Dungeon Master's Guide

Getting StartedAbout this guide

This is the author's companion to The Lost Realms. Where the Player's Handbook teaches someone how to play a world and the in-app Field Guide is a reference to every button, this guide is a progressive walkthrough of making worlds: how to conceive one, plan it, generate it with the World Builder, and then shape every detail in the World Editor.

It is organised the way you actually work, in five parts:

Getting StartedThe DM & the GM — two different masters

Everything in this guide rests on one distinction. There are two "masters" in The Lost Realms, and they are not the same thing:

The two meet constantly while you build. Almost every Editor tab has a GM request box at the bottom: you type an instruction in plain language ("add a grizzled blacksmith named Doran to the square") and the GM authors the underlying data for you. The ✨ buttons work the same way for prompts. So in the Editor you are directing the GM as a co-author; at play you are handing it the keys. Keep the roles straight and the rest of this guide reads cleanly.

Getting StartedThe build workflow, end to end

A world moves through four stages. You can loop back to any of them at any time — worlds are never "finished" — but this is the natural order, and it's the order of this guide.

1. Conceive. Settle the tone, theme & premise, art style, and the rules of reality. Sketch the regions, cast, and an opening thread. Part I
2. Build. Open the World Builder from the login screen, describe the world, and press Generate World. The GM forges places, people, lore, and a starter quest as one editable JSON world. Part II
3. Edit. Open the world in the World Editor and refine it tab by tab — rooms, entities, classes, skills, items, magic, quests, factions, regions. Part III
4. Dress & run. Generate art from your prompts, then playtest with the DM debug commands, and grow the world as play reveals what it needs. Parts IV–V

ConceivingThe seed of a world

Before any tool, decide what the place is. Five choices shape everything the GM does downstream, and all five are things you'll type into the World Builder — so it pays to have opinions about them first.

You do not have to write all five yourself. The World Builder can Suggest a premise, Suggest an art style derived from your tone and theme, and ✨ Generate both the World Rules and the Prologue from what you've already written. But the more you bring to Theme & Premise, the more the world will feel like yours rather than a default.

ConceivingDesign pillars — the questions worth answering

A premise is a sentence; a pillar is a decision you'll lean on a hundred times. Before you build, answer these — even roughly. They keep the generated world coherent and give you a yardstick for every later edit ("does this fit?").

ConceivingPlanning the structure

The Game Master will happily forge an entire region from one paragraph, but the worlds that play best are the ones where you had a shape in mind. Think in terms of the objects the world is actually made of — the same objects you'll edit later — so your plan maps straight onto the tools.

Scale it to the Scope

The World Builder offers two scopes: Small (a compact 4–6 room starting area) and Medium (a fuller 8–12 room region). Start small. A tight, fully-dressed six-room world — every room described, every NPC given a secret, one clean quest — is far more satisfying than a sprawling one that's mostly stubs. You can always grow it later.

Sketch the moving parts

ConceivingA pre-build checklist

When you can answer all of these, you're ready to open the World Builder:

• ◈ A one-paragraph Theme & Premise with a hook.
• ◈ A Tone chosen from the list (it sets your art presets).
• ◈ A one-line Art Style — or a plan to Suggest one.
• ◈ A sense of the World Rules: how magic and death work.
• ◈ A starting location the player can act in on turn one.
• ◈ 2–4 regions and a rough count of rooms per region.
• ◈ 3–6 named NPCs, each with a want and a secret.
• ◈ At least one faction.
• ◈ One opening quest in 2–4 beats.
• ◈ Your Claude API key (required) and any image/sound provider keys you want (optional).

The World BuilderOpening the World Builder

The World Builder turns a paragraph of intent into a whole, playable world. You reach it from the login screen.

1. On the login screen, paste your Claude API Key (required for generation). Optionally click API Keys to add image/sound provider keys.
2. Click New World. The World Builder opens as a full-page workspace titled World Builder.
3. Describe the world (next section), Generate World, review, and Save or Export it.
4. Back at login, tick New Game, choose your world, and Begin Your Journey.

The World BuilderThe concept form, field by field

The Builder is a single form. Fill in as much or as little as you like — only a Theme & Premise really matters; the rest can be suggested or generated.

The World BuilderGenerating the world

Press Generate World. The Game Master reads your whole form and forges one complete world — rooms and their exits, people and creatures, a starting item catalogue, lore, and an opening quest — as a single JSON object. A live timer shows elapsed time while it works (a full world can take a minute or two, especially with Auto-lore on).

Three things to know about how the GM writes it:

• It is written in one pass, in order, and the order is load-bearing. The world comes back as a single JSON object written top to bottom, so where a thing sits in that object is when it was decided. The classes and the peoples come first; then the skills; then everything that leans on a skill — the items, the beings, the rooms with their locked doors and trapped chests, and the quests. That middle position is the whole reason it is worth naming: a skill has to already exist before a lock can set a picking difficulty against it or a being can be given a knack of this world's own, and it has to come after the peoples and classes to be tailored to them at all. A world whose skills were written last would have items and beings referring to a roster that did not exist when they were written.
• Prompts are written style-free. Every banner, portrait, and item image prompt the GM authors is a plain subject description — no palette or medium words — because your world's Art Style is applied automatically at generation time. This is why one Art Style line can re-skin the entire world. See Part IV.
• Your framing is stamped onto the world. The tone, art style, theme, and rules you chose are saved onto the world object so they survive export, import, and reload — and so the World › Profile and Art › Style tabs show them later.

The World BuilderThe editable World JSON

The generated world drops into the World JSON (editable) panel — a full code editor. Everything about the world is here and hand-editable: rename a room, fix a typo in a description, adjust a stat, delete an entity. Most of the time you'll prefer the friendlier tab-based Editor (Part III), but the raw JSON is always the ground truth, and it's the fastest way to make a surgical change or paste in content you've prepared elsewhere.

The World BuilderSave, export & import — and opening the Editor

The row of buttons under the JSON panel is how a draft becomes something you can play or share.

The World BuilderFrom world to playthrough

Once a world is saved or imported, playing it is a login-screen choice:

1. Tick New Game. A World dropdown appears.
2. Choose your world — Default (the built-in Lost Realms) or any world you've saved. An imported file is used automatically.
3. Set your character's Name and Class, keep Dungeon Master ticked if you want Editor access in-game, and press Begin Your Journey.

You now have two roads into the Editor: from a fresh world's World Editor button in the Builder, or in-game via the DM's Editor tab. Both open the same tools. Part III walks every one of them.

The World EditorThe Editor at a glance

The World Editor is a tabbed workspace over your world's data. Each tab manages one kind of object — rooms, entities, classes, items, quests, and so on. Learn its two recurring patterns once and every tab becomes familiar.

Getting in

Three doors lead to the same Editor:

• DM In-game. While playing as a DM, the Editor tab across the top of the screen opens it over your live world — edits take effect immediately.
• From the Builder. The World Editor button on a generated draft opens that draft for tuning before you save.
• Edit World. The login Edit World button opens your current saved world as a draft (a detached, full-window editor).

Pattern 1 — the standard toolbar

Most tabs are a scrolling list of cards, one per object, topped by the same toolbar:

Pattern 2 — the GM request box

At the foot of almost every tab is a text box and an Apply button. This is where you author. Type an instruction in plain language and the Game Master edits the data for you:

add a grizzled blacksmith named Doran to the square
give Willa a night-owl routine and a smuggling secret
raise the Mage's base INT to 20
remove the smuggling side quest

There is deliberately no "New" button — you create, change, and delete objects through this box (or by Import). A few things are true of every box:

• It is strictly scoped. The Factions box only edits factions; ask it for a room and it politely declines. This keeps edits from bleeding across object types.
• It is not a story turn — it authors data, it doesn't advance play or narrate.
• It merges, it doesn't clobber. Editing an existing object by name updates its fields in place (and applies to every same-named instance).
• The result — created / updated / removed — is reported on a status line, and every handoff is written to the Logs tab.

Cards themselves also carry inline editors: description boxes with a ✨ to have the GM (re)write them, portrait controls, and collapsible prompt and lore sections. The rest of Part III is a tour of what each tab manages and the fields each object carries. The tab order below matches the Editor's own.

Editor · MapMap

Editor › Map · inner subtabs: World / Regions / Background

The Map tab is a viewer, not an editor — the play-map with the fog lifted, so you can see the whole world's shape at once. It has no card list, no toolbar, and no GM box.

