Outline your fantasy novel with the ultimate Fantasy starter kit
Every fantasy starts the same way: with a world that doesn’t exist yet. And yet its invention isn’t pure escapism — nor is it a random collection of dragons and spells. Instead, it’s a sure-footed, deeply coherent story that readers will come back to time and time again, simply to find a second home in it.
This starter kit gives you everything the genre asks of its writer, in four connected boards. Like every genre starter kit in Studio, it’s built around what its genre believes about stories — and fantasy believes the world is also a character. Each board template comes with:
- The Outline board — your plot, mapped on the Hero’s Journey: twelve guided stages from the Ordinary World to the Return with the Elixir, each with workshop questions and a worked example alongside.
- The Worldbuilding board — guided cards for your world’s cultures, religions, magic, species, economies, and lore, so every invention holds together.
- The Characters board — profiles for your protagonist, antagonist, mentor, and confidant, ready to grow into a full cast.
- The Places board — continents, countries, cities, and wilds, from kingdoms and realms down to single points of interest.
Take your hero from the Shire and back again
Tired of chasing runaway subplots, or wading through the saggy middle? Your Outline board walks you through all twelve stages of the Hero’s Journey, so your plot always knows where it’s going.
Every stage is an interactive, three-part card, including:
- An explanation of the beat
- Space to sketch your version of the scene, with a worked example of Rocky beside every stage to show the structure in action
- Thoughtful workshop questions to pressure-test the beat. “What is quietly wrong with your protagonist’s Ordinary World?” “Write the worst-case scenario if your protagonist answers the Call — and if they don’t”
- A checkpoint so that you can check in with yourself and your journey
And every card is fully customizable: rename stages to match your saga’s vocabulary, trim the beats your plot doesn’t need, add your own questions, and check off stages as you complete them.
Build a world that holds together
The Worldbuilding board is your ultimate worldbuilding bible. In nine in-built cards, it helps you plan, interrogate, and keep track of your world’s civilizations, powers, economies, magic, nature, and lore, including:
- Continent: the body — topography, climate, the places still unexplored, and why.
- Species: inhabitants you can sense — anatomy, habitat, even what they sound and smell like.
- Culture: what it believes — its values, its outsiders, who’s at the bottom of its social order.
- Religion: what it worships — your faith’s creation myth, its take on good and evil, its schisms.
- Magic: power and its price — the limits, costs, and side effects that turn a superpower into a story engine.
By the end, your world passes the hardest test readers have for you: not is this imaginative, but rather, has this place been here all along?
Link your fantasy to the heroes who cross it
A world is only as compelling as the story that crosses it, which is why these four boards are connected, not collected. Every stage card carries @-mention fields for its settings and characters: plan your Ordeal, tag the Inmost Cave from your Places board and the antagonist waiting inside it from your Characters board, and every profile is one click away while you plot.
Give your chosen one, your scheming vizier, and your disquietingly knowledgeable innkeeper each a profile; give your capital city its card and your cursed forest its own; then weave them through the journey stage by stage. When your magic system’s one hard rule changes on its Worldbuilding card, it’s waiting right beside every scene you’ve built around it. Every element of your story universe stays connected — and consistent.
Best of all, when the last stage is checked off, your first chapter starts right here in Reedsy Studio — with your outline within arm’s reach for the entire draft.
Your outline, saved and synced on every device
Reedsy Studio automatically saves every change you make, so your kit is always current, always backed up, and always where you left it. And because Studio works on any device, you can chart the Crossing of the First Threshold on your laptop and rewrite the laws of magic on your phone.
In other words, your world travels with you.
From first outline to finished fantasy novel, all in Reedsy Studio
This kit pairs a structure storytellers have trusted for decades — Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, in Christopher Vogler’s twelve-stage adaptation — with the worldbuilding workshop fantasy has always deserved, refined by Reedsy into a starter kit built for fantasy novelists.
And it’s just the beginning of what Studio can do. The same free app that holds your kit is where you can plan, write, and format the whole book.
The Fantasy starter kit includes:
- Four connected boards: Outline, Characters, Places, and Worldbuilding
- All 12 stages of the Hero’s Journey, grouped into three acts, with a worked example beside every stage and a status tracker for each
- Three-part stage cards: a canvas for sketching the beat, workshop questions, and arc-tracking checkpoints
- Over twenty guided asset cards, including Character and Location profiles plus Worldbuilding cards for culture, religion, magic, species, government, economy, and lore — all @-linkable from any stage
Beyond the kit, Studio provides:
- A full library of planning templates — story structures, outlines, characters, and worldbuilding
- A distraction-free manuscript editor for drafting and revision
- Professional typesetting: export print-ready PDF and EPUB files
- Automatic saving, cross-device syncing, and collaboration tools
