Outline your science fiction novel with the ultimate Sci-Fi starter kit
Every science fiction novel begins with a question: what if? What if the ship could think? What if the cure worked too well? What if we’d gone left instead of right, a hundred years ago? The genre’s job is to take that question seriously enough to follow it all the way down, past the invention to the people who have to live with it.
This starter kit gives you everything the genre asks of its writer, in five connected boards. Like every genre starter kit in Studio, it’s built around what its genre believes about stories, and science fiction believes every idea has consequences. Each board template comes with:
- The Outline board — your plot, mapped on the 3-Act Structure: nine guided beats from Exposition to Denouement, each with workshop questions, a checkpoint, and a worked example alongside.
- The Worldbuilding board — guided cards for your world’s technology, time, trade, species, cultures, religions, governments, and lore, so every invention holds together.
- The Places board — from Planet down to a single Location, with continents, countries, cities, and wilds in between.
- The Characters board — a full Character profile and a Supporting Character card, ready to grow into a crew.
- The Essentials board — theme, conflict, and stakes: the cards that keep asking what your what if is really about.
Take your story from Exposition to Denouement
Big ideas have a way of running off with the plot. Your Outline board walks you through all nine beats of the 3-Act Structure, the industry-standard map, so your story goes however far your world reaches.
Every beat is an interactive, three-part card, including:
- An explanation of the beat, with space to sketch your version of the scene and a worked example beside every beat to show the structure in action
- Thoughtful workshop questions to pressure-test the beat: “What does your Exposition withhold?” “Write the worst-case scenario of what would take place if your protagonist does nothing.”
- A checkpoint asking what each beat has just made possible, and what it has made impossible, so the doors your story opens and closes are always on record
And every card is fully customizable: rename beats to match your story’s vocabulary, trim the ones your plot doesn’t need, add your own questions, and check off beats as you complete them.
Build a future that holds together
The Worldbuilding board is your ultimate series bible. In ten in-built cards, it helps you plan, interrogate, and keep track of your world’s civilizations, powers, economies, technologies, nature, and lore, including:
- Technology: the engine of the genre. Who built it, what it can’t do, what it costs to run, and the ethics section that ends by asking whether it should exist at all.
- Time: how long a day is on your planet, how many moons pull the tides, what year zero commemorates, and whether time can be paused, rewound, or crossed.
- Trade & Commerce: who holds the wealth, what the currency looks like, what’s smuggled, and how an ordinary worker experiences the economy.
- Species: anatomy, habitat, communication, and the central conflict that defines a species, whether it’s your crew or the thing they’ve found.
- Government: who holds authority, how they got it, who’s exempt from the law, and how large the military is.
By the end, your world passes the hardest test science fiction readers have for you: not is this clever, but does this add up?
Link your future to the people who have to live in it
A world is only as compelling as the story that crosses it, which is why these five boards are connected, not collected. Every beat card carries @-mention fields for its settings and characters: plan your Midpoint, tag the research station from your Places board and the engineer who’s been lying about the readings from your Characters board, and every profile is one click away while you plot.
Give your reluctant captain, your ambitious first officer, and your ship’s AI each a profile; give your home planet its card and your derelict its own; then weave them through the story beat by beat. When the one thing your technology cannot do 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 beat 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 your Inciting Incident on your laptop and rewrite the laws of physics on your phone.
In other words, your future travels with you.
From first outline to finished sci-fi novel, all in Reedsy Studio
This kit pairs the structure storytellers have trusted since Aristotle, refined by Syd Field into the nine-beat map most novels still run on, with the worldbuilding workshop science fiction has always deserved, distilled by Reedsy into a starter kit built for sci-fi 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 Sci-Fi starter kit includes:
- Five connected boards: Outline, Characters, Places, Worldbuilding, and Essentials
- All nine beats of the 3-Act Structure, grouped into three acts, with a worked example beside every beat and a status tracker for each
- Three-part beat cards: a canvas for sketching the beat, workshop questions, and possible/impossible checkpoints
- Over twenty guided asset cards, including Character and Planet profiles plus Worldbuilding cards for technology, time, trade, species, culture, religion, government, and lore, all @-linkable from any beat
- Essentials cards for Theme, Conflict, and Stakes & Consequences
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