• World (inner subtab) — the realm graph. Zoom in/out and reset view with the floating controls; set or reset a decorative map background image; click a room node to open its detail popup, and click item/being icons on a node to inspect them.
• Regions (inner subtab) — every region's map on one screen. This is a review surface, not where regions are authored: they are made, named, shaped and filed on World › Geography › Regions, which shows one at a time because that is the right shape for writing one. This board shows them all at once because the question it answers is about the set — do these look like sheets out of one atlas? — which you could not ask before without selecting each region in turn. A card per region with its map, its own map prompt, and Generate / Upload; the head counts how many are still to draw. The controls are the same ones the detail panel draws, so an edit made here is an edit made there.
• Background (inner subtab) — the world map: a single 2D render of the world's exterior areas in their relative positions, with the world's name lettered across the top. Its own prompt and Generate / Upload, beside the shared Style.

Use the Map to sanity-check connectivity — dead ends, orphaned rooms, a region that isn't reachable — then jump to Rooms to fix exits.

Editor · WorldWorld — Profile, Chunks, Geography, Factions & Currency

Editor › World · inner subtabs include: Profile / Chunks / Geography / Factions / Currency / Settings

The World tab holds the world's framing and its highest-level structure, spread across several inner subtabs along its bottom edge. This section covers six of them — the ones that shape a world's identity, its geography, its money, and the people in it: Profile, Chunks, Geography (which holds Regions and Districts on a strip of its own), Factions, Currency and Settings. Two more are covered elsewhere: Evaluate compiles the world and reports what is provably wrong with it; because that belongs to testing rather than to authoring, it has its own section in Part V — see Evaluating & fixing a world. Culture is large enough to have outgrown a subsection and has a chapter of its own — see Building Cultures.

World › Profile

The world's identity, mirroring the World Builder form and pre-filled from the live world.

World › Chunks

The world's merge-and-backup bench. Three jobs live here: grow the world with the GM, merge JSON "chunks" by hand, and export the whole world.

• Generate with GM — describe a new area ("westward, a haunted salt marsh") and the GM authors a full, fleshed region and merges it. The raw JSON also lands in the paste box for review.
• Stub a large region — lays out 8–16 skeleton rooms (name + one-line description + exits, each flagged a stub) to be fleshed out later from the Rooms tab. Great for blocking out a big area fast.
• Stitch onto — pick 1–4 existing rooms the new area should connect to (sent to the GM in full detail so it joins cleanly). Leave it unset to attach to the player's current room.
• Paste & Merge — drop a hand-written or exported chunk into the box and Merge. Supported keys: rooms, items, entities, classes, lore, quests, encounters, and exitPatches (to graft new rooms onto old ones). Merging is additive — existing rooms and quests are never overwritten; catalogue collisions prompt you to overwrite or keep.
• Export World — downloads the entire world as a versioned .json backup, dungeon maps included. Do this often.
• Include dungeon tile art (the checkbox beside it) — off by default. Dungeon layouts always travel; the tiles you uploaded to dress them are pictures, and a fully dressed dungeon measured over two megabytes on its own. Unticked, a dungeon arrives on the built-in stone; ticked, exactly as you drew it. The answer is remembered, and it applies to Export Game too.

World › Geography

Geography is one tab with two faces, and its own strip of subtabs along the bottom: Regions and Districts. They are the same subject at two scales — a region is a stretch of the map with an outline and cardinal neighbours, a district is a named part of one — and they used to sit four places apart on the World strip, where nothing suggested they had anything to do with each other. The tab remembers which face you left it on, so stepping out to Calendar and back puts you where you were.

World › Geography › Regions

The functional region map — the world partitioned into named zones the player sees on their map.

• Generate / Regenerate — the GM proposes 3–7 regions (each a name + 1–2-sentence description + a banner prompt) and the engine draws them as a selectable map. Regenerating asks for confirmation and clears every room's region, so you'll re-file rooms afterward.
• Select & edit — click a region (or the "No Region" chip) to open its detail panel: rename it (renames everywhere and re-tags its rooms), edit its description, and give it a banner image (Generate / Upload, with an image prompt + ✨ and an art-style override).
• File rooms — the region's rooms panel lists matching rooms, each with a dropdown to reassign its region.
• Map — below the banner, each region card has a Map section that paints an illustrated map of the region's interior layout. A ✨ asks the GM to compose a direction-aware map prompt from the region's rooms and how they connect (e.g. "Market Row lies north of the Village Square"), so locations land near their true relative positions; you can also type the prompt yourself. Below the prompt sits the generated map image (or a placeholder) with Generate / Regenerate and Upload. A shared Style prefix (with a Preset picker — Oil on Aged Parchment, Ink & Quill, Watercolour, Antique Engraving) is prepended to every region's map prompt so all your maps share one look. Region maps generate through the Map AI provider (Settings), and are shown to the player on their Maps › Region tab for whichever region they're currently in.
• Build — select a region and press Build Region to open the Region Builder, a form for authoring that one place in isolation without leaving the dialog. See below.

The Region Builder

The Region Builder is a region's own brief — description and climate (the same two fields the Regions tab edits) plus eight authoring fields: Theme & Premise, Tone, Scope (small / medium / large / extra large), Art Style, Rules of this place, Prologue, Narrative, and Beings. Every field may be left blank to inherit the world's own answer, and a ✨ beside each asks the GM to suggest it. Pressing Build Region hands the whole brief to the GM, which writes rooms, beings, items (with proper equipment slots, so any gear it mints can actually be worn), quests, and encounters for this region only — plus, if the Auto-generate Lore/Unlocks checkbox is on, its lore — told to write to the region's climate so the weather it describes matches the weather the engine resolves there, and merges the result straight into your world. It refuses on an empty brief rather than inventing a region from nothing but its name.

Export Region downloads this region — its brief, its record, and everything in the world that belongs only to it (its rooms, and the catalog entries only its rooms use) — as a JSON file; Import Region loads one back in. A region file deliberately carries no dungeons: a dungeon's location is free text ("a region, a room name, a direction"), so which dungeons belong to a given region has no answer the engine can compute yet — build and place dungeons separately with the Dungeon Builder.

Region fields: id, name, description, color, polygon, label, bannerImage, bannerImagePrompt, mapImage, mapImagePrompt, ignoreArtStyle, brief. The shared map style lives on world.regions.mapStyle.

World › Geography › Districts

A region is a stretch of the map: it has an outline, a colour, cardinal neighbours, and a room says which one it is in. A district is the other half of how people name where they are — the shambles, the dock ward, the terraces above the mill — and it is a name rather than a shape. It is not drawn on the world map, it has no polygon, and nothing about it needs a room to know it exists.

The tab is a roster like Factions, with the same toolbar, cards and GM box. There are two ways in and they are different acts: + New opens a dialog asking for the name, the region and the two descriptions together, and refuses a nameless district while what you typed is still on screen; + Add has the Game Master invent one whole from this world's regions, theme and tone.

An id that stops resolving is kept and shown as missing rather than pruned: a room deleted today may be restored tomorrow, and a dangling reference you can see is one you can fix. The opposite rule applies to the Game Master — a reply naming a region or a room this world does not have has it dropped and named back to you, because that is a new claim made against a roster the model was shown in full, not data you already wrote.

Map Pins, left of Regenerate, opens the map with the district's rooms beside it: click a room, then click the map to place its marker, which shows the room's name above a dot. Clicking a room that already has one re-arms it, which is how a pin is moved. Pins are stored as fractions of the image, so they hold at any size, and a pin only lives as long as its room does — take a room out of the district, or delete it from the world, and its pin goes with it. That is deliberately the opposite of the rule the rooms list follows, and the reason is in the design doc: a dangling room id is recoverable and you can see it, while a dangling pin is a dot labelled with somewhere that is not there.

The map section is the Regions tab's, control for control: the shared Style prefix with its preset picker — world-level on purpose, so every map this world paints reads as one hand's work — the map prompt with its ✨ handoff, the image, and Generate / Upload.

Once placed, the pins are drawn in four places, so you never have to reopen the dialog to see what you did. The district card's own map carries them under it. Each room on the Rooms tab grows a read-only District section naming the quarters it is filed under, and the room popup — the one an NPC's location link or the map opens — carries a District line under Region. Both are chips and lists rather than single names, because a room may be filed under two quarters and naming one of them would read as a finished answer. Neither is editable: the district owns its rooms list, and a picker on the room would be a second writer onto the same relationship.

