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PostRoll Help

Actors vs entities

The same character can exist twice in PostRoll, and that’s deliberate. An actor is a sheet you play from. An entity is what your world knows about someone. Most confusion about either one clears up once you’ve seen why they’re kept apart.

The difference

Section titled “The difference”
Actor Entity
What it is A character sheet — stats, gear, cards, a token A canonical record — summary, aliases, relationships, history
Where it lives Your library, available in every world Inside one world
What it’s for Playing at the table Writing and organising your setting

Captain Aldren the player-character is an actor: hit points, a longsword, the cards he plays in a fight. Aldren the person — heir to a disgraced house, sworn enemy of the Ember Court, mentioned on nine wiki pages — is an entity.

Why they’re kept apart

Section titled “Why they’re kept apart”

Your actors follow you. You can take the same character into another GM’s game, a one-shot, or a world you don’t own, because an actor isn’t attached to a world at all. Entities can’t work that way: an entity is part of a world’s canon, so it belongs to the world and travels with it whenever that world is shared or copied.

That’s also why a character you built doesn’t appear on the World Hub. Nothing is broken — it just isn’t world content yet.

Promote an actor to an entity

Section titled “Promote an actor to an entity”

Promoting gives a character a record in your world without taking the character out of your library.

  1. Open the actor from Actors.
  2. Find the Entity card in the side panel. Before it’s linked it reads “Not yet linked to an entity.”
  3. Click Promote to entity.
  4. Choose the World the entity should belong to, check its type and name, and create it.

Once linked, the entity appears in that world’s Entities tab, joins its relationships, timeline and graph, and turns up when you type [[ in a wiki page.

When it’s worth doing

Section titled “When it’s worth doing”

Promote when the character is part of the setting — a recurring NPC, a player-character whose family tree matters, a villain with a history worth writing down.

Skip it for one-shot monsters, a stack of generic guards, or anyone whose whole story fits on their sheet. Entities are opt-in, and a world with ten real ones is worth more than a world with two hundred empty ones.

Unlinking

Section titled “Unlinking”

Unlink on the Entity card separates the two again. The entity itself isn’t deleted — the world record stays exactly as it was, it just stops pointing at that sheet.

Section titled “Related”