A document into a board

You have a scene written as prose. This turns it into a board — every line in its own node, attributed to the right character, branching where you wrote a choice.

You will need: the Pro plan (documents are a Pro feature), a project with at least one document containing a scene, and ideally a few entities for the characters in it. Twenty minutes.

1. Have the characters first

Stop before you generate and check that the people in your scene exist as entities.

This is the step that decides how good the result is. Before the model sees anything, TaleShard looks for speaker cues in your document — a line that starts with a name and a colon, like MIRA: Three nights dark., or a screenplay cue, the name alone in capitals with the speech on the next line — and matches each name against your project’s entities: exactly, then by code, then by an unambiguous single-word match. Labels such as CHOICE:, NOTE: or SCENE: are not treated as speakers, and a capitalised name above speech counts only once it has spoken at least twice, so a title or a chapter heading is never mistaken for a character. What it hands the model is a mapping:

"ELYRA"  →  entityId: "…", code: elyra
"GUARD"  →  NOT MATCHED

A matched speaker becomes a real entity reference on the node. An unmatched one is left empty rather than invented.

So: make the entities, or accept nodes with no speaker attached. See entities.

2. Open the Dialogue board form in document mode

Open Thalia’s dock — the ✦ Thalia button in the header, or Ctrl+I — and pick the Dialogue board tab of its strip.

Set Mode to From Document. The panel changes shape: the free-text prompt is replaced by a document picker, because in this mode the document is the prompt.

Pick your scene under Source Document.

3. Say only what the document cannot

Additional Instructions (optional) is for the things your prose does not say — Skip the narration, Focus on Act 1, Add a choice at the end.

Leave it empty and the request is simply convert this document into a faithful dialogue board. That is usually right. Resist the urge to re-describe the scene: you already wrote it. For a screenplay, empty matters more: see the shortcut below.

4. Narrow what it may build with

Node types decides the vocabulary. Everything available is the default and is fine for a first run.

If you have authored your own types — a Skill check, say — you can save a set that narrows the generation to it, with its own brief. A set narrows what a generation may build with, and can carry its own brief. It can never make a node type available that you switched off in its type editor.

Sets are worth it once you know what you want; skip them today.

5. Check the two settings that matter

Open Advanced settings and pick the Layout Direction — Horizontal or Vertical. Horizontal reads like a script; vertical reads like a flowchart. Change it later by regenerating, or rearrange by hand.

There is no project-knowledge (RAG) switch in this mode: the document is the whole source, so nothing else from the project is searched.

Then press Generate Dialogue Board.

6. Watch it work

The form steps aside the moment the run starts and the chat thread comes forward on its own. A card in the thread, headed Dialogue board, shows Connecting…, then AI is thinking… with a timer until the board arrives — the board is written in one pass, so there are no step-by-step counts to show. A long chapter can take a minute or more. The form’s tab stays in the strip; if you switch away, the Chat tab brings the thread back.

7. Review the board, not a list

That same card becomes the result, in place among Thalia’s replies — no tab switch needed — and it draws the actual board, laid out exactly as it will be written. It is not a summary and not a preview of a preview: the same planner and the same layout pass run for the preview as for the apply.

Underneath: Nodes, Edges, Duration, Iterations — and notes on anything the generation got wrong: text the AI put in the wrong field (moved to the right one for you), a line node that came back with no text, or links to nodes the AI never wrote. A board with several empty nodes is a failed run — discard it and try again, or try a stronger model.

Read the branches first. A choice should have become real outgoing edges, each carrying the option’s text, not one node listing options as prose.

Two more buttons here:

• Polish prose re-runs a pass over the text only, leaving the graph alone. Useful when the structure is right and the writing is stiff.
• Discard throws it away. Your document is untouched; nothing has been written.

8. Apply it

Apply creates a brand-new board at the root of your board tree, named by the generation, opens it, and writes the nodes and edges in — creating any variables the generation proposed along the way.

It never writes into an existing board, so there is nothing to overwrite and nothing to undo beyond deleting the new board.

If some part could not be written you get Board applied with N issue(s) and the first few, rather than a silently incomplete board.

What it actually promises

Worth knowing precisely, because it sets your expectations for the review:

A shortcut worth knowing

If your document is a Fountain or Final Draft screenplay and you leave Additional Instructions empty, this path does not call a model at all — the script is parsed, the characters resolved, and the board built locally. It is deterministic, instant, and costs no credits. Type any instruction and the request goes to the model instead, because a parser cannot follow it.

For a real screenplay you probably want the Screenplay page instead, which gives you scene grouping, routing and a live preview.

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