The fourth is the player's. When they are standing in a room filed under a district, their Maps tab grows a subtab named after the quarter itself — Quill Ward, not the word District — showing that quarter's map with your pins over it; walk out and the tab goes. A room filed under two quarters gets a subtab each, so the strip names both. It pans and zooms like the Region map. So the district's name is what a player reads on that strip, beside World and Region, which is worth knowing when you name one: a quarter called “District 4” or “the rooms near the docks” is a tab label as much as it is a record. Nothing about it asks whether a room was visited: the world map earns its fog one room at a time because the party assembles it by walking, but a district map is one authored picture, and fogging parts of an illustration would mean cutting it up.

And on that tab the pins are how the player gets about. Pressing one asks to travel there; they confirm, and they walk. The marker for the room they are standing in is drawn and inert — you are here — and on your two surfaces, the card and the pin dialog, markers stay inert too, so a click in the dialog still places a pin rather than moving anybody.

The walk is an ordinary turn, not a jump. The engine sends the command the same way the Maps tab's Return button does, the Game Master narrates the crossing, and the world moves while they cross it — so an ambush, a shut gate or a change since they last came that way all still happen. The GM is told about the district in its per-turn briefing, which is also what lets an NPC standing in the shambles talk about the shambles.

World › Factions

The world's organised powers — guilds, orders, cults, guards. The player only learns a faction exists when play earns it, so factions are as much a GM tool as a roster.

GM box examples: "add a Thieves' Guild aligned chaotic neutral" · "make the Ashen Order hostile to the player" · "give the Salt Cartel a reveal condition tied to dockworkers" · "give the Ashen Order a hidden history and price what it costs to learn it" · "remove the Guards".

Per-card, you can also generate/upload the emblem, edit the reveal condition, author DM-only lore, and hit Add to Player to enrol the current character.

World › Currency

A world's coinage, and anything else it spends. Every world starts with one currency — Coin, denominated gold / silver / copper (1 gold = 10 silver = 100 copper) — and this is where you can rename it, retune it, or mint others alongside it (gems, chits, favors — anything a being might demand instead of coin).

A currency or denomination can't be deleted out from under a being still using it — the editor names who, and blocks the removal until you've reassigned them. Every item's price stays a plain copper integer regardless of how many currencies a world defines; what changes is which currencies a being will take. That's set on the being itself via its acceptedCurrencies field (GM box, in the order it prefers to be paid) — see Editing items and the Currency & Tender design doc for the fuller picture, including what's still open.

World › Settings

Settings the world itself carries, authored here by the Dungeon Master — distinct from the app's own Settings dialog, which belongs to whoever is sitting at this browser and lives in localStorage. This one travels with the world, and with every save and export of it. Right now it holds one collapsible section, Identity: the world's own signing key, the credential a Realm Registry checks before it will list a world under your name rather than as claimed-first-not-proved.

Mint a key for this world… asks for confirmation, then downloads a private key file and writes the matching public half into the world data, where it travels with every copy from here on. Minting cannot be undone or regenerated — lose the file and this world can never be proved to be yours again, which is why the button insists on that confirmation first rather than after. Once minted, the section reports whether the world is keyed and, when it is, whether the private half is still on this machine or only ever lived in a file you saved elsewhere.

Editor · WorldBuilding Cultures

Editor › World › Culture · inner subtabs: Languages / Folklore / History / Castes / Religions / Heraldry

Rooms, beings and items describe what a world contains. Culture describes what its people share — the tongues they speak, the stories they repeat, the powers they swear by, the ranks they sort themselves into, and the arms they fly. It is six inner tabs along the bottom of World › Culture. Another, Beliefs, was considered and then folded into Folklore as a fourth kind of tale rather than built on its own, which is the shape most of this tab's decisions take: prefer one roster with a kind over two rosters that mostly agree. History is the one place that rule was deliberately not followed, and the reason is worth stating: a tale and a chronicle entry are not two rosters that mostly agree, they are opposites. One is what people say happened; the other is what did.

Five of the six carry real world data today. One does not, and the difference is visible the moment you open it.

A disabled control is a promise kept

On Castes, every authoring control — the filter, the New button, the GM request box, its Apply — is disabled, with the reason in its tooltip. That is deliberate and it is the thing to understand about this tab before you use it. The failure being guarded against is not an empty screen; it is a control wired to a handler that quietly answers not yet, so you type a request, watch it accepted, and change nothing. That has happened twice elsewhere in this app, and both times nothing reported it. A disabled button cannot become either.

The same rule governs the GM boxes on the five built tabs, and they do not all agree yet: Folklore, History, Religions and Heraldry have working boxes, Languages does not. A box is opened only alongside the authoring roster that reads what it writes — Languages' records exist, its roster does not, so its box stays off with "Coming with P4" in the tooltip rather than pretending.

Culture › Languages

A tongue this world speaks, and the one Culture system a player meets through an object rather than a conversation. + New invents one — a name, a sample sentence, and twenty-six letters to draw. The card then holds:

The glyphs are the part with the most machinery behind them. The sheet dialog will generate a whole alphabet from the language's name and feel, or take one you drew and uploaded, and either can then be traced into vectors so the letters stay crisp at any size — with a trial run first, so you can see what the tracer makes of your sheet before committing the set. Individual glyphs can be replaced or cleared one at a time. The words dialog authors the lexicon by hand or asks for a starter dictionary in one call.

What a language is for lives on the Items tab. language is a fact about the object, so a book, a spellbook, or a scroll alike can be written in one — its chapters, where it has any, render in glyphs and placeholders to a reader who hasn't learned the tongue. The four lessons that teach the tongue itself — teachesScript, teachesWords, bilingual, and teachesLanguage — stay with whatever is actually read, a book or a scroll: they are facts about reading a thing rather than about the thing, and a spellbook grants none of them, being inscribed rather than read. teachesLanguage is the largest of the four and the one to reach for last — a grammar that hands over the tongue itself, letters and every word the world gives it, now and later, subsuming the other three; the directive asks for one to be rare, a whole quest's worth of object rather than a shelf item. All deterministic, with no GM call and nothing to roll. A player reviews what they've learned of a tongue — the alphabet, every word they know, and whether they're marked fluent in it — in their own Journal › Languages. See Items for those fields and Dialects & Languages for the whole system.

Culture › Folklore

The stories a world's people tell — and the first Culture system a player ever meets. Every tale has a kind, and the kind is chosen before the tale exists: + New opens a menu rather than dropping a blank card, because a tale has to be drawn under a heading and the engine will not guess which.

A kind you did not write is kept, not corrected. Import a world whose author grouped their tales as sagas and the tab grows a Sagas group; the alternative is rewriting somebody's vocabulary into ours, which nothing downstream would ever report. The tab carries two filters for the same reason the Items and Lore tabs do — a name box and a funnel by kind — plus Import/Export and Collapse/Expand all.

GM box: "add a legend about the drowned bell under the millpond". An NPC card carries a Folklore field too — chips for the tales that being can tell, picked from the same grouped list. A monster carries none: the field is for conversation. Each chip names the tale's kind beside its title, since “The Bell Below” says nothing about whether the being is repeating a myth or passing on a warning — and a chip whose tale the world no longer has is kept and marked rather than dropped, the same rule a religion's races follow, so a deleted tale is distinguishable from a being nobody gave one to. Every turn, the GM's dossier lists only the tales tellable by whoever is standing in this room — not the world's whole roster, the way Lore Hooks does — because a tale is earned from its teller, and a teller who is not present is telling nothing. A locked tale reaches the GM with its full text, so it can be told the instant it is earned, under a standing warning that it is a secret until then. Unlocking one copies it into the player's own Compendium › Lore with the tale's own picture.

Culture › History

The tab beside Folklore, and the other half of the same question. Folklore is hearsay — what a people say happened, handed down and shaped in the telling, true or not. History is the record: wars, famines, sieges, plagues, treaties, successions, the debasement of the coin, the year the river froze. The test is one sentence, and it is worth applying to every entry you write: could a clerk have written it down at the time, and would an ordinary person today know it the way anyone knows their own century? A prophecy, a curse, a haunting or a founding myth fails that test and belongs one tab to the left. One person’s duel fails it too — that is not history unless the realm felt it.

