About Canopy

Pull up a chair. I'm Hyperion, and I make Canopy. Let me tell you where it came from and what it means to me.

Why "Canopy"

When I think of a fantasy world, the first thing I see is ruins in a forest with ivy growing over them. Nature taking back what people once built, because in the end nature always wins.

I've loved mythology ever since I played Age of Mythology as a kid, so my mind went to Yggdrasil, the world tree. It fit. But as a worldbuilder you sit even higher than the gods. You hold power over everything. From up there you look down on the canopy: the top of the tree, with all its layers of leaves and branches below. Layered and beautiful, like a world full of lore.

How it started

For years I kept my worlds on one of the big worldbuilding sites. Over time it became more beginner friendly, which is fair, but the style I wanted got buried under layer after layer of settings, and I got fed up. After that I used Obsidian. It's great for text, but it wasn't everything I wanted.

I looked at other tools too. One let you do literally anything, and asked more up front than I wanted to pay just to try it. Others were plastered with ads. None of them did exactly what I wanted.

Now that I know how little it costs to run a site like this, that frustrates me even more. I like money too, but I want to earn it by making something worth paying for.

So Canopy cuts the clutter. Nothing is hidden three menus deep, and only your content matters. I want it to be friendly to ADHD brains.

My worlds

I've been playing tabletop games for over 10 years and running my own for about 10.

I love going deep on very specific things and letting my imagination run wild. In one of my worlds, I wrote about 10,000 words on where wood elves came from: a plague that drove elves feral, the few who survived by hiding in the woods, and the characters, places and politics tied up in finding a cure. All because I needed an excuse for wood elves to exist.

Another was inspired by Dune. Its societies failed to stop a drought brought on by magic, and the drought destroyed the world. After the end, people learned to survive in the desert.

Right now I'm building NullTerra, which I hope will be my forever world. I want to describe all of it, from how the gods were born to the architecture of famous bridges and the politics between nations.

For me, the pleasure lies almost more in building the world than in playing the game. You don't have to go that far to use Canopy, though. If you just want to run your game, it's built for that too.

What I promise you

  • Your world is yours. Download it any time from the World menu, as a zip that opens as an Obsidian vault. You can leave whenever you like. I'll never hold your baby for ransom.
  • Your secrets stay secret. Players only see what you've shared with them.
  • Your lore is right there at the table, on your phone or your tablet.
  • Your words are your own. Canopy has no AI that writes for you. AI is only used for research or placeholder pictures, and it's always marked.
  • Rename an article, and every link to it follows.
  • For now Canopy is all about running games. A mode for novelists comes later.
  • I run my own games with Canopy every week, so when something's broken, I notice too.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you'll build something beautiful here.

Hyperion