Story Flow

Four building blocks make up every Verhaler book:

• Book: the book itself. Title, cover, description, tags, and the price your reader pays.
• Chapters: where your story lives. A chapter holds paragraphs, headers, images, videos, and Triggers, in any order.
• Glossary Items: a small page for every character, place, item, or faction your story refers to. Each one carries its own facts, which the rest of the book can check and change as the story unfolds.
• Triggers: small event blocks you place in chapters. They react to what your reader has done: reveal a character or a hidden chapter, or open a Dice Template.

Then there are the seven Dynamic Components: Decision Templates, Dice Templates, Dialogue Templates, Combat Templates, Trade Screens, Calculations, and Backgrounds. These are the parts your reader plays through. You build each one once, name it, and a Trigger opens it when the story needs it. Two of them work a little differently: a Trigger never opens a Calculation (other pieces reference it instead), and a Background doesn't open at all; it changes what the page looks like.

Paragraphs are capped at 800 characters. If you type past the cap, the editor moves the last word into a new paragraph. If you backspace across the gap, the paragraphs merge again.

The cap exists for two reasons. Most readers are on phones, and short paragraphs read better on a small screen. The cap also lets the platform track where your reader is in the story.

The chapter order in your sidebar is for you, not your reader. Readers can move through chapters in a different order. The same chapter can be reached from several places, and some chapters only appear if something specific happened earlier.

Branching comes from Triggers. A Trigger can branch directly: it reveals a chapter or header your reader couldn't reach before. It can also branch indirectly: it fires a Decision Template or a Dice Template, and what your reader picks or rolls decides which paths open up.

Once your story has more than a couple of branches, the Story Canvas draws the whole shape: every chapter, choice, dice outcome, and dead end.

Dynamic Components live in their own sidebar tab; they don't sit inside your chapters. They reach your reader one way: a Trigger fires them. You point one of the Trigger's results at the Dynamic Component you want to run. When your reader reaches the Trigger and any conditions you've set are met, the component opens.

You build a Dynamic Component once and can fire it from any number of Triggers, in any number of chapters. The Dynamic Components overview covers what each kind does, and the Triggers page explains how to fire them.

Glossary Items aren't part of the reading path. They sit alongside it, and your reader can open them from mentions in your text. Each one carries:

• A short title and a one-line description.
• A wiki body: the same editor as chapters, but for reference reading rather than the story itself. Lore, descriptions, anything your reader might look up.
• A fact card: named values you and the rest of your book can check and change as things happen. Numbers, yes/no flags, lists, inventories.
• Optional item settings (for things your reader can carry and trade) and living-entity settings (for characters who can fight or hold a conversation).

To mention a Glossary Item anywhere in your text, type @ and pick it. Your reader can click a mention once that item's been revealed to them. The Glossary Items page covers all of this in detail.

Writing on Verhaler follows three steps:

1. Write. Draft chapters and Glossary Items in any order. Add Triggers where the story should react to what your reader does. Build your Dynamic Components in their own sidebar tab.
2. Test. Open Reading Simulation and play your own book. The editor switches to the reader's view, and you walk through the story as a real reader will. The Story Canvas lets you jump in at any point with earlier choices already made, so you don't have to replay everything from the start each time.
3. Publish. When you publish an expansion (new content on top of what's already out), Verhaler saves a Snapshot of it automatically. Readers who bought an earlier version keep reading the version they paid for, even while you keep editing the live book. See Publishing for how expansions work and how they stack.