Nothing in the engine plays a historical event. They exist to give the Game Master geopolitical ground to stand on: why this duchy distrusts that one, what the old soldier in the tavern was too young for, which year the coin was cut. A world with a century of dated events behind it answers “what happened here?” out of its own past rather than out of the air.

Precision is deliberately partial. Most history is known only to the year, and the form is built to let you say so: leave the month and day unset and the entry reads “Year 218”. Add a month where it matters — a winter famine, a spring campaign — and a day only for a single decisive dated event a chronicler would have stamped. Resist filling in a day to look precise: an over-dated record lies with more confidence than a vague one, and the Game Master is told the same rule when it drafts for you.

The tab draws a timeline, oldest first, the same shape the Journal uses — within a year the precisely-dated entries run in sequence and “sometime that year” trails them. Click an entry to open it and edit it in place; every field writes straight through and saves. It is the one editor tab that draws its cards shut by default, because a chronicle is a list you scan and twenty open edit forms is not a timeline.

Two buttons add one, and they are different acts. + Add hands the job to the Game Master, which is what you want for an event that should fit: it is given your world’s canon, its calendar, the events already recorded and the tales already told, and asked to write one that sits among them without colliding with any. Press it with the request box empty and it records something your world implies and has never had written down. + New opens a dialog for when you already know what happened — it refuses a nameless event and a dateless one, because a timeline has nowhere to draw either.

You decide what your player reads. Every card carries an Unlocked for the player checkbox, off by default. Ticked, the event appears in their Compendium › History — the same timeline, read-only — and its card is badged Published here so you can see at a glance which of forty they have, without opening any of them. Untick it and the event is still fully live for the Game Master; it is simply not in the book your player can read.

The Game Master ticks it too, and this is the thing to know before you are surprised by it: when somebody in the room gives your player an actual account of an event, it is written into their Compendium there and then. So a box you left unticked can come back ticked, and that is the feature rather than a fault. You publish what you want them to have up front; the rest arrives as they are told about it.

It is still publication and not discovery, which is worth being clear about because Folklore one tab to the left carries a box with the same label meaning something else. A tale is earned: your player draws it out of somebody who was not going to volunteer it, and is paid experience for it. Being told about a war is none of those — they asked an ordinary question and got an answer anyone in the realm could have given. So this box pays no XP however it comes to be ticked, has no XP field beside it, and the Game Master never withholds an account to make one of them work for it. What the box records is that your player has been told, so they can look it back up.

The + Add roster is the one place the Game Master may not set it, and the distinction is worth the sentence: writing world data is not telling anybody anything. There is no player in that exchange and nothing has been said aloud, so an unlocked it returns there is ignored — a model asked for “the siege the player heard about” will helpfully publish a beat nobody has recounted.

Write with the same thing in mind either way: everything you record here is public knowledge in your world, published or not. A secret about the past is not a history entry, it is a lore hook, and the engine has three ways of doing those. The checkbox decides whether your player has read the record; it does not make an event a secret.

Your Reveal all toggle works on their tab as it does everywhere else: with it on you see the unpublished beats too, dimmed and badged Unpublished, which is how to review the whole chronicle from their side without ticking forty boxes to check. One difference from your own card is deliberate: a person your world no longer has is kept and flagged here, below, and simply left off theirs — you can repoint a broken reference and they would only be shown a raw id.

Who carries it — the History field on an NPC

A chronicle nobody can speak to is a document. Every NPC card in Editor › Beings carries a History field directly beneath its Folklore one: pick recorded events from the list and they become part of what that person can talk about. The Game Master is then told, every turn, which of the people standing in the room can speak to which event — and what happened in each.

What the pairing gives you is standing, not permission. Anyone in your realm may know of the siege; that is what makes it history. The list says who was at it. Pair the old soldier with it and he tells the player about the ninth day; pair the miller instead and you get what the siege did to the price of bread. Leave a person unpaired and they still know of the thing in the general way everyone does — they simply have no account of their own, and the Game Master is told not to invent one for them.

It is an NPC field, like Folklore, because the point of it is conversation and a monster has none. It stores ids, so retitling an event on this tab does not break the pairing, and an event you delete leaves a marked chip on every card that named it rather than vanishing. The picker is in chronicle order with each event's date beside its title — a title alone does not tell you whether this person lived through the thing or is repeating their grandmother. And it does not offer the publication box: that belongs to the event, not to the person. A beat you have not published is still a beat this person can speak about.

When one of those people actually recounts an event, the engine writes it into your player's Compendium › History and tells them so in a line they can click. That is the second road to the checkbox above, and the pairing is its gate: only an event somebody in the room carries can be filed, so a Game Master that remembered a war from an earlier scene cannot file it in a room where nobody was there.

Culture › Religions

A faith: what is worshipped, by whom, where, and what the faith asks of them.

An id that stops resolving is kept and shown as missing, never pruned. A race deleted today may be a race restored tomorrow — this app has a Save Editor and an undo-by-reimport habit — and a normalizer that quietly dropped the reference would turn a recoverable mistake into an unrecoverable one.

+ New opens a dialog rather than dropping a blank card, and refuses a nameless faith while what you typed is still on screen: a religion is worth nothing until it has a name, a deity and the peoples who keep it, and a blank card asks for none of those. There is also a + Add on the shared random-add driver for when you want a faith to react to rather than to plan — something Folklore does not have, so the Game Master will write you a tale on request but will not invent one unasked.

GM box examples: "found a new religion of the sea, worshipped by the Fisherfolk" · "give the Sunwrought Faith an insignia". This is the one Culture roster that refuses an invented reference. Asked who keeps a faith, a model will cheerfully answer "the Elves" in a world that has none — so the directive carries the world's real race and region ids in full, drops anything else, and names the drop back to you rather than writing a worshipper who does not exist. Religions is also a group on both halves of Editor › Art: Missing, so Generate All paints every unpainted faith at once, and Review, so the gallery includes them.

Culture › Heraldry

The devices a house, an order, a realm or a faith is known by — and the one Culture record that is read on another tab entirely. + New opens a dialog; + Add asks the Game Master to devise one whole.

The kind is not a label on a device — it is what the record is about. The same wolf's head woven into a hall's hanging, flown from a mast, painted on a breastplate and branded into a doorpost is four records, not one with four notes. Three things read the field: the picture is painted from it (a prompt naming only the charge gets the same generic shield every time), the card head groups by it, and — the reason it matters most — the armour select on the Items tab offers your coats of arms and nothing else. A tapestry is woven and hung; offering one to an armourer would be offering you something no armourer could put on a breastplate. That is why the New dialog refuses a device with no kind, where the religion dialog beside it refuses only a missing name.

Where you use it: open any item of type armor on Editor › Items. Its Details table carries a Heraldry row — a select listing this world's coats of arms. No other item type draws the row. A world with none yet still shows it, disabled, so you know the feature exists and where to go.

Removing a device clears the armour that bore it, and this is the one place the app breaks its own keep-a-dangling-reference rule on purpose. A broken faction reference shows in red on the card holding it, so you can find and fix it; an armour bearing a device you deleted would show nothing at all, and you would have to hunt it one item card at a time. The confirmation dialog names the armour it is about to clear before you agree.

GM box examples: "a drowned-oak coat of arms for the Fenwardens, and a flag to fly over their tower" · "give the Guards a plain symbol their people would brand". Like Religions, this roster refuses an invented faction and names the drop back to you. It also polices the four kinds: asked for a "pennant", it creates the device without a kind and tells you, rather than filing it as a flag — because guessing what the thing is would put the guess in the picture where nothing could see it.

Heraldry is a group on both halves of Editor › Art: Missing, so Generate All paints every device that has no picture yet rather than making you visit each card, and Review, so the gallery of what your world looks like includes its banners and each cell opens the device it draws.

Castes — what it will be

The tab is drawn, it states its intended shape in the app, and it stores nothing. It is worth opening anyway: the panel is the specification, and reading it is the cheapest way to decide whether your world wants the system at all.

Castes is how a society sorts its people — a name and a rank against the others, which peoples sort this way, what a caste may and may not do, and how one moves between them, or that nobody does. The open question is whether a caste binds to a race independently of place; where it is practised is already answered below.

Where a culture record attaches

A language nothing speaks is a paragraph you wrote once. The question of what these records attach to is what decides whether Culture is a system or a notebook, and it has been answered: the region. A culture record is world-level in the same sense a weather condition or a currency is — its data travels with the world rather than being built into the game — and geographically it belongs to the region, the same way a region already names its climate by id while the climate catalogue lives on the world. A record keeps the properties of a people (which races, which orders); the map keeps place.

