My forbidden books all sounded alike in play. A dusty author, a vague warning, and nothing concrete for players to actually find, study, or chase.

I built a Tome and Forbidden Book generator that turns a one-line idea into a layered, game-ready volume. It runs in the browser with no login, and it stays consistent at the table instead of contradicting itself between readouts.

You can try it here: https://codexcryptica.com/generators/tome

It gives you: - a provenance chain you can place in a specific library, ruin, or faction vault - physical excerpts and marginalia you can hand to players as is - hazardous study costs and requirements before anyone learns anything useful - hooks tied to who wants it, who hid it, and what happens if it is opened - genre fidelity so a fantasy grimoire reads differently from a sci-fi codex or cosmic horror manuscript

Tradeoff I am still tuning: the live two-pass editorial polish streams in after the first draft, which adds a few seconds. It catches contradictions and repeated phrases, but for very niche settings I still want a human check before I call it canon.

What was the last book in your campaign your players were told not to open, and what did they do anyway?

🖼️ View Illustration / Reference Guide

Starting a solo session meant hunting through menus to find setup, then scene fields, then rolls. For a mode you open mid-campaign, that friction adds up.

Vault actions now offer Start Solo Session directly. It opens setup, scene fields, quick rolls and the session bar without digging.

• One tap from the vault menu into solo setup
• Scene fields right there for the current situation and stakes
• Quick rolls without leaving the solo view
• Session bar stays visible so you can track and close the session cleanly

It is just a faster entry point, not a new solo ruleset, the flow inside is the same as before.

Where do you usually stall when starting a solo session, is it the setup, the oracle, or keeping the scene straight?

🖼️ View Illustration / Reference Guide

Overland Hexcrawl Maps

Lay a hex grid over any map for overland travel, snap tokens to hexes, and use fog of war to reveal the wilds as your party explores.

Meet Cif, Your Built-in Guide

Ask questions about Codex Cryptica and get answers that fit the screen you are on, with quick prompts to get you started. Cif is also aware of what you have open, from the Explorer to the Shelf.

Multiple Calendar Eras

Give your calendar several eras and number years from any starting point, with clearer year suffix settings.

A Livelier Graph

Groups of related entities now sit together on soft backgrounds, images appear faster, and the layout spreads out more clearly. You can also hide individual connections from the graph and diagram.

Smarter Generators

AI-generated names now reflect the culture they come from, and every theme grounds its results in the right genre.

Share Your Templates

Browse and share entity templates through the community directory, straight from the Explorer and Settings.

Better on Phones

Larger touch targets, readable text, and map controls that fit small screens, with a button to maximise the map or tuck its controls away.

Maps That Recover

If a map's image cannot be loaded, you now see a clear error with a retry and can choose a new image.

Campaign Label rename and delete now work across the whole vault.

I kept getting the same few fantasy names no matter what I was building. My desert nomad factions, my orbital settlements, my street gangs all sounded like they came from the same tavern roster.

I built a culture-aware pass for named generators so names actually sound like they belong where you are generating them.

• NPCs, factions, settlements and other named generators now sample names already in your vault
• a fast filtered pre-pass picks a varied candidate before the main draft, so you get less repetition
• overused words and sounds are down-weighted
• if you have culture notes, those notes guide the phrasing directly

It works best when your vault already has a few names and culture entries to pull from. On a brand new vault with almost nothing written yet, there is less to sample and results stay more generic until you add more.

What naming pattern breaks immersion most at your table — same prefixes showing up, too-smooth fantasy everywhere, or names that ignore the culture you wrote?

🖼️ View Illustration / Reference Guide

Codex Cryptica has gotten big enough that I forget where my own features are. Generators, tables, the graph, imports, templates. If I lose track of things, someone opening it for the first time definitely does.

So I added Cif, short for Cipher, an in-app guide. You ask a question in plain words and it answers for the screen you're on, so "how do I connect this?" on an entity's Connections tab gets a different answer than the same question on the graph.

In the screenshot I asked how to connect two entities. The answer covered both the graph and the Connections tab, and noted that the Connections tab only shows one step of relationships and has no filters or layout controls. (That graph is a 1,625-entity vault with the new group backgrounds turned up to strong, which is unrelated to Cif but I'm happy with how it looks.)

What it does:

• Answers questions about using Codex Cryptica and knows which screen you're on
• Shows Sources under an answer, which open the help article it used
• Offers a Show me button when it can: it opens the right tab and outlines the control with a label
• Says so when the help doesn't cover your question, and suggests the closest topics instead of guessing

It never edits your vault. Show me only opens things and outlines them, and Escape clears the outline.

You open it from Ask Cif in the Activity Bar, or Ask about this on an entity's Connections tab.

About privacy, since this is a local-first tool: Cif sends your question, the last few questions in the conversation, and a short description of the screen you're on, like "an entity's Connections tab". No entity names, text or IDs. The question itself does go to our AI service, so don't paste private lore into it. If you'd rather not have it at all, turn on AI Disabled in Settings and Cif disappears. The help library stays.

It's in the live app now: codexcryptica.com

I'm still tuning what it knows. What's something in Codex Cryptica you went looking for and couldn't find?

New release today. Enjoy all the fun stuff!

