Production

Arc

Jalaran Arc is a story planner that holds the beats you still intend to write across several episodes, and shows you when a setup has no payoff yet.

Open Arc →Create free account

Who Arc is for

For anyone writing a serialised story — a channel, a series, a campaign — who has ever planted something in episode two and realised in episode nine that they never paid it off. Arc is for the gap between what you meant to write and what you actually wrote.

What Arc does

Arc holds a named narrative thread per character with ordered beats classified as setup, development or payoff. The distinction that makes it useful is that Arc is a plan while its sibling Lore is a record: a beat can exist long before any script does, so the arc legitimately runs ahead of the work. A pure structural check runs on every read and reports when setups outnumber payoffs. It counts; it does not judge — it will not tell you which setup is unpaid, because deciding what pays off what is the writing.

Setup, development and payoff beats per character thread
Unpaired-setup detection that runs even when the AI is offline
Suggest-then-review — no AI beat is saved without your say-so
Markdown export with checkboxes reflecting what is actually written

How Arc works

Create an arc for a character
A named thread belonging to one character from your Lore bible.
Add beats in order
Each beat is a setup, a development or a payoff. Beats can exist before the episode that will contain them.
Watch for unpaired setups
A structural check compares totals on every read and flags when setups outnumber payoffs.
Ask for suggestions, then decide
AI proposes beats; nothing is written until you accept one. Suggestions are never auto-saved.
Export the plan
Markdown with task boxes, so an exported arc is still something you work through rather than a flat list.

What Arc does not do

Arc counts setups against payoffs; it does not identify which specific setup lacks a payoff, and it makes no claim about whether your story is good. Pairing a setup to its payoff is the authorial judgment the module deliberately declines to automate. It plans one character’s thread at a time rather than modelling an ensemble, and it does not schedule, estimate or track production — the production state of an episode is Slate’s job, and the two are deliberately independent.

Common questions

Will it tell me which setup I forgot to pay off?

No. It compares totals and tells you a gap exists. Identifying which thread is unresolved is exactly the writing decision it refuses to make for you.

Does the AI write beats into my arc automatically?

Never. Suggestions are returned for review and you add the ones you want through the ordinary editing flow. Nothing is written to your plan without an explicit action.