Getting Started
Your first universe, from idea to first story
On Anthologist, your job is to build the world. The AI's job is to write the stories.
As a creator, you define the universe — its lore, its characters, its tone, and the story ideas you want explored. You curate what gets written and decide what becomes canon. No prompting experience is required; the platform handles the generation side entirely. What it needs from you is a living, well-tended world to draw from.
The sections below walk you through the four surfaces you'll spend most of your time in, and what each one is for.
Creating Your Universe
Everything begins on the Edit World page. This is where you give your universe its identity — its name, its genre, its tone, and the foundational details that will shape every story generated within it. Think of it less as filling out a form and more as writing the back cover of a book that doesn't exist yet.
When you create a universe, you are its founder and administrator — the creative authority and the person responsible for keeping it running. A universe can stay a solo project indefinitely. But if you want to bring others in, you can invite admins to help manage the world and editors to contribute to the story queue and shape the growing canon.
Once the Edit World page is complete, two surfaces become your primary working environment: the wiki and the story backlog.
Building the Skeleton
The Wiki page is the skeleton of your universe. Not the brain — that's you and your editors — but the structural foundation that holds everything upright and coherent. It's where you document the world's lore: its history, its factions, its characters, the rules that govern how it works.
Before your first story generates, it's worth spending time here. The richer the wiki, the more grounded and consistent the stories will feel. As your universe grows, the wiki grows with it — each published story adds to the canon, and it's the editorial team's job to keep that record accurate and alive.
Filling the Queue
The Backlog page is your editorial queue — the list of story ideas waiting to become stories. You and your editors add entries here: a character's arc to explore, a moment in the world's history, a conflict that's been building in the lore. The platform works from this queue in order, generating one story per entry.
This is how you stay in creative control of what your universe produces next. An empty queue means no new stories are generated automatically, so keeping it stocked is one of the most important habits of an active editorial team.
Credits & Generation
Each time a story generates, it draws from your universe's credit balance. Every new universe starts with enough credits to get going — no upfront cost required. When you need more, you can add them from your Profile page.
Credits are the only cost on the platform. There are no subscription fees, no advertising, and no paywall on published stories — everything Anthologist generates is free to read.