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 assembles a link. Any model that can browse the web will do.
Open it — and send it on
The link opens straight into Mundu 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 voyage of the Beagle. Seventeen landfalls, five years, one lap of the planet — every one of them resolved against Wikidata, and the whole thing living in 1,285 characters of link.
The Voyage of the Beagle
Five years around the world with the young Charles Darwin: the fossils at Punta Alta, the earthquake at Concepción that lifts the coast in minutes, the Galápagos mockingbirds that differ from island to island, and the atoll that proves the coral theory.
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 Mundu before.
https://mundu.app/app/?t=The+Voyage+of+the+Beagle&d=Five+years+around+the+world+with+the+young+Charles+Darwin&k=Outward*South+America*The+Pacific*Home&s=Q43382@27121831*9!0-Q3751@16011832*5!0-Q36947@28021832*7!1-…&c=She+sails+at+last,+after+two+false+starts+in+a+December+gale*…
- 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 |
|---|---|
| Q43382 | the Wikidata item — here, Plymouth. This is the only part that must be there. From it Mundu takes the name, the description and the article, in the reader's own language. |
| @27121831 | the date, day-month-year with nothing in between. @121831 is December 1831,
@1831 is the year alone, and a minus sign puts it before Christ. |
| *9 | 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. That is
where its colour comes from. |
| (4.4125,50.6803) | optional: where it happened, longitude first. Only needed when Wikidata cannot place the item itself — a person, for instance, has no coordinates. |
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 Mundu'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.