That is why a religion names races and regions and a language names its speakers, and why there is no per-system field bolted onto the Region card: a later region culture dialog is where an author picks all of a region's cultural markers at once.

Editor · RoomsRooms

Editor › Rooms

Every place the player can stand is a room. This is where you shape geography, exits, contents, atmosphere, and per-time-of-day art.

GM box examples: "add a mossy well to the square" · "add a dusty storeroom north of the kitchen" · "rewrite the crypt's description and set its region to The Barrowlands" · "add a hidden exit down from the chapel to a crypt". New rooms are created and stitched into the map automatically; edits merge (exits and descriptions merge rather than replace). A lock on that storeroom is not authored here, though — see Doors on exits below.

Stub & flesh

A stub room is a placeholder — a name, a line, and its exits. Its card shows a Flesh out with GM button that has the GM write its full description, banner prompt, items, and inhabitants, then clears the stub flag (its exits and visited state are preserved). Stubbing a whole region and fleshing rooms as the player approaches is a good way to build big worlds without generating everything up front.

Doors on exits

Any exit can carry a door (or a barrier — the same record under a different label and a squarer picture, for a boulder or a portcullis rather than something hinged). Doors aren't authored through the GM box like the rest of a room: each exit row carries its own + door button — or a state chip, once one exists — that opens the Door Editor directly.

Ambient behaviours — a room that breathes

A room's ambient field holds the little background beats that make a place feel lived-in while the player lingers there: a snatch of overheard song, a fist thumping a table, the wind rattling the shutters. It is organised per time of day — dawn, morning, afternoon, evening, dusk, midnight — so the same tavern can roar at evening and fall to embers and wind by midnight. Each period holds a list of acts, and each act is one recurring beat.

Every act has four parts:

A beat written 30% · 60s therefore means: every 60 seconds the player stands in this room at this time of day, there is a 30% chance the beat fires and the GM narrates it. Low chances and longer intervals keep a place subtle; higher chances make it feel busy.

A worked set — one tavern, evening into midnight. Five beats that, read top to bottom, tell a small story of the room emptying out:

The first three are the busy evening — a song, a lost bet, a nervous rumour; the last two are the room winding down toward midnight — the fire settling, then only the wind, at lower chances and a longer interval. Authoring beats that shift with the hour like this is what makes a place feel alive rather than looped.

Two ways to add them, both in Editor › Rooms:

• The GM box — describe the atmosphere in plain language and let the Game Master author the acts, chances, and intervals for you, spread across the right times of day: "give the tavern a lively evening — patrons singing off-key, a fist thumping the table over a lost bet, a hushed traveller muttering about lights on the moor — and quieter midnight beats as the fire dies down and the wind picks up."
• The room card's Ambient section — expand a room and edit its per-time beats by hand: choose the type, write the prompt, and set the chance and interval. For a sound beat you can add a short text-to-sound-effect prompt and press ✨ to synthesise an actual clip (the Audio AI provider), ▶ to preview it, and tick play with ambient so the clip plays alongside the narrated beat.

How the GM generates each beat. Because the prompt is a seed rather than a line, the moment a beat fires the Game Master composes a fresh narration from it — and it does not do so blind. It reads the beat against the room's description and, above all, the room's atmosphere / mood at the current time of day (the per-time mood you can author on the room, GM-eyes-only). The same "patrons talking" prompt becomes uneasy, clipped remarks in a tense, gloom-soaked room and boisterous banter in a warm one. Since both the mood and the beat list are keyed to the hour, the GM lends the room a different voice at dawn than at midnight without any extra work from you. A speech beat yields a single overheard spoken line; a sound beat a described noise (and, if you generated one, its clip); an action beat one brief sentence of activity. None of it advances the plot, changes state, or consumes a turn — it is pure background.

“Ambient on Enter” changes when they are heard, not what they are. A player who keeps moving can walk through a whole village and hear none of your ambience: each beat rolls its chance only while they stand in the room, so beats written to be rare are the first to go unheard. The switch in Settings › Story makes entering a room fire one beat outright — chosen at random and delivered at once, with no chance roll after the pick. It draws from the room's beats for that hour and from the ambient behaviours authored on the beings standing in it, so an NPC with a remark makes it as the player arrives rather than half a minute later. Author for the OFF case, which is the default — low chances, beats that bear repeating — and know that with it on your rarest beat is as likely as your commonest, since the pick is uniform over whatever is eligible. A beat you set to chance 0 is still never chosen: it says never, and a pacing setting does not overrule an authoring decision.

Editor · EncountersEncounters

Editor › Encounters

Encounters are the world's randomised, timed events — a wolf pack that prowls the road at night, a merchant who wanders into town by day. Each is a definition the living-world clock rolls against.

GM box examples: "add a pack of wolves that prowls the forest road at night" · "make the wraith encounter only fire at midnight in the crypt" · "raise the wolf pack's spawn chance to 40%". If an encounter needs a creature that doesn't exist yet, the GM authors it too and adds it to the bestiary.

Editor · DungeonsDungeons

Editor › Dungeons

A dungeon is two things kept in two places, and knowing which is which explains almost everything about this tab. The record — its name, where it lies, what it looks like, its hidden lore — is world data, and you write it here on a card like any other. The map — levels, corridors, doors, locks, chests, monsters and the stone they are all cut from — belongs to the Dungeon Builder, a separate application that opens in its own window from the card's Edit button. The two are joined by the dungeon's id and nothing else.

+ Add makes an empty dungeon and you fill the card in. Export and Import move the records — the cards, honouring the filter — as their own JSON file; they carry no maps, so a dungeon imported that way arrives undrawn. Whole worlds do carry maps — see World › Chunks and the tile-art checkbox beside Export World.

The Dungeon Builder

Press Edit on a card and the Builder opens in its own window, already pointed at that dungeon. It is a genuinely separate application — no login, no world, no network — which is why it can also be opened on its own from Modules/Dungeons/dungeon-builder.html and even installed as a standalone app. It has no copy of your world, so anything it needs from one (a room id, an item to put in a chest) is either taken on trust or handed to it by the game.

You draw with three families of tool. Piece brushes stamp the shape of the floor — Bedrock, Dead end, Hallway, Corner, T, Cross, Room, and a plain Floor that carves rock without deciding its walls for you; right-click or R turns the stamp. Wall and door brushes paint one face of one square: Wall, Torch (a sconce, and a real light), Door, Open (which cuts through into the rock behind), Secret, and Switch. Select, Lock and Visible act on something already placed rather than painting — Select opens a properties panel for the face or the square you clicked. Undo goes back eighty steps.

Mechanisms are three fields on a door or a wall, and they compose. A lock id is free text and global to the dungeon, so several doors can share one; a switch carries the lock id it throws, and pressing it opens every lock of that name at once, wherever they are. A secret wall reads as plain stone until it is searched out, and can carry a lock id too. A switch can itself start hidden. And a locked door can carry a narrated act instead — something the party must do at that door, written out in your own words (speak the word "mellon") — which is the one lock down there the engine cannot judge, so it asks the GM.

Chests are real containers: give one a lock, a trap and contents, and the party works it with exactly the rules a chest on a room's floor obeys. Because the Builder has no world to look items up in, the game publishes a digest of this world's item catalogue for it, so the chest editor offers a picker rather than asking you to type an id. You can also create monsters and replace any of the sixteen tile-art slots with your own images.

The sprite sheet editor

A monster in this engine is its sheet — a horizontal strip of equal frames billboarded onto a quad, its width taken from one frame's own proportions so a squat spider comes out squat and a tall skeleton tall. + Create monster… opens one dialog for the whole act, in two pages you turn between with the pager under them: Creature & prompt, which is everything you type, and Sheet & corridor, which is everything you look at. Generating or choosing a sheet turns to the second page by itself, that being the point of pressing the button.

The second page keeps together the things that have to be judged against each other: the sheet itself with the grid the engine will cut it on drawn over it, the frames taken apart underneath, and beside them how the result reads moving down a corridor at one square's distance. A frame count that is wrong looks perfectly fine examined alone, so seeing all of that at once is the whole job — and giving those two half a dialog each is why they are no longer sharing it with the prompt.

