A local-first workbench that turns novels into storyboards and TTRPGs

What it does

StoryForge (故事熔炉) is a TypeScript/React app for AI-assisted narrative creation: long-form and short fiction, scripts, and comic/motion-drama material. Its “motion drama” pipeline takes a one-line premise or an existing novel and walks it through series bibles, episode planning, character/scene/prop assets, beat scripts, storyboards, and reference frames — ending in adapter packs for tools like Seedance, Runway, or LTX. It also ships a world engine: you can fork a world from your manuscript and build interactive experiences, including an AI-refereed tabletop RPG with an original 2d6 ruleset.

The interesting bit

Everything is local-first, stored in IndexedDB via Dexie, with a deliberate data lifecycle: PROJECT_TABLES unifies backup/import/migration, and a Context Gateway (CONTEXT_SOURCES + assembleContext()) tracks where every piece of AI context came from, while FIELD_REGISTRY + adopt() gates what gets written back into the official manuscript. That’s an unusual amount of provenance engineering for a writing tool — most AI writing apps just hope for the best.

Key highlights

• Runs fully offline in the browser; works with cloud APIs, Ollama/LM Studio, or a local Codex app-server reusing your logged-in ChatGPT account (text only, no API key).
• Ships playable built-in works: a no-API visual novel/text adventure (18 nodes, 158 beats, 3 endings) and three 3D narrative games rendered with Three.js — no game engine required.
• Plugin system with .sfplugin packages, a public SDK, and 12 reference packs (notes, cards, calendars, timelines, plot boards, node flows); a community workshop site for discovery.
• Node-graph preview mode: drag nodes, wire ports, run to a specific node, and adopt candidates back into the long-form manuscript chain.
• Frozen, versioned worlds: derivative products read from a SourcePlan and own their own assets, so playing a game never rewrites the source novel.

Caveats

• Node mode, interactive products, and Plugin API 1 / SDK 0.1 are explicitly labeled previews; cross-mode acceptance testing is still ongoing.
• The Codex channel is text-only, subject to your subscription’s model and usage limits, and won’t auto-retry or fail over to other APIs.
• Motion-drama output stops before video generation — editing, voice, and final assembly happen in external tools, and adapter packs don’t guarantee third-party plan support.

Verdict

Worth a look if you write fiction and want AI assistance with actual provenance and version control instead of a chat box. If you wanted a turnkey video pipeline or production-ready multiplayer TTRPG hosting, the README is upfront that those aren’t done yet.