Dankstory

Family trees for fiction

Family trees for the families you invent

Dankstory is a free family tree maker for fictional families (fantasy houses, royal lines, sci-fi clans, your original characters) that works in your browser, on a phone or a desktop, with no sign-up.

Make a family tree
Example family tree of the invented House Varrow of Emberfell: Lord Aldric Varrow and Isolde Marrin at the top, their children and in-laws below, four generations in all, each box in its house colour with a crest, including a separated couple, an adopted son, a fostered ward and a child whose other parent is unknown, with a legend of the nine houses underneath.
The example family, exported as SVG by the tree maker itself. It loads in one tap on the tree page.

Made for fiction, not genealogy records

Each person has a name, a title and a house (with its own colour and crest), and free-text birth and death dates, so "Year 312 of the Third Age" works as well as a real year. A person can marry several times, in order; a couple can be married, partners or separated; a child can be adopted or have an unknown other parent. The chart lays itself out one generation per row, and every change can be undone.

Already have a family in a genealogy app? Save it as a GEDCOM file (.ged, version 5.5.1, which most programs export), open it on the tree page and print it as a poster. In our test, a file of 5,000 people opened and drew in 1.1 seconds (5.3 with the processor slowed four times, as on a modest phone), and Find jumps to anyone in it by name. The file is read in this browser; nothing is uploaded.