Fill in a name, a build (Small/Medium/Large, which sets the cell proportions) and a frame count, then either write the creature clause yourself or press Invent at the left of the acts row to have the Game Master supply one, write it into the image prompt at the build and frame count you've set, and paint the sheet — three steps in one press, each stopping on its own failure and keeping whatever the earlier steps produced. Generate sheet runs the last of those three steps alone, from whatever prompt is in the box. The background comes back a flat colour rather than transparent — magenta by default, green as the fallback for a rose- or flesh-toned creature magenta would eat into — and the Builder keys it out the moment the sheet arrives; the sheet sits on a chequerboard so a colour that didn't key cleanly is visible rather than merely dark-on-dark. Save sheet (labelled Create monster on a new one) commits it to this dungeon's palette.

Judging a sheet — the cuts, the corridor and the cells

Three things in the dialog answer the question is this sheet right, and they are on screen together because each of them alone can be misread. The sheet shows what came back with the cut lines drawn over it. The frame strip shows those cuts taken apart, so a cell holding half a creature is obvious. And the corridor shows the thing animating where the party will actually meet it.

The cut lines, and dragging them

The prompt asks for frames of equal width and the image providers frequently paint the right number of figures and then space them by eye. That is not a fault the frame count can repair — there really are eight figures; it is the even cuts that fall through two of them — so each line can be dragged to where the gap between two figures actually is. A line cannot pass or sit on top of its neighbour, and the numbers under the sheet report the slice widths as you go.

What a drag does is worth knowing, because it is not what it looks like. The engine always slices a texture into equal columns and is not being taught otherwise: when you move a line, the editor rebuilds the sheet, copying each slice into a cell of its own, every cell as wide as the widest slice, each slice centred in its cell rather than stretched to fill it. Stretching would make the creature pulse in size across its own walk cycle. So the sheet that leaves the dialog is an ordinary even one, and nothing downstream ever knows the sheet arrived crooked. Even cuts puts the lines back where they started; changing the frame count or loading a new sheet does the same, since positions placed against one picture describe nothing about another. Nudging the background tolerance does not reset them — that dial moves no figure.

Cropping the empty space — the reason monsters come out small

Image providers hand back a frame with a lot of sky in it, and how much varies by creature. That is worth knowing because the symptom does not look like framing: the monster is simply smaller than the Height you typed. The engine works out how wide the creature stands from one frame’s proportions and then draws the whole frame at that height — so a creature filling three fifths of its frame is drawn at three fifths of the height you asked for. Nothing on screen disagrees with anything else; it just comes out short.

Trim to the creature does the whole thing in one press. By that point the background has already been keyed out, so the sheet itself knows exactly which rows hold the figure — the button finds them and sets both lines, leaving a row of slack so the creature’s own outline is not shaved off. Nudge the handles afterwards if you want more air. If it tells you there is nothing to find, the background has not been keyed out: set the Background colour on the first page and generate again, or drag the lines by hand.

The two horizontal lines across the sheet are the fix. Drag the top one down to the creature’s head and the bottom one up to its feet; the shaded bands are what is being thrown away. The sheet is rebuilt without them, so the frame the engine measures is that much shorter and the creature fills it — watch the corridor beside it, which will jump to the size you meant. It gets wider in the same proportion, because it is the same picture at a larger scale. Full height puts the lines back to the edges.

One band comes off every frame at once, which is right: the empty space is a property of the cell the model painted in, and that is the same cell in all of them. Where you cropped to is saved with the monster, so reopening its sheet shows the lines where you left them — over a sheet that has already been trimmed to match.

The corridor

The creature at the rate it will move at, standing one square away — orthogonal adjacency, which is the distance the party actually meets a monster at and therefore the view worth being sure about. The corridor is drawn with the engine's own figures, a square across and a ceiling at 1.15 squares, so how the thing sits against the walls and under the ceiling is true rather than suggestive.

− and + zoom, and Fit returns to the framing that holds the whole creature. Zoom tightens the lens; it does not walk the camera forward. That distinction is what keeps the picture honest: focal length scales the walls, the floor, the ceiling and the creature by exactly the same factor, so the relationship between them is unchanged at every setting — it is the same true geometry through a tighter lens. Past 1× the creature runs off the top and bottom of the frame, which is the point; past a certain size the question is what a hand or a face looks like, not how the thing fits under a ceiling.

Trying another provider

Under the sheet is Painted by — the image provider this sheet came from — and Regenerate. Some providers are simply better than others at a flat-lit row of equal frames, and which one is better varies by creature, so the quickest answer to a sheet that came back wrong is often the same prompt somewhere else. The list is the game’s own: whatever is offered under Settings › Image AI is offered here, including any your vault adds. A provider you have set no key for is still listed and marked as such, because it still works — the game falls back to its keyless provider for that call and notes the substitution in the Logs.

Choosing here changes nothing outside this dialog: your Settings choice is untouched, and the rest of the game goes on painting with it. What is remembered is which provider painted this monster, so reopening its sheet comes back to that one.

Which cell is playing

The corridor names the cell it is showing — Cell 3 / 8 — the sheet prints that number inside each of its cells, and the one playing is lit. Three sightings of one fact, because the question you have when a frame looks wrong is which frame, and the only other way to answer it is to count along a row whose count is the very thing you are unsure about. On a sheet with many frames the numbers drop out below about fourteen pixels a cell, a clipped 8 being easy to read as a 3.

Pause holds it on one cell without stopping the corridor answering everything else — you can zoom, drag a cut or change the height while it is held, which is most of what anybody pauses in order to do. The arrows either side of Pause walk one cell at a time and wrap both ways, so the seam between the last frame and the first is as easy to inspect as any other join. They pause as they go: a step taken while the animation is running is overwritten by the next frame, so rather than sitting greyed out until you have pressed Pause, they simply stop it and hold where you asked.

The way in, and the way out

You do not tell a room that it leads to a dungeon. You tell the dungeon where it comes out, and the entrance is worked backwards from that. Stairs up on level 1 have no floor above them to pair with, so they are the way out, and each carries the id of the room the party climbs into — typed into the Room field on that tile. The room then offers a Descend exit, derived at read time and never written into your world data, so clearing the stair later cannot strand a phantom way down.

Two rules follow, and the card reports both. A room that already has its own down exit keeps it — the authored cellar wins, and the dungeon gets no entrance there. And a dungeon with no way out is not enterable at all: its Enter button is disabled and says which half is missing, either nothing drawn yet or no stair with a room on it. A way in with no way out is a trap, so the app declines to build one.

What the party does down there

Enter replaces the Story view with a first-person view of the dungeon. The party walks it themselves — keys, or the pad under the view — and that is the one thing the GM does not do for them: it describes, adjudicates, answers questions and keeps the thread, but it does not move them a square or open a door. Ask it to go north and it will tell you, plainly, that down here you walk yourself.

Everything else works as it does above ground. A chest is picked, trapped, detected, disarmed and looted through the ordinary container rules; a secret is found by searching the right wall, and the GM decides whether the search earned it; a skill check is a skill check. Monsters you placed stand where you put them and attack when the party comes alongside — the engine starts that fight, not the GM, which is why nothing is ever foreshadowed down a corridor — and a fallen one leaves remains holding whatever it was carrying, opened like any other container. A monster is only a foe if you told it what it is: point it at one of this world's monster kinds in the Builder and it fights as that creature, pack and all; leave it unpointed and it is scenery, which stands there and is never fought. Leave puts the party back in the room they descended from.

What is remembered

The map is what you drew; what the party has done to it is play state, and the two are kept apart. Doors they opened, secrets they found, switches they threw, lids they lifted, the ground they have charted and the square they were standing on all ride in the game save, per dungeon — so a crypt left half-explored is exactly as they left it when they come back, while your authored map is untouched and a locked vault is locked again in a fresh game.

The map itself lives in this browser, filed under the world it belongs to, and it travels with a world export or an exported save — layout always, and the tile art you uploaded only if you tick Include dungeon tile art beside Export World, since art is megabytes where a layout is kilobytes. Arriving somewhere that has already drawn that dungeon, a carried map is ignored: what is on the machine wins, so importing an old file can never overwrite an afternoon's work.

Editor · EntitiesEntities — NPCs & Monsters

Editor › Entities · inner subtabs: NPCs / Monsters / Catalog

Entities are the living beings of your world, split by behaviour: NPCs (people to talk to) and Monsters (hostile creatures). Wildlife (animal-type) lives one tab over, under Environment › Fauna. All three share the same rich card. A third subtab, Catalog, shows the templates those beings are built from.

