Using Querki

You don't need to know tons about Querki in order to work on a LARP, and much of it works as you'd expect -- feel free to just dive in and start experimenting and creating. But for those who like to read the documentation first, here are the relevant bits:

Probably the most important thing to know is that text in green usually represents a link. (Yes, this is a potential issue for the color-blind -- this is a known bug.) When you hover over a link, it should show as underlined, and clicking on it goes to that page as usual.

The most universal and important link is the one to the Space's home page, which you'll find in small type under the Querki logo at the top-left of each page. That's how to get "home" from wherever you are. (The Querki logo itself takes you to the index of all the Spaces you own or are a member in.)

Everything in Querki is a "Thing" -- that's the general term, and we use it a lot. Things can be Models (a sort of Thing, like Character or Item), or Instances of those Models (like Joe Smith or Large Teapot).

Things are made of Properties, sometimes lots of them -- for example, Character has Properties that include:

and lots more -- you can find the full list in Writing Characters. Each Property is of a particular Type -- there are lots of Types, such as Text, Tag, True/False, Date, Number and so on.

This App tries to make it convenient to create the Things you want when you need them. The home page has links to list each sort of Thing -- All Characters, All Plots and so on -- and each of those pages has a button to create another one of that sort at the bottom. The links on the home page also include "Add" buttons.

From anywhere in the Space, you can create anything you want by using the "Actions" menu at the top. If you pick "Create any Thing", it will ask you what to create.

But one of the best ways to use Querki is by using Tags. The power of this system is that everything is hooked together -- for example, each Character says which Plots it is involved in. But you do not have to create the Plot before you refer to it! From the Character, you can simply give the name of a Plot that you plan to write, and it will show up as a link on the Character's page. If you click on that link, it will take you to a page showing all the Characters that refer to that Plot. And if you edit the Plot page, it will let you create it and fill it in.

This way of doing things -- starting out by using a Tag to refer to something, and later coming back and filling it in -- makes it much easier to build up your game without tying yourself in knots trying to worry about what to write first. Let it go a bit stream-of-consciousness, then come back, fill things in and edit.

Assuming you are an Editor on the game, most pages will show with the Edit button -- -- at the top. Pressing this lets you edit the Properties of that Thing.

Most Properties are pretty straightforward to edit, but the most important -- the ones that make up the bulk of a game -- are the Large Text Properties such as Character Sheet and GM Notes. These are the big, multi-line text areas that let you fill in as much text as you like.

Text Properties in Querki don't yet have WYSIWYG editors. (It's coming, but not there yet.) Instead, you use QText, a wikitext format similar to the popular one called Markdown, to format your text.

Mostly, QText is just ordinary double-spaced text. Leave two lines between paragraphs, and they will show up as you expect. But there are a few common formatting tricks you're likely to want:

To italicize something, surround it with asterisks, like this:

I mostly care about *this bit*, right?

and that shows up as:

To boldface something, use double-asterisks, like this:

No, really -- **this is important**!

and that shows up as:

To make a section header, start the line with one or more "#"s:

### Stuff About Joe

The number of "#"s defines what "level" of header this is, and how big it is, from 1 "#" (very large) to 6 (pretty small).

You define a bullet list by starting lines with "*":

* Flowers
* Bunnies
* Unicorns

For the time being, you can't nest bullet lists. (We'll get there.)

There's lots more, and you can find the full details in the QText Reference. But the above are the ones you'll probably use most often.

Querki makes it easy for text to include data -- it's one of the main things that Querki is for. You do this with double-square-brackets, [[like this]]. If the stuff in the brackets names a Property, it sticks in the value of that Property; for example, if the Character sheet for Joe Smith says:

that would come out as:

In general, you do not usually need to do much of this while writing a LARP -- most of that is built into the App. The one common exception is if you want to write gender-neutral characters in such a way that you can set the gender at casting time and have all the pronouns come out right automatically. This is a bit involved, and is discussed in detail in Writing Gender-Flexibly.

In the Actions menu at the top of the page, you will find a Print... menu item. We recommend using that instead of your browser's Print button -- the LARP App is set up with special stylesheets so that pages print appropriately for use in-game, but that only works reliably from the Actions menu. (This limitation is due to inconsistencies in how browsers work.)

The built-in stylesheets are simple but functional. You can make them fancier, but it currently requires some skill with CSS. If you want to give that a try, contact Justin and I'll be happy to walk you through what's involved.

At the bottom of every Thing's page -- every Archetype, Character, Plot, and what-have-you -- you will find Conversations. These are there so that the members of the team can collaborate on specific elements of the game. You can have any number of Conversations per page. Conversations currently display as simple flat chats, but will eventually be threaded, to make it easier to dive into sub-topics.

Querki tracks nearly all changes to your game automatically: if you are the owner of the Space, you can go to the Actions menu, choose "Advanced...", and press the View History button. You can always undo your changes later, so don't be too worried about breaking things. (The undo capability is currently very coarse-grained, but that will improve with time; the important bit is that we have all the information needed to fix mistakes later.)

Querki was designed from the get-go for smartphones and tablets. At this point, it works pretty well for reading on those devices, but doing serious editing on them is only so-so. For now, I recommend a keyboard for serious work.

You can find gobs more detail in Querki Help, particularly in the Querki Quickstart page (intended mainly for programmers) and the more detailed Learning Querki tutorial. And please ask any and all questions (and report any bugs you might find) to Justin.