Game masters

A campaign is a world where you know everything and the table knows part of it. Plotra keeps both in one project. Each session is a release, so the project can show you the world as your players know it after any session. Lines meant only for you are tagged so they are never shown to the table, and the Publish view builds a small wiki of people and places that holds only what has been revealed.

Start writing for freeEvery feature is on the Free plan. No card needed.

Set upCopy Anchor Link

1. Start the project. In the cold open, answer the first questions and choose A tabletop campaign.
2. Name the table. "Who's at the table?" takes the player characters, separated by commas, up to eight. Each gets a page in a "Player characters" folder.
3. Say what happens in session one. That line becomes the top of your prep.

The project opens on "Session 1 prep", inside a "Session 1" folder, with folders for "Player characters", "NPCs" and "Places" and a release called "Session 1". Chapters are called "Session" in this project. The prep ends with a line marked for the game master only.

A tabletop project starts with two modules on, World bible and Releases & reveals. For the players' wiki you also need Publishing: the checklist step "Export a wiki for your players" offers to turn it on, and so does More → More tools.

To see a campaign that is already running, open the Tabletop RPG campaign sample, "Ashes at Carrow Ford": three sessions as releases, NPCs with game-master notes, a "Secrets (GM only)" folder, clues, a timeline, and one contradiction to find. See Sample projects.

Typical workflowCopy Anchor Link

1. Prep the session. Write the prep in the session's folder. Type [[ to link every NPC and place you mention, so each of their pages lists the sessions they appear in.
2. Give NPCs and places their own pages. Characters and locations are built in. With World bible on you also get factions, objects, events and types of your own. The Codex lists them all.
3. Mark what only you may read. Put the cursor in a paragraph, press ⌘⌥T and set Revealed to "Never (the audience isn't told)". The paragraph is hidden under every spoiler horizon and left out of the wiki. To hold a paragraph back until a later session, choose that session instead. See Block tags.
4. Record who knows what. In Secrets & setups, track a secret, which characters know it and the scene where they learn it, and whether they hold the truth or a false version. The Setups and payoffs tab has a "Clue" kind for what you have planted. See Who knows what.
5. After you play, record the session as a release. In the Release roadmap, press Release and set Ships to that session's folder. Everything inside the folder is then revealed by that session, with no further tagging. Reveal an NPC's page in the session the players first met them, from the Story tab of the inspector.
6. Check what the table knows. Choose the last session under World as of. Notes the players haven't reached dim in the binder, game-master lines blur in the text, and the Codex, graph and timeline leave out what is unknown. See The spoiler horizon.
7. Build the players' wiki. Open Publish, choose the last session under As of, and press Download .zip on the wiki card. You get a folder of plain web pages: one for every revealed character, place and world entry, linked to each other.
8. Hand it over. Unzip it and upload it to any host that serves plain files, or send the folder as it is: it opens straight from a computer. After the next session, download it again and replace the files. See Putting it online.
9. Run the continuity checks before the next session. The Continuity view finds the NPC who died two sessions ago and is still on the guest list. See Continuity checks.

What the players can be givenCopy Anchor Link

What to read nextCopy Anchor Link

Quests are optional. They come with the Interactive narrative module, which carries a Beta tag: a quest is a world entry with a giver, prerequisites, objectives, a reward and what it reveals, drawn on a map of what unlocks what. The map follows the spoiler horizon. Quests have no states, so there is nowhere to tick one off as done.

Things to knowCopy Anchor Link

• Sharing the project with a player shows them everything. A viewer reads every note, and the spoiler horizon is their own setting, not yours. Give players the wiki, not access.
• The read-only link ignores every reveal. It shows unrevealed notes and passages tagged Never, with nothing to say they were meant to be hidden.
• Plotra does not host the wiki. It is a zip of static files and a copy from the moment you downloaded it.
• The wiki is empty until pages are Canon. "Only canon pages and passages" starts ticked and every new note is Draft. Mark the pages as Canon in the Story tab, or untick the box.
• A page needs a reveal. Once the project has releases, a character or place gets a wiki page only if some release reveals it, by its own tag or through the folder it is in.
• Titles, aliases, synopses and properties are published whole. Reveal tags hide notes and passages, not fields. Keep a secret in a tagged paragraph of the text, not in the synopsis.
• Uploaded images do not travel. A map uploaded into a note shows only inside Plotra. The wiki shows images that were added by web address.
• The horizon is yours alone. It is remembered in your browser for each project, so set it again on another device.
• On the Free plan a project can be shared with 5 people, which matters if you do share it with co-GMs. On the hosted version one uploaded file can be 4 MB on either plan. See Limits.