GM box examples (NPCs): "add a grizzled blacksmith named Doran to the square" · "give Willa a night-owl routine and a smuggling secret" · "add the Ironvale Guard faction to both Town Guards".
Monsters: "add a pack of dire wolves to the forest road" · "make the cave troll stronger and give it a regeneration ability" · "make the crypt wraith respawn after 3 days" · "set a size on every monster that has none".

Standing, Fame & Renown — the two scales, and which one is hidden

Your world carries two measures of how the player is regarded, and the difference between them is worth holding: reputation is what one person thinks of them, and Fame is what the realm at large has heard. Reputation is a visible number; Fame is a hidden one the player only ever sees as a word. Standing & Morality is the full write-up; this is what you need to run one.

Reputation sits on each being, on the engine’s single −100…+100 scale, and the player sees both the number and its label in an NPC’s close-up. You set it on the being’s card; the Game Master moves it in play with reputationChange. One asymmetry is deliberate and catches people out: on a positive change the engine adds the player’s CHA bonus and their Fame bonus; on a negative one it adds neither. Charm and renown open doors and do not soften an insult.

Fame is one hidden number, fameValue, that the player never sees. They see its label, and they are told once when the label moves — “Your fame grows — you are now Notable.” Each tier also lends a persuasion bonus, which is the mechanical reason to care about it at all: a famous character is believed more readily by people who have never met them.

Unknown is the bottom rung, not an error. A fresh character is nobody, and every surface that shows the label — the Character Profile, the Renown chip on a Legends entry — will say so until something moves the number.

Four things move it, and all of them happen in play:

Your own lever is the console: // fame +150 or // set fame 300 (renown works as an alias). It echoes the number and the label back, so you can see where a value lands without consulting the table above.

Alignment is the third measure and the only one nobody computes. It starts at True Neutral and the Game Master nudges it as the character behaves; the valid set is your world’s own alignments map, each with a description the model is shown, so a world can moralise on its own terms rather than on a borrowed nine-box grid. Set it directly with // set alignment Lawful Good.

Catalog — the templates, and what is using them

The NPCs and Monsters subtabs list the beings standing in rooms. Catalog lists something different: the templates a room's {"ref": "…"} resolves against. The distinction is invisible until it matters, and then it matters completely — a template is a description of a being, not a being. Defining one puts nobody anywhere.

So the column that earns this screen is the last one: what is using each template. There are three answers.

Two controls per row. Place builds a being from the template into the room you choose — the repair for a template nothing uses, and equally the quick way to put a second Town Guard somewhere. Delete removes the template, and is offered only while nothing uses it: deleting one that is placed, or that an encounter spawns, would leave live beings whose reference resolves to nothing.

Editor · RacesRaces

Editor › Races

The peoples and species of the world. A race is lore-and-flavour: it gives NPCs a heritage and the player a sense of place. Beings reference a race by name.

GM box examples: "add a race of stone-skinned mountain dwellers" · "give the Sylvani a 300-year lifespan and a woodland homeland" · "remove the Hollow".

Editor · EnvironmentEnvironment — Flora & Fauna

Editor › Environment · inner subtabs: Flora / Fauna

Environment gathers the world's natural life — plants and non-hostile wildlife — so they don't clutter the Items and Entities tabs.

• Flora — plant-type items. They use the same card as the Items tab, scoped to type: "plant". Author with the GM box ("add a luminous moor-moss that glows at dusk"). Common vegetation is usually worth 0 coin; give it an evocative icon (🌿🌳🍄🌸) and a subtypes tag (herb/tree/fungus/flower).
• Fauna — animal-type entities. These are beings, not items, so they use the full entity card (stats, hp, size, aggression, routine, ambient, portrait) minus race — and size earns its keep here more than anywhere, because a wildlife roster is where the difference between a thing that fits in your pack and a thing that does not is most often the whole question. Author with the GM box ("add a marsh heron that stalks the shallows"); new entries must be non-hostile animals.

Editor · PlayerPlayer — Classes & Progression

Editor › Player · inner subtab: Classes

Classes are the archetypes a player can begin as. Each sets starting attributes, a starting loadout, the signature skills it begins knowing, and — optionally — a milestone progression timeline.

GM box examples: "add a Cleric class built around WIS with a mace and holy symbol" · "raise the Mage's base INT to 20" · "give the Ranger a bow and 3 arrows as starting gear".

The class portrait

A class card carries a picture, with the same controls every other object card has: Generate and Upload on an empty slot, ⬆ beside ♻ once there is one, and a Portrait box under Prompts with its ✨ writer and the per-object art-style override. It matters more here than almost anywhere else: a class is what a player picks from at the login screen, before they have seen a single room.

Leave the prompt blank and Generate still works — the fallback is derived from the class's description and its starting loadout, because gear is most of what tells two classes apart in a picture. A warrior and a mage differ in the frame by what they are carrying far more than by any adjective, so the loadout you authored above is doing double duty.

The Progression dialog

Each class card carries a gold ✦ Progression button (with a beat-count badge). It opens a big dialog showing that class's milestone timeline — the rewards a character earns as it levels.

• Generate drafts a whole timeline. If one already exists it asks to confirm the overwrite first.
• The ask bar refines it in plain language: "space the beats out more" · "add a level-5 riposte class skill" · "give level 10 a +2 CON bump".
• Confirm simply closes — edits are already applied.

A beat is { level, title?, revealed, rewards[] }: a level (2+, since level 1 is creation), an optional nickname reserved for meatier milestones (it also becomes the character's honorific), a revealed flag (show the player the beat early, or keep it hidden until reached), and one or more rewards. Reward types: classSkill, skill, stat (a fixed bump), statPoints (points to allocate), and other (a mechanical boon). Timelines are meant to be sparse and front-loaded — a handful of beats across twenty levels, not one per level. The full design rationale is in the Player Progression doc; the player sees their own copy on the Character › Progression tab.

Editor · PlayerPlayer — Skills

Editor › Player · inner subtab: Skills

The world's skill catalogue — the proficiencies the GM rolls against when an action calls for one. Skills are what classes grant, books teach, and mentors train.

GM box examples: "add a Pickpocketing skill for Rogues (DEX)" · "make Herbalism governed by INT" · "add an open-to-all Swimming skill, DC 10".

What the Game Master can see of this tab

Until recently, only the skills a character had learned reached the Game Master. The world's catalogue — everything a character could learn — was never sent, and that had one consequence worth knowing about as an author: the GM could not name a skill the player had not got. Asked to adjudicate something that wanted training the character lacked, it either refused in general terms or invented a plausible-sounding skill name, and an invented name is a dead end you did not write. The player goes looking for it in their Skills panel and there is nothing there.

The whole catalogue now travels in the cached half of the prompt, with each skill's name, id, governing stat, base DC, tier and — for a gated skill — what it wants first, by name. So a refusal can say “that wants Apothecary, and you would need Concoction before it”, and every word of it points at something the player can actually go and learn. Two things follow for you. Anything you author here is immediately nameable by the GM, so a skill with a vague description will be recommended vaguely. And the catalogue is cached, not per-turn, so its cost is one write rather than a charge on every turn — see What it is costing you.

Crafting

Crafting is built. All seven phases of the design in Crafting have shipped — the skills, the skill catalogue the Game Master is briefed with, dismantling, assembly with its hours-and-stages dial, the recipe a successful craft leaves behind, the condition ladder, and repair. Everything below describes what the engine does today, and the part you author for it is authored in this very tab.

Crafting is the mundane half of making things, and it is three acts: putting materials together into an item, taking an item back apart into materials, and repairing a worn one. It is adjudicated by the Game Master rather than by a recipe table, which is the deliberate opposite of Concoctions, and §2 of the design doc argues why both are right: a concoction is magic and magic is specific, so its catalogue is closed; there is no canonical way to make a knife, and a table of authored knife recipes would be endless and beside the point.

Two rules shape everything else. A craft combines what already exists and never creates it — no conjuring a material to make the thing you want — so the economy is bounded at the input end by your world's own material stock rather than by a value ceiling you would have to keep tuning, and magic falls out of scope by that same logic, since magic is not a material a hammer can work. And the cost is hours, under four rules a player can guess without being told: aim higher and it is harder and longer; rush it and you will probably botch it; take somewhat longer and it goes somewhat better, up to a ceiling; work through the night and you get worse at it, because a long craft advances the clock and the sleep-deprivation tiers are already wired into every roll.

