Your vault, imported.Your links, understood.

Why fiction writers love Obsidian

Obsidian keeps your notes as plain Markdown files in a folder on your own machine, which it calls a vault. You link notes with double square brackets, see every backlink to a note, and watch the graph view grow as the world fills in. Community plugins add a great deal more, and because the files are plain text, nothing is trapped inside the app.

For worldbuilding that is close to ideal: a note per character, a note per city, a folder of history, all cross-linked. Many writers draft their chapters in the same vault, so the whole project sits in one place they control and can back up however they like.

Where links stop and a story begins

A link says two notes are related. It doesn’t say what happened. Your note on the duke links to the city he rules, but nothing in the vault knows that he was exiled in chapter eighteen, that the reader learned his real name in chapter twenty-two, or that two chapters later you wrote him back on the throne by mistake. The vault is exactly as current as the last time you edited each note by hand.

Fiction also runs in time, and notes don’t. A relationship that starts as rivals and ends in marriage is a single line on the graph. Which characters have met by chapter ten is invisible. These are the facts that cause continuity errors in a long book, and they live in the prose, not in the notes about it.

What Authrot reads from your chapters

Authrot treats the chapters as the source of truth. A chapter reading records who appears, what happens, who has met whom, and the setups planted, each tied to the words that established it. Facts that change are kept with the chapter they change in, and flashbacks follow story time, so a scene set years earlier sees the right past rather than the present.

Relationships come out of the text the same way. Connections draws the cast as a web, a circle, or everything around one character, and each tie knows the chapter it starts in and the one it ends in. Slide back to chapter ten and you see the story as it stood then, before the betrayal you wrote in chapter thirty.

• Four kinds of reference: named, referred to, relied on, and shaping a scene unmentioned
• Facts over time on every entry, and anchored facts that must never change
• Screen time for the cast across every chapter
• Every plot thread drawn down the chapters, with the quiet ones flagged

Importing an Obsidian vault

Drop the vault folder into the import dialog, or zip it first. Files are read in your browser. The .obsidian settings folder and other dot-folders are skipped, and images and other files that aren’t documents are summed up in one line rather than imported. Folders are read in order, with a leading number sorting first, so “3 - Midpoint” comes before “12 - Climax”.

Front matter is read whatever tool wrote it. A title, an order, a type such as chapter, character or location, a book, a summary and aliases are picked up under the names writers commonly give them. A [[Target|alias]] link becomes the alias in your text, and its target is passed to the bible as a hint. Embeds and %% comments %% are dropped from the text.

Chapters numbered in their file names or front matter arrive in order. If nothing gives an order, the Reading order list says no chapter numbers were found, so you can drag them into place before anything is read. That matters more than it sounds: each chapter is read against the ones before it.

• A folder named Characters, World or Notes sends its files to the matching place
• A note whose front matter says it is a character becomes one bible entry
• Folders named like Book Two start a new book
• Other front matter fields on a character sheet go to the bible with it

Working in Authrot after the move

The habits carry over. Type [[ in a chapter to link a name to its entry, or select a name and link it; it’s free and works with the AI off. Near-duplicates (two notes that were really the same character) are caught and can be merged, with every reference and tie moving too. Notes, outlines and ideas still sit beside the manuscript, and project search finds chapters, notes and entries at once.

If you want the files back, export the book to Markdown, one file or one per book, along with the bible, notes, plans and story map. Download my data gives you everything as a file whenever you like, so your work is never stuck in one place.

If your vault has a style note (tense, point of view, words you never use), it can become writing rules: must, should, avoid and never. A note titled like a style guide is read for those rules on import. The AI holds them on every line it writes, and chapter readings check your chapters against them.

When to stay with Obsidian

If your notes are the project (a setting for a tabletop campaign, a lore archive with no manuscript), or you depend on particular plugins, Obsidian is the better fit. It is also the right choice if you want every file on your own disk and nowhere else: Authrot keeps your project online so co-authors can work in it live and every device opens the same book.

Some writers keep their research vault in Obsidian and bring across only the manuscript and the character notes that matter to it. The import doesn’t mind whether you bring everything or a single folder.