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Characters

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Characters are the actors in your stories. Each character has a description that is injected into every prompt so the AI knows how to portray them — their personality, speech style, background, and any other traits you define.

You need at least two characters to run a story:

Your persona — the character you will incarnate and write as yourself.
At least one AI character — the character or characters the AI will generate responses for.

Characters are owned by your account and can be reused across multiple stories.

Creating a Character

Go to Characters → Create Character.

Fields

Field	Description
Name	The character's display name. This is used in prompts and shown in the message feed. Keep it concise.
Short Description	A private note for your own reference. Never sent to the AI. Useful for tracking which story or concept a character belongs to.
Description	The character sheet injected into every prompt. Describe appearance, history, and background traits you want the AI to reflect. There is no hard length limit, but longer descriptions consume more tokens on every generation.
Personality	A focused summary of the character's personality, tone, and speech style. Injected separately from the description, making it easier to keep the two concerns distinct.
Character Lore Book	Attach a character-specific lore book. Its entries are retrieved and injected alongside any story-level lore books when this character is present in a story.
Chativity	A float from 0 to 1 controlling how spontaneously the character speaks when multiple AI characters are in the scene. 0 means the character almost never initiates; 1 means the character is very likely to respond on any given turn. Tune this to shape the balance of voices in multi-character stories.
Tags	Freeform labels for filtering and organising characters in your character list. Not used in prompts.
Default Muted	If enabled, the character cannot send messages by default. Useful for characters you want in the background or as passive lore anchors. Can be overridden per story.
Default Present	If disabled, the character is in the cast but not active in the scene by default. They won't appear in the prompt or generate responses until Presence is toggled on in a specific story. Can be overridden per story.

Incarnation

Incarnating a character means you take manual control of it. Messages you type in the story input are sent as that character, appearing in the feed under their name and avatar.

Key rules about incarnation:

Only one user can incarnate a character at a time. If a character is already being incarnated by another user in a multiplayer session, the Voice button for that character is disabled for everyone else.
You must be incarnating a character to send messages. If no character is assigned to you, the message input is disabled.
Leaving a story clears incarnation automatically. When you close the play screen or disconnect, your incarnation is released so other players (or the AI) can take over.
The story owner can see and override incarnations in the Participants tab of the config panel.

How to Incarnate

Open the play screen for a story.
Open the config panel and go to the Characters tab.
Find the character you want to control.
Click Voice to take control. Your name appears below the character card as the current incarnating user.
Click Voice again to release control.

Per-Story Character Settings

The Characters tab in the config panel lets you adjust each character's state for the current story session without changing their defaults.

Toggle	Description
Presence	Whether the character is active in the current scene. Toggling this off removes them from the prompt and stops them from generating responses, but keeps them in the cast.
Voice	Whether you are currently incarnating this character. Toggling on claims control; toggling off releases it.

These per-story settings are independent for each story. Changing them here does not affect the character's defaults or their settings in any other story.

Mood & State

Each character has two free-text fields, editable from the Status section of the Characters tab in the play screen config panel:

Field	Purpose
Mood	How the character is feeling right now (e.g. "irritated but trying to hide it").
State	What the character is doing or aware of right now (e.g. "standing guard at the door, hasn't noticed the intruder yet").

Both fields can be edited by hand at any time, and can also be kept up to date automatically by the AI:

Each field has an AI updates switch. When on (the default), Dream Scrolls asks the AI to re-evaluate the field right before the character's next turn, based on what happened since its last update. When off, the field is locked — it stays exactly as written and the AI will never overwrite it.
AI evaluation only runs if the story (or the preset it was created from) has Mood/State Evaluation enabled — see Advanced. If it's disabled, the fields are purely manual notes.
Mood and State are evaluated independently and concurrently, so enabling both does not double the added latency.

Mood and State are available as template variables in your prompts (see Templates), so you can have the system prompt reference a character's current mood and state directly.

Export

Characters are exported as CHARX files (.charx) — a ZIP archive following the CharacterCard V3 specification. The archive contains the character's name, description, personality, tags, portrait image, and any attached lore book entries. CHARX is the native export format for Dream Scrolls and is also compatible with other tools that support CharacterCard V3.

To export, open the character menu from the character list and choose Export.

Import

Characters can be imported from:

CHARX (.charx) — a CharacterCard V3 ZIP archive (the current native format for Dream Scrolls).
CharacterCard V2 PNG — a PNG file with embedded character metadata (compatible with SillyTavern and older exports).
CharacterCard V2 JSON — a raw JSON file in the CharacterCard V2 format.

Go to Characters → Import Character and upload the file. Before the import completes, a preview shows the character name, description, and attached lore count so you can confirm the file is correct. Dream Scrolls will extract the name, description, personality, and any embedded lore book, creating new records in your account.