Your subject is written into the prompt for you. Use a model that can browse the web — it has one page to look up — or read the prompt first to see exactly what it asks for.
Three steps
The whole thing takes about a minute, most of it spent waiting for the model to look things up.
Copy the prompt
Type your subject above and press the button. What lands on your clipboard is a page of instructions, already filled in with what you asked for.
Paste it into your model
It chooses the events, then opens one Wikipedia page to read off the identifier of each one — the step the prompt does not let it skip — and answers with the story's title, clickable. Any model that can browse the web will do.
Open it — and send it on
The link opens straight into Erask and plays. It is also the whole story, so passing it to someone else passes them the story. Nothing is stored anywhere.
One that came out of it
Subject: the Punic Wars. Fifty battles, sieges and treaties across a hundred and twenty years, every one of them looked up on Wikidata rather than recalled — and the whole story living in 2,963 characters of link, with nothing behind it.
Rome and Carthage
Fifty places trace three wars that remade the western Mediterranean: the fleets improvised and lost off Sicily, the mercenaries who nearly finished Carthage from inside, Hannibal from Saguntum to Cannae, Scipio from Cartagena to Zama, and a city erased.
What it is, and what it isn't
The two kinds of story run on the same globe and the same timeline. They are not the same amount of work, and you can see the difference at a glance.
- Territories painted as they were on the day, faction by faction, fading from one snapshot into the next as the war moves
- Routes that draw themselves leg by leg, a moving point at the head of the line
- Events researched against their sources, weighted by hand, paced so that the crowded years get room to breathe
- A cover, a page of its own, a place in the catalogue
- Events appearing in place and in order, each dot sized by how much it matters
- Wikidata's own description under every name, and a caption where that would leave you guessing
- Colours and legend from the groups the model chose — and nothing else on the map
- Lives only inside its link, outside the catalogue
So: fewer moving parts, on purpose. A prompt can pick good events and place them correctly; it cannot draw the Napoleonic empire year by year. If one of yours turns out to deserve that treatment, the button on its opening card sends it to us.
What is actually in the link
Everything. There is no story on a server somewhere with the link pointing at it — the link is the story, which is why it works in a chat message, in a note to yourself, or on a phone that has never opened Erask before.
https://erask.org/app/?t=Rome+and+Carthage&d=Fifty+places+trace+three+wars+that+remade+the+western+Mediterranean.&k=First+Punic+War*Mercenary+War*Second+Punic+War*Third+Punic+War&s=Q2478491(15.55,38.19)@-0263*7!0-Q917376(13.58,37.31)@-0261*8!0-…&c=Rome+crosses+into+Sicily;+the+struggle+becomes+a+Mediterranean+war.**…
- t
- the title
- d
- one line saying what we are about to watch
- k
- the groups — sides, factions, phases. Each gets a colour and a line in the legend
- s
- the events themselves, in order, joined by a dash
- c
- captions, only on the events that need one — the heaviest part of a link, so they are kept short and left out where the name already tells you enough
And one event
| part | what it is |
|---|---|
| Q2478491 | the Wikidata item — here, the battle of Messana, where Rome crossed into Sicily. This is the only part that must be there. From it Erask takes the name, the description and the article, in the reader's own language. |
| (15.55,38.19) | where it happened, longitude first. Needed whenever Wikidata cannot place the item itself — a person, for instance, has no coordinates — and harmless when it can. |
| @-0263 | when: 264 BC. Digits only, no separators, and a minus sign for BC in astronomical
numbering, where 1 BC is the year 0. @18061815 is 18 June 1815,
@061815 June 1815, @1815 the year alone. |
| *7 | how much this moment matters to this story, from 1 to 10. It is the size of the dot on the globe. |
| !0 | which group it belongs to — the first one in k, counting from zero, so the
First Punic War. That is where its colour comes from. |
Who decides what, between the model and Wikidata
A language model writing history from memory will be confidently wrong somewhere. The design takes that as given: as much as possible is looked up rather than remembered, and where the two disagree there are rules rather than luck.
If the item carries coordinates of its own, those are used and any the model wrote are ignored. Coordinates in the link are a safety net for what Wikidata cannot place — and an event with no place at all is left out rather than guessed at.
For a battle or a treaty, the item's own date is the event's date, and the model can only add precision inside the same year. But a city's date is its founding and a person's is their birth — there the story's date is the one that counts, or Darwin would reach Rio de Janeiro in 1565.
Every generated story announces itself as one before it plays: how many events it has, how many were dropped for want of a date or a place, and how many were over the limit. Fifty events is the ceiling — beyond that a link stops fitting through the plumbing of the web. None of these stories enter Erask's catalogue on their own; if one deserves to, there is a button on that same card to send it in.
The honest bits
- It is the simpler kind of story — events in place and in order, and that is all. No territories, no routes, no editing pass. Expect a good sketch, not one of the hand-built ones.
- The model must be able to open a web page. Not run code — just read one page. Wikidata's identifiers are the one thing no model knows reliably from memory, so the prompt has it look them all up in a single request, and tells it to refuse rather than guess. Read the closing paragraph it writes you: that is where it admits what it could not confirm.
- The events are its choice, not ours. What belongs in a story about your subject, and what got left out, is the model's judgement. Ask it for the same story twice and you will get two different ones.
- Nothing is stored. No account, no upload, no server: if you lose the link, the story is gone. Keep the good ones.
Questions people actually ask
- Which model should I use?
Any of them that can open a web page: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Copilot. They differ in how many events survive — the prompt asks for fifty and some come back with twenty — but the link works the same. If one refuses because it cannot look up Wikidata identifiers, ask it again: the prompt has a fallback that works from article names instead of numbers. - Do I need an account, or to install anything?
No. The whole story travels inside the link, so there is nothing to upload and nothing to sign up for. The other side of that: nothing is stored either, so if you lose the link the story is gone. - How long does it take?
About a minute of your time. Copy the prompt, paste it, type your subject, and paste back the link the model gives you. The model itself takes anywhere from ten seconds to a couple of minutes, depending on how much reading it decides to do first. - Can I get a story about anything?
Anything with places and dates. Wars, epidemics, expeditions, elections, the spread of an idea, the career of one person — all of these work. What does not work is a subject with no geography: a story about a philosophy has nothing to put on a globe. - Will the dates and places be right?
The places and dates come from Wikidata, not from the model's memory, so a marker sits where Wikidata says the thing happened. What the model chooses is which events to include and what to say about them, and that is where it can be wrong or thin. Every marker links to its article so you can check it. - Can I share the story I made?
Yes — the link is the story, so sending it to somebody is all that sharing means here. It also opens on a phone, and you can save it into your archive so it is there next time. - Why did some of my events disappear?
The opening card tells you, by name: an article that does not exist under that title, an item with no date, or one with no coordinates. Duplicates are counted there too. Usually it means the model invented a title rather than looking one up. - Can you build a story properly instead?
Sometimes, yes. The hand-built ones in the catalogue take a day or two each and have territories, verified dates and an editing pass. If your subject deserves that, ask — the form takes a sentence.
Or ask for one to be built by hand
The stories in the catalogue are not made this way. Each one takes a day or two: real territories that change hands, dates checked against a table decided in advance, and a generator that refuses to publish if the check fails. If your subject is worth that, say so — a sentence is enough, and the ones people ask for get made first.