Chapter 39 · The Staff
Running a Continuity Check
The continuity editor reads your document against itself. It collects every fixed fact the pages state about a named person, place or thing, and tells you where two of them cannot both be true. It has no interest in the outside world, which is the fact-checker's job, and it never suggests which version you meant.
Starting a pass
Open the document, choose the Review tab on the ribbon, and press Continuity, the button beside Check Facts. The findings rail switches to its Continuity tab and a spinner appears.
Everything about the mechanics matches a fact-check. Your last change is saved first, and the pass is refused if that save cannot reach the server. It runs at Storskarvia's end, so you can keep writing or close the tab. It costs one check per 10,000 words, rounded up, from the same monthly allowance. A pass that fails is given back. Only the document's owner sees the button.
The two kinds of check are independent. A fact-check and a continuity pass can run on the same document at the same time, each fills its own tab, and neither clears the other.
What it reads
It reads this document, as it currently reads, with pending struck-through suggestions left out. It also reads the project's Story Bible. It does not read the other documents in your binder, so a pass on chapter twelve cannot know what chapter two said unless that fact is recorded in the Story Bible.
From the text it extracts persistent attributes, the things that should stay the same across a story:
| Compared | Ignored |
|---|---|
| Eye colour, hair, height, build, age | Mood and emotion |
| Scars and marks | Posture, and whether someone is standing |
| Family relations | What someone wears in one scene |
| How a name is spelled | Weather |
| A car, a possession, a hometown | Anything not tied to a named subject |
| A place's fixed features: distance, colour, layout | |
| When something happened or was founded |
With and without a Story Bible
The pass runs in one of two modes, chosen by whether the project's Story Bible has any entries.
- Open mode, on an empty Story Bible. Storskarvia names the subjects itself as written, so a draft with no preparation still gets a real check. The results carry a note: "Checked without a Story Bible, so Storskarvia inferred the characters and places itself." The catch is that Danny and Daniel are two different people to it.
- Grounded mode, once entries exist. Only claims about your entries count, every alias resolves to the entry's Name, and each Detail with both a label and a value is entered as a claim of its own. A claim about a name that matches no entry or alias is dropped without comment.
Grounded mode is the sharper tool, and Aliases, Custom Fields, and Hover Cards explains how to write entries that give it the most to work with.
How two mentions become a finding
Claims are grouped by subject and attribute. Attribute names are matched loosely, so eye colour, eyes and eye color fall into one group. When a group holds two or more different values, one becomes the reference and each other value is compared against it. A Story Bible Detail is always the reference when there is one, because it is the value you told Storskarvia is true. Without a Detail, the first value in reading order is the reference.
A disagreement is not yet a finding. A second reviewer reads both quotes and is told to let the pair go when there is a plausible reconciliation:
- hair can be dyed or cut, and people age;
- green or steel may be a metaphor rather than a colour;
- the two quotes may be about different people, or different things;
- something in the story explains the change: a haircut, an injury, a renovation.
What survives is the same fixed trait given two incompatible literal values with nothing in the story to account for it. Blue eyes on page four and brown on page ninety, with no contact lenses in between, is a finding.
Reading the paired quotes
A continuity card carries a CONTINUITY pill and two quotes. The first is the passage where the disagreeing value appears. The second line begins conflicts with: and holds the reference it was compared against. The explanation names the subject, the attribute, and both values, followed by one sentence from the reviewer.
You get one card per disagreeing value, quoting the first place that value appears. If the draft says brown eyes three times against one earlier blue, fix the first brown and search for the others with Find.
Jump here selects the first quote and Jump to other selects
the second, so you can read both in context before deciding which is wrong. When the second quote
is in brackets and begins (story bible:, the other side is a Detail on your Story
Bible entry. Jump to other has nothing to find in the document, and the fix may belong on the Story
Bible page instead. Reading a Finding covers Resolve,
Dismiss and the tab counter.
A clean pass says "No continuity conflicts found across 57 details." The number counts every claim it collected, Story Bible Details included. In grounded mode only claims about your entries are kept, so a small number on a long chapter is worth a look at who is missing from the Story Bible.
When a pass will not start
The reason appears in the Continuity tab.
| You see | What it means |
|---|---|
| "Write a little more first" | The document is under forty characters. A pass needs at least two statements to compare. |
| "Please verify your email first" | Use the link in the verification email, or resend it from your Studio page. |
| "A check is already running" | Your account already has two checks running, of either kind, across all documents. Wait for one to finish. |
| "You've used all 20 checks on the free plan this month." | The whole pass does not fit in what is left. Nothing is charged, and a pass never runs in part. |
| "Your last change has not reached the server" | Let the storage chip settle and press the button again. Nothing is charged. |
| "Check failed" | The pass started and broke. The checks it cost are given back, and running it again is safe. |
Why it missed one you can see
- It is in another document. Record the fact as a Detail, and every document you run a pass on is held to it.
- The name has no entry or alias. In grounded mode the claim was dropped. Add the nickname under Also known as.
- It counts as temporary. A coat, a mood, the weather, where someone is standing.
- The reviewer found a way to reconcile it. Dyed hair and figurative colour are let go on purpose.
- A cap was reached. One attribute of one subject is compared across at most 12 different values, however many times each is repeated, and a pass makes at most 300 comparisons, with pairs involving a Story Bible Detail first. When either cap drops anything, a note above the results says so, for example "Compared the first 300 of 412 possible conflicts found, Story Bible details first."
The Story Bible itself is covered in Part V, starting with The Story Bible. How allowances are counted is covered in Part IX.
Updated 2026-09-15 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?