

Importing an existing world from another platform is currently in development at Archive Arcana and is not yet available. Data export is available today, so anything you build in the meantime can be taken with you.

Archive Arcana does not train AI models on your content. We also do not aim to integrate AI functionality directly into the platform at all.

Archive Arcana currently requires an internet connection and has no offline mode. Offline viewing of your information is something we are actively exploring.

A Seal is Archive Arcana's name for a subscription tier. There are four: the free Wanderer's Mark, the Archivist's Seal at $5 per month, the Lorekeeper's Seal at $10 per month, and the Archmage's Seal at $15 per month. Every Seal grants the same core worldbuilding tools, and claiming a greater one raises your limits rather than unlocking different features.

A Charm is an optional add-on that extends any Seal in Archive Arcana. Available Charms include the Deeper Vault, which adds storage at $1.00 per GB per month, and the Ward of Silence, which removes advertisements from a free account for $1.00 per month.

Storage in Archive Arcana starts at 512MB on the free Wanderer's Mark, and rises to 5GB on the Archivist's Seal, 10GB on the Lorekeeper's Seal and 25GB on the Archmage's Seal. Per-image upload caps run from 5MB to 100MB across those tiers, and the Deeper Vault Charm adds extra storage to any Seal for $1.00 per GB per month.

Archive Arcana does not offer a lifetime purchase, because ongoing hosting costs make lifetime pricing infeasible. A generous free tier remains available instead.

Archive Arcana has no standard discounts. Students and educators can contact support@archive-arcana.com to ask about assistance.

Your content stays permanently accessible if you downgrade or cancel Archive Arcana. On downgrade, your current features continue through the end of the billing period and then transition to the lower Seal. If you exceed the new limits, you keep all existing material but cannot add more until you are back under them.

Archive Arcana offers a full, no questions asked refund within 14 days of your first payment if you are unsatisfied. Refunds on subsequent billing cycles are evaluated individually.