Where to keep your roleplay characters

I built one of the tools on this page, so read the rest knowing that. It’s re:plyr, it’s free, and I’ll tell you what it’s bad at in the same detail as everything else.

I’m writing this because people keep asking and nobody’s answering. There are threads on Toyhouse’s own forums going back two years where somebody wants exactly this list and gets four half-answers and an argument. The honest version is that these tools do different jobs, and the one you want depends on a question nobody asks first: what are you actually doing with a character once you’ve made it?

A Google Doc in Discord

This is what most people use, and I want to be fair to it, because “just use a Doc” is the correct answer more often than anyone selling you something will admit.

It’s free, everyone has one, your partner can read it without an account, and you can put anything in it. For a lot of people that’s the whole job.

Where it starts to hurt is pictures. Images eat your Drive storage, a long sheet’s formatting gets fragile, and sharing permissions are fiddly in a way that’s easy to get wrong without noticing. And a formatted sheet can’t move anywhere else without losing the work, which matters more than it sounds like it should.

Use it if you mostly write and rarely need to show anybody a face.

Toyhouse

Toyhouse is for people who collect and trade characters. That’s a different hobby to the one I’m building for, and it’s very good at it: galleries, ownership records, transfers, a real community, and profile customisation nothing else comes close to.

If you want a character to be an object that other people see, admire and sometimes swap, this is the site. re:plyr does none of that and isn’t trying to.

One practical thing worth knowing: it’s still invite-only. The registration form asks for an invite code, which I checked on 10 September 2026. That’s not a criticism, it’s how they manage growth, but it does mean you can’t just decide to start tonight.

Use it if your characters are the point, rather than the story you’re telling with them.

World Anvil, Kanka and LegendKeeper

These are worldbuilding platforms, and they are enormously more capable than anything else here. Maps, timelines, wikis, campaign management, article hierarchies. If you’re running a long campaign or building a setting you’ll still be in five years, one of these is probably right.

The complaint that follows them around is the size of them. World Anvil’s own reviews describe getting lost in it, and there’s a well-known writeup arguing people leave for Google Docs because there are dozens of features and none of them were the one they needed.

That’s a genuine trade rather than a flaw. Power costs learning time, and if you want the power it’s worth paying.

Use one if the world matters as much as the people in it.

Ellipsus

Ellipsus is for writing the prose, and the thing it does is clever: drafts are branches off a main document, and you can compare two side by side and merge the bits you want. If you and a partner actually co-write in one document, that’s a real answer to a real mess.

It’s free, with a paid tier, and it’s built by people with a loud and specific position about generative AI, which a lot of writers care about.

Two things it doesn’t do. Its own help pages say images can’t be exported and image links can’t be shared outside Ellipsus, so it isn’t somewhere to keep reference pictures. And a shared link doesn’t preview: paste one into Discord and you get a bare link with no title and no picture, which I checked on 10 September 2026.

Use it if the writing is the thing you need help with, rather than the reference.

re:plyr

Mine. It’s for the bit in between: keeping characters, scenarios and reference pictures somewhere tidy, and handing one to a partner as a link.

The share link is the whole point. Paste it into Discord and it unfurls with the name, the summary and their face, so the person on the other end sees who they’re being introduced to before they click anything. Everything’s private until you decide otherwise, and switching a link off takes one press.

Use it if you write with partners and you’re forever digging out the same sheet.

What re:plyr is bad at

Same detail as everything above, because a page that only lists strengths isn’t worth reading.

• You have to be 18. No exceptions, and that rules out a lot of this hobby.
• There’s no community. No feed, no comments, no browsing other people’s characters. You can write one page about yourself to find someone to write with, and nobody can reply to it there. That’s deliberate, but if you wanted a place to hang around in, this isn’t it.
• You can’t make it yours. Toyhouse lets you build a character page that looks like the character. re:plyr gives you fields and one layout. A colour per character is on the roadmap, which is a smaller thing than what Toyhouse does and isn’t a date.
• The full download starts again if it’s interrupted. It holds the pictures and opens offline, but it’s built as it downloads, so a big library on a bad connection means starting over.
• Pictures made by AI aren’t allowed, since 10 September 2026. If that’s how you make your reference art, this is the wrong tool and I’d rather you knew now.

The bit everyone should ask about and nobody does

It’s free. That’s the question, not the answer.

Refsheet, which did a similar job, went dark at the start of this month. Before that Charahub closed overnight in 2019 and took five years of people’s characters with it. If you’ve been in this hobby a while, “free” doesn’t read as generous, it reads as how long have I got.

So here’s the actual arithmetic. The expensive thing is storage, and storage is cheap. A full 25 GB account, the largest allowance there is, costs me well under a pound a month to hold, backup copy included. Almost nobody fills one. The 1 GB everyone gets costs a few pence. That’s a bill one person can carry without a business plan behind it, which is exactly why there isn’t one.

What I’ve written into the terms rather than just saying here: I’ll use reasonable endeavours to give you at least 30 days’ notice by email before the service closes, with the downloads on your account page, as the terms describe them, working the whole time. It can’t apply where closure is forced on me: by law, by a court or regulator, or by something outside my control, such as a supplier pulling out. And nothing you’ve uploaded is ever locked to make you pay. Neither of those costs me anything to promise, which is the point. The promises that matter are the cheap ones somebody actually keeps.

So which one

• Collecting and trading characters. Toyhouse.
• Building a world or running a campaign. World Anvil, Kanka or LegendKeeper.
• Co-writing the actual prose. Ellipsus.
• It’s working fine already. Keep using the Doc.
• Keeping characters and pictures tidy, and sending them to people. Mine.

Plenty of people will want two of these, and that’s fine. I use a Doc for drafting and re:plyr for everything I have to send somebody. Nothing here has to be the only thing you use.

Everything I’ve said about other people’s tools was read off their own pages on 10 September 2026. They’ll change. If something here is out of date or wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it.