Family tree maker Draw the family yourself or generate one to start from. Paste rows of names and parents from Excel or Google Sheets, or open a CSV, and the tree draws itself; save it back as a spreadsheet. Each house gets a coat of arms you can redesign; GEDCOM goes in and out with places and marriage dates; any person's descendants print as their own chart; Related? names how two people are related; and the date check lists every parent too young and every loop. An hourglass chart prints one person with their ancestors above and descendants below, or as a blank form to fill in by hand. For two relatives, a cousin chart counts the generations down from the ancestor they share, marks where they meet (first cousins, second cousins once removed) and prints. Print it in black ink for a book's pages (houses told apart by hatching, arms in the heralds' engraved lines) or in a vintage style on drawn paper with a frame, under your own title. Make a family tree Fantasy family tree maker Give each people of your world its own lifespan and age of adulthood, and the date check judges every parent by their own people's clock: a 40-year-old is a grown parent among a people who come of age at 16, and a child among one who come of age at 100. One tap loads the D&D 5e peoples, from dwarf to tiefling, with the ages the free SRD 5.1 rules give. Make a fantasy family tree Royal dynasty family tree Pick the current ruler and a rule (absolute or male-preference primogeniture, male line only) and the line of succession numbers every heir on the chart. Each person's inbreeding coefficient is worked out from the tree's birth-parent links, with the cousin marriage that caused it and a list of the ten most inbred in the dynasty. Make a royal family tree Pantheon maker The family tree of the gods you invented: each box shows a god's name and domains, a god with one parent can be born of the first storm in place of the unknown-parent box, and each generation can carry a name, such as The Elder Gods. Or generate a pantheon of 10 to 20 gods over 3 or 4 generations, each with its own domains and none used twice, and edit it from there. Make a pantheon Story timeline maker Plot lines and characters as tracks, events and reigns as bars, and your world's own eras: type "Year 12 of the Age of Lanterns" and the page places it on one axis. With a calendar, events in the same year line up in day order, and each character's age shows at every event. Open a GEDCOM file onto the timeline and everyone's births, marriages and deaths land on their real dates, one track per surname or per house. Paste events from a spreadsheet and they land in your own eras, tracks and chapters; save them back as a CSV. Make a timeline Timeline for writers Give each scene a chapter and a POV, then switch between story order and world order, with flashbacks flagged. Export outline prints your book scene by scene or saves it as Markdown, plain text or CSV, with characters' ages at each scene. Plan a novel Worldbuilding timeline A fantasy timeline for thousands of years of your world's history: ages as eras, each nation or people a track that rises and falls. Add up to four dating systems, each nation's own count of years (one can count down, as years before a founding do), and every event card shows its year in each of them side by side; type an event's year in any of them, or read the ruler in one. Build a world's history Plot grid for novelists Your novel outline as a grid: chapters down the side, plot lines across, each scene a card in its cell, so the empty cells show where a thread goes quiet. Tap a cell to add a scene, move cards between chapters and plot lines, title and insert chapters; print it across several sheets or save a CSV with one row per chapter. It is the same file as the timeline for writers. Lay out a plot grid Plot diagram maker Pick a plot diagram (Freytag pyramid), a story mountain, a Fichtean curve of 2 to 6 crises or a three-act arc, and write what happens at each point; switching shape keeps your text. Print it on one A4 or Letter page filled in, or blank with lines to write on and a one-line definition under each label, for a class handout. Draw a plot diagram Word count tracker for writers Set a word goal and a deadline, or one tap for 50,000 words in 30 days starting 1 November, then log each day's words or your manuscript's new total. It shows the words a day you need to finish on time, your projected finish at your 7-day pace, your streak, a chart against the on-pace line and a calendar of every day. Several projects, each its own file; CSV, chart PNG and SVG, a progress card and a one-sheet print. Track your word count Manuscript word counter Open your .docx, .odt, Markdown or text file and see the words in every chapter and scene: split by Heading 1, Heading 2, "Chapter 12" lines or a marker you choose, with the longest, shortest and median chapter, reading time and a bar chart. The file is read in this browser and never uploaded; save the table as a CSV. Count my chapters Manuscript format Open your .docx, .odt, Markdown or text manuscript and download it as a .docx in standard manuscript format, following William Shunn's guide: 12 pt Times New Roman, double-spaced, half-inch indents, the Surname / Title / page header, a title page for a novel or the contact block for a short story, # for scene breaks and the word count rounded. Italics, bold and chapters are kept; nothing is uploaded. Format my manuscript Story bible Gather what you keep here into one story bible: every character from your family trees with their sheet (family, wants, fears, flaw, arc), the houses, your timelines in story order and world order, the calendar's months and moons, the relationship map's ties and the plot grid's chapter outline. Add your own premise, places, rules of the world, themes and glossary, put the sections in your order, and print it with a title page and contents, or save it as a .docx. Make my story bible Fantasy calendar maker Your world's months, festival days outside them, a week of any length and a leap rule with exceptions, plus seasons, holidays and moons with their phases. Put events on its days, from one-off session notes to holidays that repeat by rule, like the first full moon after the thaw. Print any year, keep your campaign's "today" and move it on, or generate a calendar to start from. The timeline maker can use it for full dates. Make a calendar Fan chart maker Anyone's ancestors as a half or full circle, 4 to 7 generations, father's side on the left and mother's on the right, drawn from the tree you made here or from a GEDCOM file. Or print a blank fan with numbered segments to fill in by hand. Make a fan chart Pedigree chart maker The classic numbered ancestor chart: 4 or 5 generations on one A4 or Letter page, continued on chart 2, 3, 4 as far back as your tree goes, printed as one PDF. From your tree or a GEDCOM file, or blank with writing lines. Make a pedigree chart Character relationship map Your cast on one circle: who is family, in love, friends, allies, rivals or enemies, who mentors and who serves whom. Each kind of line has its own colour and dash pattern, so the map reads in black-and-white print too. Tap two characters to link them, drag anyone where you want them, give each a group colour and a picture; export PNG, SVG or a one-page print, with no watermark. Make a relationship map

Your work in this browser

Every tree, timeline, calendar, map, plot grid, plot diagram, story bible and word log you make here is kept in this browser's storage, on this device only. Each tool saves its own file; Back up everything saves all of them at once, as one file you keep. Restore from a backup opens that file here or on another device, shows what each item would add or replace before anything changes, and can be undone. To gather them into one document to print or save as a .docx, make a story bible.

Why it matters: Safari, and most browsers on an iPhone or iPad (Apple has them run on Safari's engine, WebKit), may delete what a site keeps after seven days of use without a visit to that site. WebKit's own announcement says Safari deletes "all of a website’s script-writable storage after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site", and names LocalStorage, where Dankstory keeps your work (WebKit blog, 24 March 2020: webkit.org/blog/10218). A web app added to the home screen keeps its own count of days. Clearing site data, or a private window closing, deletes it in every browser.

This page has not looked at this browser's storage yet. Last backup: never.

The backup file is made in this browser and downloaded to your device; nothing is sent anywhere. It holds the exact text each tool keeps, so a restored tree opens just as it was. A damaged file, another kind of file or one from a newer version of Dankstory is refused and nothing is changed; an item its own tool would refuse is skipped with a message.

Made with AI tools.