The Journal
The Journal is your campaign log and director's notebook. Open it via the right-edge Journal tab in the world view. It has four tabs.
World
Per-settlement notes and directives. Active notes are woven into the next day's events, so a note like "There's a smuggling operation under the docks" will start showing up in NPC moods and overnight events.
You can add notes to specific settlements, mark them as active or inactive, edit, and delete. A note set to inactive doesn't influence the world but stays around for reference.
Story
The world-level narrative summary:
- Story so far — a rolling summary of the major beats, automatically updated as you play.
- Recent day summaries — what happened on each of the recent days.
- Settlement stories — per-settlement mega-summaries, one paragraph per settlement of how the local situation has evolved.
- Today's progress — what's happened today so far and which NPCs have been active.
This tab updates live while it's open.
Characters
A list of every NPC you've interacted with, filterable by settlement. Click one to see:
- The NPC's portrait, role, and current disposition toward you.
- All their memories, color-coded by type:
- Player (green) — your direct conversations
- Gossip (yellow) — what they heard from other NPCs
- Reaction (purple) — their emotional response to relevant gossip
- Injected (blue) — memories you manually added
- Search across all their memories by keyword.
- Pin important memories so they're always included in the NPC's context during conversations.
- Inject new memories — write something and it becomes part of the NPC's knowledge.
- Actions — move the NPC to your current location, or send them home.
Hero plan accounts get longer NPC memories before they start getting compressed.
Preferences
This is where you tell RPBuddy what kind of story you want. Setting these is optional but highly recommended — they shape everything from the NPCs' moods to which kinds of events show up overnight.
- Genres — pick one or more. Crosses between genres are fine (e.g., medieval fantasy + romance + mystery).
- Backstory hooks — free text. A few sentences about your character's history, current goals, what makes them tick.
- Tone — light, balanced, dark, etc.
- Pacing — slow burn, steady, fast.
- Agency — guided, balanced, sandbox. How proactive should the world be?
- Avoidances — things you don't want to encounter (specific themes, topics, etc.). RPBuddy already filters the obvious things automatically; this is for personal preferences on top of that.
- Surprise me — toggle on to let RPBuddy pick everything for you.
Changes here don't reset the world — they take effect on the next day advance and the next NPC interaction.
Start New Story
At the bottom of the Preferences tab, Start New Story resets the narrative state — Story So Far and day summaries are cleared so you can begin a new arc in the same world. NPC memories, relationships, and inventory are preserved.