Braden Lanes sound pretty cool! One thing I'd love to see from a timeline feature is to be able to show certain periods and lanes of the timeline for a given page, i.e. queries and views supporting filters on both, and embeddable elements to display the results of the query. Maybe even allow those query params to be set as metadata on the page or even template type.

Say I have a project for a world with 1,000 years of history captured on a timeline. In this project, I have a page for a city. It would be cool to be able to have city-based events (as a dedicated lane) on the project's timeline, but only display the events for the 200 year history of the city on its page/a tab on its page.

That's probably beyond MVP, but context-aware timeline views would be dope.

Chris Dudley: Very cool! Yes, our ultimate "data" vision for LK is to have every view embeddable with a query attached, so that we can use sources of truth as "lenses" based on context.

i plan to have at least one timeline that is for the alternate history of the campaign. Since it’s based on an existing setting that has been homebrewed I’d like to show were canon events branched off into Homebrew.

And a player in the game I run run has been keeping their own adventure log, so I expect they are going to want to be able to record story events in a personal timeline.

Lastly, there are some family trees that I want to document. I’m looking forward to be able to build that and to possibly show parallels with other, separate timelines. Perhaps that will be how I use lanes.

Braden I plan to primarily use a single timeline so there's one source of truth and I don't have to worry about something off in a corner getting out of sync if I change something. I'd be starting off with a few dozen events on the timeline, and I don't expect I'd exceed a couple hundred - though it might be neat/useful to keep session notes or major campaign events on the timeline as well (I use LK to track lore for my D&D setting), which might significantly increase the number. I really like Chris Dudley's notion of sub-views of a larger timeline - sourcing the same primary page for consistency, but narrowing the view down to just what's relevant to a particular page or idea. I also think it would be really helpful to have different levels of detail be possible on the larger timeline, much like how pins on some map sites will group or hide pins as you zoom out. Seeing every event on an entire timeline might be unreadable, so I'd like to be able to configure which events should stand out when some have to be hidden.

Campaign-specific events sound like a good fit for lanes, but my immediate thought for them was separating things geographically; i.e. keeping a lane per civilization/region to get a bird's eye view of how things were progressing more locally in a given timeframe.

Braden I represent rather minimalist approach to LK use as a DM, because I worldbuild only when my players are about to reach certain place, I create more detailed history only when my players ask for details.

That being said, I'd use timelines for two basic tasks:

1) General world history

2) Session Journal

So for me it'd be useful to have things connected to the timeline, NPCs, places. Much like I'm doing not in my plot chart made as a board, so it'd be easy to see when my group found their lost friend, when important NPC was killed, etc, just by adding a "card/s" that'd be main focus of a given moment. Like... A horizontal extension to the timeline if you know what I mean.

Another good feature would be option to add short secrets right ON the timeline. So I could see some important bits of information on a timeline representation of a session log. Say, something like "PC's received a clue about X here"

Braden My partner and I are using LK for a story/world that has 50+ characters, with some storylines spanning hundreds of years. It's also a multiverse, with very specific branching paths after a single point of divergence.

It can be challenging to figure out the best way to lay everything out as a coherent narrative. LK has already been very helpful on that front, and I think the timelines feature is going to be a huge boost. Especially the lanes! Being able to quickly see what different characters/factions are doing during the same timespan sounds fantastic.

I think I’ll likely separate tracks based on category of knowledge, i.e. History vs. Mythology vs. stuff that happened in a game session (useful since I run games all over the timeline of my main TTRPG setting).

Hopefully this feature will stop me from forgetting who should be emperor this week!

Braden Basically i will put the history stuff on timelines. The lanes are great to represent what happend in different cultures or separate the types of events. I will probably have multible timlines. The events are not to much per timeline. I have 6 "ages" - an within theses ages there are about 10 to 20 events. Not to much i would say. I would have timlines for character or even for tracking game sessions. Also the events are limited. We have about 20 game sessions a year, so when we play a chronicle over 4 years i would have about 60 entries.

But i would need to hide them so, that only me as a gm and player can see it. Same with history. Most... no all things are related to some kind of role. Some should see things, others not. As we only habe 2 roles, the main use of timelines are quite limited and can practically only be used for common knownledge.

And i would need a normal gregorian calendar for tracking real events.

Braden Ideally I'd have everything in one timeline, with lanes separating regional histories, D&D campaign timelines, and character timelines.

I'd also like to be able to name eras, such as Wars and Eras.

For Wars involving only some of the regions split into lanes, will it be possible to have an era title only apply to those lanes? I've attached an example to try to explain. In the example Hepmonaland isn't involved in the Greyhawk Wars Would it be possible to exclude a lane from an event visually?

The Greyhawk campaign setting timeline has history dating back 10s of thousands of years, but most of the detailed history occurs within a ~300 year period. I'm hoping to keep the timeline focused on current events/recent history whilst also being able to zoom out to see the ancient history when needed.

Braden I'll probably use it for a couple of things.

1) Timeline of my campaign for me and players to highlight events that happened in and out of game with dates etc. This as a sort of way for them to easily see what has happened in our campaign without needing to read through all notes.

2) Historical timeline with all the Era's and probably one for each Era as well with a bit more of the detail of the events that happened.

3) For all my old things like cities, clans, factions etc with some major events.

I'd for sure use the lanes feature. Sounds really good.

I would like it to be easy to update dates in all locations if the year something happens needs to change and to quickly find answers to questions like "what happened in x year"? "Who was ruling during Y time?" How long was this war?"

It would also be nice to have sort options by date vs. by location. It sounds like the lanes might do that, allowing you to see world history all at once or the history of one particular region.

Braden I'd generally see myself have two kinds of timelines: the "world timeline" (how to world got to the point it is today) and one or more "campaign timelines" that follows the adventures of the party or the reconstruction of a investigative case.

For the "world timeline", I could imagine using lanes to differentiate what happened in different cultures/different continents/with different factions in parallel. One interesting question is whether/how I could model events that affect multiple/all lanes.

For the "campaign timeline", I'd probably have just the one lane that follows the player characters for the most part. If there is an investigative character to the campaign, then _maybe_ a second lane for things that happen(ed) "off-screen".

As for the number of events: I don't know. A recent campaign had ~50-ish events in the manually maintained timeline (years apart). If we add entries from the player's journal, I'd expect something between 120 and 200 (days or hours apart).

The more interesting challenge seems to be the "logarithmic" nature of timelines. Events in the far past will be pretty far apart. Thousands of years at times. As we get closer to "today", events will become more dense. In particularly kinetic, 24-style campaigns, "recent events" might be just hours in the past. Finding a solution that keeps the timeline usable in the presence of varying density seems key to me. If we compare it to the auto-clustering feature of the map, I'd hope for a more usable solution than that.

Eli Gershenfeld a blur on the edge of a “fuzzy date” would be cool

Jon Molnar: I may be mistaken but I believe this will be possible based on info already shared

Alan: Awesome!