Answers to your Queries

Everything you need to know about Archive Arcana.

Getting started

Archive Arcana is a complete worldbuilding and campaign management toolkit designed for tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, or any other TTRPG system. It's designed with player involvement at the core, allowing for granular viewing permissions and journal keeping.

Yes! Archive Arcana offers a generous free tier that lets you use all core functionality of the platform, free forever. No credit card details required.

Not at all. Archive Arcana is system agnostic at its core. The worldbuilding tools, maps, calendars and pages work regardless of what system you play. For character sheets, we offer system-specific templates for popular systems like D&D 5e and Pathfinder. If your system is not available you can request it to be added, or even try to make it yourself!

One Realm is meant to be one setting. That does not necessarily mean it has to be one world or planet. A sci-fi game might have many worlds contained in one, for example. And a superhero system might have multiple universes in one realm.

Each realm is fully logically separated from any others, so if you run multiple games in multiple completely different settings that's when you'd need multiple realms.

Features

Pages are rich wiki-style entries for your world's lore, characters, locations, factions, items - anything you want to write down. Additionally pages can be used by players to keep their character journals.

Pages support rich text editing with embedded media, maps, interconnected links with automatic relation tracking, and unique styling per page. Think of them as your world's personal encyclopedia.

There are two types of maps: tiled and singular.

Tiled maps consist of many connected images, while singular is just one large image forming a map. Tiled maps are meant for very large world maps that you can incrementally adapt over time, while singular maps are more suited for smaller maps like a city or town.

The map system features a granular fog of war, letting you reveal areas to players as they explore. You can place custom markers with links to pages, add annotations, and layer maps for multi-level dungeons or regions.

Character sheets in Archive Arcana are built on a system-agnostic engine with system-specific templates layered on top. Each template defines the fields, and has one or more layouts that act as 'skins' for how the character sheets look.

Because of this generic setup we can support any system and you can even add homebrewed elements to existing systems or make your own system entirely.

When you link one page to another, Archive Arcana automatically creates a connection between those pages. This means that we can automatically show that connection both from the original page as the page that was linked to immediately. Making it easy to gain insight into the different connections across your realm.

Afterwards you can also label those connections to gain even more insight; marking certain relations as family, or vassals, or whatever is relevant in the context.

Players & Sharing

Yes! You can easily invite players to your realm. This is the core system Archive Arcana was built around. Players get their own access to pages for journals, and both you and your players can easily manipulate which (other) players can see the information that gets written down.

Every map, timeline, page, and even content section within a page, can have its visibility configured independently. You can set content to be visible to everyone, only to you (and the DM), to specific players, or to specific campaign groups.

This means you can have NPC pages with secret motives visible only to you, while players can still access the public-facing information.

No, a Realm's features and limits are determined by the subscription tier of the realm owner.

Data & Privacy

Your data is stored on servers within the European Union, owned by a European hosting provider, fully compliant with GDPR. We use encrypted connections and follow industry-standard security practices to protect your worlds, characters, and personal information.

As of writing multimedia storage is hosted with Cloudflare, so images are stored with a company that falls under the CLOUD act.

Yes. You can export your realm data at any time. We believe your worlds belong to you, not to us. Export options include structured data formats so you can keep a local backup or migrate if you ever need to.

Export remains available, even if you cancel your subscription. Within fair use we will never delete your data, even if you exceed your storage limits.

No, your worldbuilding content, campaign notes, and creative writing are yours alone. We do not train AI models, and we never aim to even integrate AI functionality directly into Archive Arcana.

With us your data is safe.

Currently, Archive Arcana requires an internet connection to function. We are exploring offline capabilities for viewing your information even if Wi-Fi fails mid-session.

Subscriptions

We do not offer a lifetime purchase at this time, as the hosting of Archive Arcana comes with ongoing costs that makes it infeasible for us to provide a lifetime offer.

If you are opposed to a subscription we do offer a generous free tier that we hope can help you in getting out of the platform what you need.

We do not have set discounts on offer. However, we want to stimulate creative writing and TTRPG play where we can. So if you're a student or teacher running a D&D club at school please reach out to students@archive-arcana.com from your school account and we'll see what we can do.

If you downgrade, you'll retain access to your current tier's features until the end of your billing period, then transition to the lower plan. Your content is never deleted. If you exceed the limits of the new plan, you simply won't be able to add to that content until you're within limits. But you'll still be able to access and use anything you have written before.

We offer a full, no questions asked, refund within 14 days of your first payment if you're not satisfied. For subsequent billing cycles, we handle refund requests on a case-by-case basis. Reach out to us and we'll work something out. We want you to feel good about supporting us, not feel locked in.