What is Fateweaver?
This was one of the first Self Promo Saturday discoveries that I made on Twitter @FateweaverTTRPG. Fateweaver is a web app designed to help worldbuilders, GMs, and TTRPG players keep track of their notes in a visual, linked format. Your world is connected, your notes should show you how in a lovely visual webbed map. This program is developed by Scott Davis who worked hard to create the program.
When you first go into Fateweaver there is an example map that goes through Critical Role, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings to demonstrate what you can connect together on a visual map. The graphs that this program creates use the notes that you type in to give a colored map to show different relationships based on tags and factions. You are able to tag the notes you add in by type, properties and even let you put your own labels to help you build the relationships specific to your campaign that you want to connect. I also like that you can do what is called "Tag inheritance" where you can connect tags together, more on that later.
Fateweaver is still early in development, which started with a design phase in January 2020, and development began in March 2020. The program is run and hosted by one individual (Scott) and from what I see on Twitter is very interested in feedback and continued improvement on the program.
What do you get?
Fate weaver is a program in which you get to create a "campaign" for each of your different campaigns/games/ things you want to organize and make a visual map out of. I have created 5 "campaigns" in the Fateweaver program and as you create your own each has a cog wheel where you can change the name or add a paragraph detailing what it is. Just note anything that you type in the cogwheel will not show up under the name on the campaign page so clearly label which they are by name, but know all the detailed notes are available to read when you go back into the cog. Once you decide which campaign you want to work on you click on the little arrow and off you go.
I Made a Campaign, Now What?
Fill it with your stuff! This image shows the start of my Saltmarsh group. Each of my players has their character entered in, and I love that you can add artwork in as well. Don't worry, the image on the left is just the start of my new campaign, there will be a lot more dots and lines as I start connecting things together but I wanted to show how I am personally starting to build a note map of my own using Fateweaver.
When going in to type the notes I was pleased to find that it's a word processor of its own. You get everything you would want from a basic word document from the ability to underline, bold and italics for text. You get paragraph formatting. Most unexpected but appreciated was also a word counter at the bottom corner. You can also add images. You can add an image of your characters here. If you are doing a location you could add the image of a map with the description of all the rooms. Say you are world building, you can do one dot on your Fateweaver as the name of the world, then make a separate relation for each kingdom, and then make it a parent tag to each of the main locations of that kingdom and each one can have their own detailed maps.
Premade for you to start using are the following categories: Entities, Events, Battle, Character, Item, Location, Party and Quest. I enjoy that these are the base line as these are the categories that I naturally have the most notes about as a DM. You can connect events and side quests together in a way that if something doesn't happen in the line of events you can see what the consequences would be. I also enjoy that there is a Party feature as sometimes you may have more than one party exploring the same world or campaign setting.
Customization
What I really enjoy is that you can add as many tags and attributes that you like to add to your notes to make them as detailed as you like. I am one who likes to take detailed notes (many of my games the players don't take notes or they take an over amount of notes and will expect that I remember what they're talking about from sessions ago) so the more details that I can add the better in my opinion. Want to add every single NPC for a location, you can do that. Want to make sure that you have every single item at the shop is accounted for? You can add prices, weight and descriptions to a full inventory at a shop; including what is in the shopkeepers pocket just in case of pick pocketing.
You can also change the colors that the threads of your map and tags have. You control the background color and text color for each tag under tag manager. Under tag manager you can add new tags under the Entity, Event and Relationship categories.
When on the main map you can also click the cog wheel to turn on drag and drop linking to make more connections for easy relationship building!
The Great Things
hosted by a server and can be accesed by different devices using your username and password
Free service! If you love what is going on you can help support the cost of hosting this by donating here.
Lots of different pre-created categories to fill with your content in order to build and connect your work together in a visual map
the ability to add your own tags through a tag manager
pretty user friendly, buttons are clean and labeled with a purpose.
If you have lots of rows of items you can do up to 25 row a page and it will allow you to use arrows to go back and forth through the pages.
you can click and drag the dots on the Fateweaver map to make patterns and designs of your own making (or if you like to have certain things clumped together you can do that as well)
The Things to be Improved Upon
program is sometimes slow to respond. As a fast typer, sometimes I will click on a description box and start typing and it will start on my third or fourth word. This also includes that sometimes you'll hit a button, nothing happens so when you hit it again then two pop up.
Random logging out of program when going between pages/campaigns
Things appear in your Categories/Tags list in a form that I can't make out. It's not alphabetical or by tags. I think that you're supposed to be able to click on name, image and tags as they are clickable things but the do not reorganize the listings.
I'm having trouble getting the add relationship types to work kindly on my computer even. When creating new relationships (as in the picture below) I can type new relationship types in, see the add button but no matter how hard I try it defaults to "knows." Going into the tag manager I can fix this however.
Thoughts From the Fox
I wanted to start this review with the fact that I really enjoy this program. Fateweaver is something that I am excited to share with our little TTRPG community and review. A few things of note, this project is in continual progress and I want to state that I am giving a fair an honest review of Fateweaver as it is right now, but I am excited to see the continual growth of this program. Though this review does have some critiques as it is not perfect and a bit slow at times, I personally plan on continuing to use Fateweaver as it helps me stay organized.
I 100% agree with Scott the maker that Fateweaver is best used on PC. I tried both my iPad and on my computer and I encountered more random issues and a slower (and much smaller screened) program on the iPad in comparison to the PC. The PC made it a smoother user experience.
How Do I Get Fateweaver?
You can find their linktr.ee here. I first found out about them through Twitter, but you can go straight to the site at www.fateweaver.io/. The program is free to use but you can support Fateweaver and Scott through their patreon or ko-fi.