Lore Link Lore Link

Hey there, Gamers.

The Lore Link Team is excited to let you know our next big update is upon us! Mark has been talking about the Lore Refactor in our newsletter for the past few months, and the time has come to release it. Starting at noon EDT on Monday, September 29, we will begin the update process. For more technical details, please scroll to the bottom of this blog post. For live status information, follow us on Bluesky.

“What is the Lore Refactor?” you may ask.

Simply put, we’re updating how all your Lore works in the system. Everything is considered Lore now. There’s no more confusing linking to Triggers or Game Objects. Everything can now have a relationship to everything else. This also means collection objects like Tags, Timelines, or Sessions can contain any type of Lore, not just a few specific types.

Some other improvements that are here because of the Refactor include:

  • You can now name Relationships when associating your Lore. You can now indicate if someone is a “father of” or “child of,” or when you’re putting together information about an item, you can mention whether an item is “owned by” or “crafted by.” It’s also automatically bi-directional, so you don’t have to create a link twice.
  • Speaking of bi-directional linking, you’ll now be able to see if a piece of Lore has been used in a Session or a Timeline directly from the Lore.
  • If you’re on a paid tier, you can now use Interactive Maps for all types of Lore. You can use this to create a diagram of magic item slots for your characters, or go into that ship you added and add a map to it.
  • Hierarchy is no longer limited to Tags and Locations. You can now create a chest, and in that chest there is a bag, and in that bag there is a coin purse, and in that coin purse… I think you get what I’m saying!
  • We have improved the UI for the search box and filters. No more scrolling through all your Lore trying to find that one piece, just start typing!
  • Tab management! Since Lore Link is browser-based, one of our benefits is the ability to have a lot of tabs or windows open, arranged however you like. Up until now, though, each tab just said “Lore Link.” This has been updated so each window will clearly indicate the Lore or Page displayed. If you’ve been streaming using Lore Link, this also fixes an issue where OBS would occasionally lose track of which browser you were trying to show on stream.
  • Improved keyboard handling! Now, pressing “enter” when creating new campaigns and Lore applies your changes and saves as expected, instead of canceling.

We understand that many of you have trusted us with your ideas, your dreams, and your back-of-the-napkin scribbles that have taken over your campaigns and lives. Some of our own precious creations are stored in Lore Link as well. We take great care to preserve the integrity of your data at all times. Our goal is to maximize your access tto your campaigns, but to complete this significant upgrade there will be some downtime, but we expect to have the entire update process completed by 4pm EDT on Monday, September 29.

Please note that no data gets deleted as part of this operation. That said, if you believe something is no longer showing up for your after the update, immediately get in touch with us so we can take a look. For the fastest service, please be sure to include the URL to and/or name of your campaign as well as the email address you use to log in.

The team here at Lore Link is always looking at improvements and the requests our users are making. The Lore Refactor is going to help make many of those requests easier to implement.

As always, if you have any questions, either post them on Discord, or use the Contact link on your campaign planning pages, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Thank you all for trusting us with your campaigns. We hope this makes it easier to add those campaigns to Lore Link!

Technical Details

  1. [12:00 ET] Take the application offline

  2. [12:10 ET] Start by taking a code and database snapshot of the live environment

  3. [12:30 ET] Deploy the updated version of Lore Link

  4. [13:00 ET] Convert the campaign data to the new data format (because this conversion process is additive only, no data will be lost during the conversion process)

  5. [14:00 ET] Run our thorough test script in the live environment (this is the same test play we used to confirm that both existing and newly created campaigns work as expected within the test environment)

    a. If we find any issues we’ll deploy a patch or fix the data

    b. If we find something that can’t be fixed before the outage deadline, we’ll revert back to original state using the snapshot we took at the beginning

  6. [16:00 ET] Once we’ve completed successful testing, we’ll open the app back up to our users