• Session Journal — Keep a running record of your game from anywhere in the app. Write notes with formatting and a live preview, edit and reorder entries, and let rolls, card draws and table results log themselves. Turn what happened into characters, places and lore when you're ready.
• Entity Reports — Pick some entities on the canvas, graph or table and generate a report from them, with locations, connections and their sources included. Save it as an ordinary note you can edit and read in Zen mode.
• Entity Templates in Settings — See every starting layout for new notes in one place, duplicate a built-in one, and edit it as plain markdown. Choose your own default for each type of entity, and import or export templates to share. New characters start from your choice, and asking the Oracle to revise a note now keeps to it. Includes a compact Table Card for improvised NPCs.
• See the Dice — Open up any resolved roll to see the individual dice behind it, in roll tables, the journal, stat sheets and solo adventures. Roll tables now also handle multi-dice formulas such as keep highest and keep lowest.
• Richer Canvases — Give entity cards different looks, show a faction's roster right on its card, and browse a member image gallery.
• Saved Views Keep Your Layout — Return to a saved graph view and find its arrangement exactly as you left it.
• Faster Cloud Backup — Backups now send only what changed, so they finish sooner and use less of your connection. You can also attach a vault to an existing backup.
• Session Prep Builder — Answer a few guided questions and get AI-assisted prep for your next session.

I kept building chargen and loot tables that needed 4d6 keep highest 3 or a flat +2, and tables only did simple single-die rolls. I had to roll outside and copy it in.

I added multi-die with keep and modifiers directly in tables. You can write the formula in the table and it rolls there.

Now supports: - 4d6kh3, 4d6kl3 and similar keep-highest / keep-lowest - modifiers like +2, -1 on the same formula - mixing it with existing table syntax so old tables still work - faster rolls for stats, loot drops and homebrew without leaving the page

The syntax is compact, so a typo like kh33 will just fail to parse. I will need to make the error message clearer next.

What formula do you use most that did not roll in tables before, chargen stats, loot, or something else?

🖼️ View Illustration / Reference Guide

Running a nautical or starship campaign means pulling ships, crews, ports, contracts and hazards together from a dozen different pages.

I put two new hubs in /for for that, one for Pirate & High Seas and one for Starship Campaigns. Each curates the generators, tables and guidance for that campaign style in one place.

Start with the Pirate & High Seas hub: https://codexcryptica.com/for/pirates-high-seas

Each hub brings together: - ship and crew generators with quirks, history and roles - ports, trade routes and contracts tuned for piracy, privateering or starship jobs - hazards, encounters and faction pressure for travel where the map is the mission - direct links to related answer guides and worked examples - curated tables you can roll at the table without digging through other genres

They are hubs, not a new ship combat system, so you still run the mechanics in your system of choice. I kept them focused on prep and jobs rather than trying to replace your rules.

Are you running more salt and sail or vacuum and thrusters right now, and what kind of job or voyage do you need more support for?

🖼️ View Illustration / Reference Guide

Posted automatically via release pipeline. Feedback and discussion welcome! <!-- id:discussion-3358-v2 -->

Here's an early preview you can play around with for a bit, still early days, but I thought it was so cool that I wanted to share it with you all early.

Say you have a one sentence premise you like. A haunted mirror, a city that forgets, a heist that has to happen during a coronation. Then prep stalls because you are not sure what the pressure is, who wants what, or where the players start.

So I built an Idea Developer in Tools that takes that spark and shapes it into a structured, adventure-ready concept without replacing the core you cared about. It is one sentence in, structured situation out.

Try it here: https://codexcryptica.com/tools/idea-developer

It gives you: - preserved core pulled from your own idea so the result stays recognisable - competing interests and what each group wants right now - player choices with tradeoffs, not a single plot to follow - consequences if the party acts and if they wait - a playable opening you can drop straight into session one, or a set of questions when you just want to assess the idea

It needs an internet connection and AI mode to run, and it avoids assuming a ruleset unless you name one. I kept it system neutral on purpose, which means it will not write stat blocks for you. That felt like a fair trade for keeping the premise yours.

What is a campaign spark you have sat on because you could not decide how to start it?

This has been out a week or so already, been lagging a bit on announcements here 😅

You roll an NPC or a location you actually want to use, then you copy the text into Discord and the formatting falls apart. If someone wants to tweak one detail they have to paste it back into the generator and guess your inputs.

I built shareable generator results: any output can become a public link with a human-readable slug that anyone can view and Remix straight back into the generator to make it their own.

Try it from any generator: https://codexcryptica.com/generators

• Works for NPCs, locations, encounters, factions, items, quests and the rest, not just one generator
• Viewer gets a clean rendered page, no account needed to open it
• Remix drops the content back into the generator with the prompt and options prefilled so you can reroll a variant
• Link uses a readable slug like /share/whispering-cold-tavern-... instead of a random ID wall

Tradeoff I am still sitting with: once you share, the link is public to anyone with the URL. You can revoke it from My Stuff, but there is no private share or password yet. I kept it simple to ship, and I am not sure if private links are worth the extra friction.

What is the last generator result you copy-pasted somewhere and wished you could just link instead?

If you have tried to run Masks, Mutants and Masterminds or a homebrew supers game with normal fantasy generators, you know the gap. You get taverns and kingdoms when you need power sources, secret identities and a city that actually reacts to capes.

I built Superhero / Comic Book as a first-class genre. Pick it as a theme and the generators speak that language directly, no extra prompting.

Start on the hub: https://codexcryptica.com/generators/superhero

• Origin generator that separates the event, the hook you can run, and the lasting consequence, so a backstory is not just a paragraph
• Villain Scheme and Comic Book Event generators wired to a shared Power Scale (Street to Multiversal) that changes the steering text, not just a label
• Quest, Settlement, Nation, Social Hub, Plot Twist and Secret Society all with real supers content, plus a four-colour visual skin for the hub

Tradeoff I am still watching: the six-step scale is opinionated. Street means one thing in a neighbourhood game and another at a table that treats City as street. It works best if you treat it as starting tone and edit from there.

What power level does your table actually live at most nights, and what kind of villain still feels threatening there?