Pages. It sounds like the simplest feature you could build into a Compendium. It is not. Before I tell you what Pages can do, I have to explain why they exist in the first place. For that, I take you to a situation you know: the third character sheet you are about to build again, this time as a Markdown table.
The third character sheet
I play a character for a while and want their stats, abilities, and equipment in one place. So I create a document and build a table. Name, species, class, level, a few numbers, a paragraph of equipment. With the next character I do the same, only this time I forget a field and sort the columns differently. By the third character I am annoyed that my own sheet already looks different from last time.
This is not about looks. It is about being able to rely on the structure. About knowing where the values stand when I need them. About my game master not having to ask where I hid the abilities. This is exactly where the story of Pages begins.
What there was before: Document, Image, World Entity
Before I get to the gap, briefly about what is already there. Not out of politeness, but because the existing content types stay important.
Documents are the free, narrative form. Diaries, character backgrounds, session logs, long notes. A Markdown editor, plenty of space, no fixed fields. If a piece of content is mainly told, a document is still the right choice today.
Images are reusable media. Portraits, views of places, battle maps. They are stored once in the system and can be embedded everywhere. There is not much more to say about them, and that is a good thing.
World Entities are the named knowledge of your world. They make connections visible and verifiable: who is friends with whom, who was born where, when the artifact was forged. Relationships, facts, and events can be looked at without long text analysis. That the Keeper benefits from this later is a second, pleasant side effect. The first benefit is yours: you see your world ordered at a glance.
Still, a gap remains between the free storytelling of the document and the named knowledge of the World Entity. Something is missing that should always look the same. The character sheet. The handout. The checklist.
Two answers: the standalone Page and the Profile
Instead of one solution I built two, because they answer two different questions.
A standalone Page lives in the Compendium. It gets a title, a folder, a category, and tags like any other content. It is the choice for handouts, briefings for your group, rules overviews, checklists, or printable travel plans. For everything that stands on its own and is not meant to hang on a World Entity.
A Profile stays with its World Entity. A character is a World Entity, so their sheet hangs directly on it as a Profile. No second entry appears in the content tree. When you open the character, you see their general information, their part in events, and right next to it the Profile with values and abilities.
A Profile template defines which World Entity types it accepts. A character sheet template only allows persons. That is a rule of the template, not a global assumption. That is why, in my world, the recipe Profile hangs on the delicacy "Red Gertrude", a potato from my game master's world, while the character sheet template only applies to persons.
The flow in one image
A Page does not begin in the form builder, but with the question of which role the content plays in your world. Then you choose or build a template, fill in the fields, and save. The path is the same for both variants, and a Keeper draft is always only a suggestion: it is saved only after you have reviewed it.
What a template controls
A template is a composition of sections, field groups, and repeatable rows. The field palette behind it is deliberately limited: text and Markdown, choice, checkbox and checklist, numbers with minimum, maximum, step, and unit, trackers with a current and a maximum value, an in-world date, and image fields. With field groups and repeatable rows you arrange values that belong together; image fields place portraits, maps, or found objects directly in the layout.
"Limited" sounds negative, but here it is the goal. A template built from a fixed palette stays validatable, searchable, and understandable for print and for the Keeper. Nobody who creates a character sheet can type letters into a number field.
Every template has three renderings: the open view in which you work, a currently experimental compact preview, and a physical A4 print layout that prints cleanly or can be saved as a PDF through the print function of your browser. To be honest, the compact preview is not yet a promise for every results list.
There is one important contract: changes to a template only apply to Pages and Profiles created from then on. Existing content keeps its form. That feels unusual at first, but it protects you from a template change rebuilding your finished sheets.
As an example, my take on a starter character sheet for Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is included; you can of course rework it. Atlavium stays system agnostic. The sheet is a bundled template, not a built-in rules engine and not a VTT feature. It shows how far you can get with fields and field groups.
Searching, sharing, and the boundary of your Realm
Because Pages are made of fields, they can be searched differently from running text. You filter by Page or Profile and by template. Anyone looking for all the sheets of a campaign filters by the character sheet template and sees exactly the matching Profiles.
Sharing uses the same template structure, and here there is something new. Pages are only offered in content bundles, as I described in the post about Privacy and Sharing Content. The template decides for every field whether it may cross the boundary of your Realm. So you decide per field, not per Page. The character name may travel, the note with the secret plans stays behind. Fields that are not shared, and their images, remain entirely with you. Shared embedded images travel along as visible, necessary dependencies, and with a Profile also the World Entity it belongs to. Otherwise the recipient would receive a sheet that belongs to no one.
And the Keeper?
Only now does the Keeper come into play, deliberately as an optional assistant. When you want to create a Page or a Profile from a template, the Keeper can deliver a draft. For that he receives the concrete template and a strict schema. He only researches in authorized sources of your current Realm and delivers a sourced proposal with citations. You choose which fields you want to take over, take them into the normal form, edit them if needed, and only save afterwards. What becomes Canon is still your decision. The Keeper does not build your third character sheet from scratch anymore; he prepares it.
An experiment, honestly
Pages are an experimental feature. The core idea and the stored content are solid. The field palette, the compact rendering, and the workflows may still change with your feedback. Pages came to be because I was told more than once that people want more structure. What exactly this structure can do, and where it hurts, only becomes clear in real use.
So I have a concrete question for you: which template is still missing for your group? A bestiary? A location overview? A printable travel plan? A way to share Page structures? Tell me. I depend on feedback, and only your feedback turns the feature into what you need. Feel free to join the Atlavium Discord and let's talk.