ROLECALLFeatures

Alt-Arts

Deep dives into every tool on stage

Alt-Arts

When you're browsing a character on PlotLight, you might notice a thumbnail strip alongside the main portrait — that's the character's alt-arts collection. Alt-arts are additional visual variants the creator has attached to a character: different outfits, different ages, alternate-universe designs, or different art styles for the same underlying character.

This page covers what you see as a visitor, how alts behave when you fork a character, and how alt-arts interact with versioning and lineage.

For the creator-facing side — how to add, reorder, and publish alts — see Alt-Arts on RoleCall.

Browsing Alts on a Character Detail Page

On the character's Discovery detail page, the primary art is the large portrait in the hero area. If the character has any alt-arts, they appear as a small thumbnail strip directly below (or alongside, depending on your screen width) the primary portrait.

  • Hover or tap any thumbnail to see a preview of that alt in the hero area, along with the alt's name and tagline.
  • Releasing (or tapping away) returns the preview to the primary art.
  • The thumbnail strip shows all published alts in the order the creator has arranged them.
  • Clicking a thumbnail (rather than just hovering) locks the preview — useful when you want to get a longer look before deciding to fork or subscribe.

Each thumbnail tooltip shows the alt's name and tagline — the short label the creator used to describe the look ("Casual Wear," "Timeline: Year 3," "Fantasy AU"). These labels are the fastest way to understand what the creator had in mind for each variant.

What Alt-Arts Tell You About a Character

Alt-arts are the clearest signal that a character has been maintained and expanded over time. A character with five polished alts usually means the creator is actively invested in it. The alt roster also tells you what kind of storytelling they anticipated:

  • Outfit variants suggest the character was designed for long-running sessions where wardrobe matters.
  • Age or timeline variants suggest the character was built to support multi-era stories.
  • AU variants suggest the character was designed to be flexible — able to work in settings other than the default.

None of this changes the AI's behavior. Alt-arts don't affect the character's personality, first message, or writing style — they're a visual layer. That said, some creators write scenario or first-message overrides specifically for certain alts, which is noted in the alt's tagline. If an alt has a scenario override, you'll see that noted on its thumbnail card.

Alt-Arts in Forks (Rewrites)

When you rewrite (fork) a character, the full alt list comes with it by default. Your forked copy arrives with every alt the original had at the time of forking — same images, names, and taglines.

What this means in practice:

  • You own the alts on your fork. You can keep them, remove them, add new ones, or reorder them entirely — your choices don't affect the original.
  • If you publish your fork, your alt list is what your readers see, independent of any updates the original creator makes to their own alt roster.
  • If the original creator set a Fork Rule that strips alts on rewrite, your fork arrives with only the primary art and an empty alt list. You'll see a note in the fork acceptance modal when this rule is in effect.

Building Your Own Alt Roster on a Fork

One of the most common things forkers do is swap out one or two alts while keeping others. If you loved an original character's "Casual" and "Formal" alts but want to replace the "Holiday" alt with your own commissioned art, you can — just delete the slot you don't want in the editor and upload your own.

Readers who find your fork on Discovery will only see your alt list. The original's alts live on the original's page.

Alt Attribution on Downstream Forks

If a particular alt was added by a downstream forker — not the original creator — the alt-arts section on that fork's detail page shows attribution next to the alt's thumbnail: a small "Added by @username" note indicating the alt was introduced further down the chain. This keeps the lineage transparent: you can tell at a glance which alts came from the source material and which were additions by a forker who remixed it later.

Alt-Arts and Discovery

Tags on a character are set at the character level, not the alt level. Discovery's tag filtering works against the character's main tag set. That means:

  • Searching for "modern AU" as a tag matches characters tagged that way, not characters whose alt names happen to say "Modern AU."
  • A character with a fantasy tag will surface in fantasy-filtered feeds even if one of its alts is a sci-fi variant.

The practical implication: the alt strip on the detail page is the best way to discover a character's range. Discovery gets you to the card; the alt strip tells you how far the character can stretch.

Alts in the Lineage Chain

Alt-arts are part of the versioned snapshot that gets captured each time a creator publishes. This has a few implications worth knowing:

Subscribers and Alts

If you've added a character to your Library via Add to Library (Repertoire) and the creator later publishes a new version with additional alts, you'll see an "Update available" badge on your library card. When you update, the new alts appear in your subscribed copy's thumbnail strip.

If you've pinned yourself to a specific older version of the character (because you preferred that version's behavior), your pinned version's alt list is also frozen at that snapshot — newer alts the creator added later won't appear until you manually bump.

Forks and Alt History

Forks track which snapshot they were forked from. The detail page for any fork shows which version of the original it was based on:

"Forked from v3 · Original now at v8"

If the original has added new alts in v4 through v8, those alts aren't automatically on your fork — your fork's alt list is what the original had at v3. The "view what changed since this fork" diff link shows you exactly which alts were added, removed, or reordered in the upstream, so you can decide whether to sync those changes into your fork.

Starting a Chat From a Specific Alt

When you click Chat now on a character's detail page, you're taken to RoleCall to start a scene. Once you're in the scene, the Cast wing has an art picker where you can switch between the character's alts — including the same alts you previewed on PlotLight. Any alt you pick in the Cast wing is remembered for that chat session.

If the character has a scenario or first-message override on a particular alt, activating that alt in the Cast wing before starting a new chat will use that override as the opening. Otherwise the base character's first message applies regardless of which alt is active.

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