The hours buy stages, one check each, and the grade you land on is how many you cleared — so a player reaching for a masterwork and falling short comes away with a good blade rather than nothing. A successful craft leaves its recipe behind in the save — on the PLAYER, not the world, because a discovered method is knowledge a character earned rather than a fact about the place — and it can be worked again with no GM call at all. A re-run is still a sitting per turn, though: what re-use saves is the model call, not the hours. Both halves live in the player’s Character › Crafting tab, which lists unfinished projects on one side and the known methods on the other.

Editor · ItemsItems

Editor › Items

The catalogue of ordinary gear — weapons, armour, consumables, keys, books, treasure, and clutter. (Magic items, spells, and spellbooks have their own tab; plants live under Environment.)

GM box examples: "add a silvered dagger that harms undead" · "make the Health Potion worth 20 copper" · "add a locked chest to the vault holding a jewelled crown".

Containers, locks & traps

Any item can be a container. Its container object holds hidden contents (concealed until opened), a capacity, a lock (method none / key / pick / button / sealed, a pick DC, an optional key ref, and hidden-button details), and optional trap fields — a labelled effect that springs on opening, with detect and disarm DCs. Containers and traps are covered in the Containers design doc.

Treasure

Items of type: "treasure" are special: they're filed into the player's admired Treasure trove rather than usable inventory, and finding them raises Fame. Use them for trophies and hoard-pieces.

Editor · MagicMagic — Items, Spells, Spellbooks, Schools & Concoctions

Editor › Magic · inner subtabs: Items / Spells / Spellbooks / Schools / Concoctions

Everything arcane lives here, split five ways.

• Items — magic-type items (rings, wands, relics). The same card as the Items tab, scoped to the "magic" category. "add a ring of invisibility".
• Spells — the world grimoire. "add a level 3 healing spell" · "make Firebolt cost 8 MP and deal 18 damage". Fields: id, name, school, level, mpCost, target, description, icon/image/prompt, an effect summary, and a GM-facing Usage note on what casting actually does in and out of combat (✨-authored).
• View (in a book's Actions row, when it has at least one chapter) — the one control on an item card that is not an editor. It opens the book as the player meets it, shaped like an open book: the plate is the left page and fills half the width, cropped to fill it the way a printed plate is; the words are the right page and scroll on their own, so the picture facing them stays put. In the book's own tongue, translated only as far as the current character has got, one chapter at a time with a row of pips to move between them, each move turning the page in the direction you went. On a narrow screen the two stack and the plate becomes a band; a reader whose system asks for reduced motion gets no turn at all. The Chapters editor cannot answer this, and structurally never could — it shows the English, because the English is what you are typing — so until now the plainest question about a book in a world's own alphabet, can they read any of this yet?, meant putting a copy in the pack and reading it in play. It reads the character's knowledge and never writes it: nothing is learned, nothing spent, and there is deliberately no Translate button, that being one attempt per book per level and an act of play rather than something a preview should burn.
• Chapters (on a book or scroll card) — what the thing says. Each chapter is a chip; + Chapter and any chip open the chapter editor, which puts the plate on the left and the page on the right — the same arrangement the chapter is read in. Three ✨ buttons: one beside The page asks the Game Master to write the chapter from the book's title and description and every chapter before this one, in full, so chapter four continues from chapter three instead of opening the book again; one to the right of Title names the chapter from what it says, refusing an empty page rather than inventing a heading for a chapter nobody has written yet; one under the plate prompt asks for a picture of this chapter rather than of the book. The plate is painted into the dialog and only reaches the book when you press Save, so Cancel really does discard it.
• Spellbooks — the tomes that teach spells. Each card adds a Teaches section linking to the spells it grants. "add a tome that teaches Firebolt" · "make The Emberleaf Codex also teach Frost Lance". A spellbook item's teaches field is a spell id or list; reading it learns those spells. The app can even mint an evocative tome for a given spell for you.
• Schools — one card per school the world's own spells and craft skills actually declare (derived from live data — a school appears without anyone maintaining a list). Each carries a name, a type of magic (divine, arcane, earthen, or whatever a world calls its kinds), an origin, a description, and a governing attribute that, once set, overrides the engine's own school→attribute table for every spell in that school — a world may re-point Restoration off WIS, or give a school the engine never named an attribute at all. Left blank, nothing changes. There is no GM box here yet; the cards are hand-edited.

Concoctions & Reagents

Concoctions is earth magic: compounded from ingredients by ritual rather than cast from a loadout, governed by the concoction skill (CON, tier 2, open to any class) rather than Spellcasting. Three tiers, three vocabularies — an ingredient is a real item (subtype ingredient) the player finds, buys, or cuts off a corpse; a reagent is a transformation of one, and is not an item at all — a record in world.reagents, with a count of prepared measures kept on the player; a concoction is brewed from reagents and is an item again. The tab's two inner panels:

• Catalog — one card per recipe (world.recipes): the governing skill and dc, the hours a working takes, a reagents map of reagent id → count, the batch a single working yields, the yields item (defaulting to the recipe's own id — a concoction is the item it makes), a description, and a Preparation box for the rite itself in plain prose. + Add is disabled here, because a concoction names the item it yields and only the Items tab can mint one; ask the GM box for it instead once the item exists — "recipe a Knitbone Salve from comfrey root and beeswax, worked by poultice, DC 13".
• Reagents — one card per reagent record, each carrying an origin (where in this world it's got — what makes it findable rather than merely purchasable), its own preparation (how the raw ingredient is readied, distinct from a recipe's rite worked on several reagents together), the recipe that yields it, a skill (the craft gate — defaults to concoction rather than to ungated, so a world cannot open the tier by omitting the field), and secret (the formula gate — unticked, which is common knowledge, unless a keeper is meant to hold this one).

Playable end to end. A player prepares an ingredient into a reagent — a Prepare button on the item's card, or typing prepare <reagent> — labour rather than a roll: it spends the ingredients and the recipe's hours and always succeeds, once two gates are open. The craft gate is the reagent's own skill (see above) — without it, preparing refuses by name: "Preparing Knitbone Meal is Concoction work, and you have not learned it." The formula gate is secret — a character who has not been taught a secret reagent is refused with "You do not know how to prepare Cured Venom." A receipt book (an item of type: "book" carrying teachesReagents, an array of reagent ids) teaches a secret formula the moment it's read: no check, and unlike a skill book, the book is never consumed. Marking a reagent secret with no book or keeper anywhere in the world leaves it unobtainable, which nothing yet checks for. They then brew a concoction from reagents on hand — a Brew button, or brew <concoction> (brew 3 knitbone salve to scale up) — which spends the reagents and hours before rolling d20 + Concoction proficiency + CON against the recipe's DC; a failed roll still costs what was spent. The roll uses the engine's outcome ladder: a natural 1 spoils the working, a natural 20 lands it at the best grade, a total at or above the DC grades on margin (Workable, Sound at +5, Potent at +10), missing by one or two yields a thin batch (half the doses, floored, never below one, at the plain grade), and missing by three or more spoils it. dc (default 12) and hours (0 is legal) are authorable on the recipe with no upper clamp; the hours are discounted by the player's proficiency (skill level + 1, capped at 5) by about a tenth per step above the first, to the quarter hour — never by grade, which is only known after the clock has advanced. The grade is carried in the brewed item's own name and description, since the game adjudicates a consumable from its description rather than a hidden field. A recipe's batch and the player's chosen scale multiply how many doses one working yields; the DC and hours do not grow with the batch, so one roll governs the whole of it. The GM's dossier now carries the craft — what earth magic is, that prepare/brew are the player's own to invoke, that grade multiplies effect, and the measures currently on hand — and is told explicitly never to move a measure, decide a working's outcome, or hand over a brewed item on its own initiative.

Editor · QuestsQuests

Editor › Quests

Quests are threads of story told in beats. Crucially, they are GM-eyes-only: the player never sees a quest list or a beat title until play organically triggers it, at which point the beat is woven into narration and written to their Journal. As DM you see the whole thread — every beat, locked and unlocked, with its hidden trigger.

GM box examples: "add a three-beat revenge quest against Baron Vale" · "give the missing-child quest a reward of the silver locket" · "change the final beat's trigger to entering the crypt at midnight" · "remove the smuggling side quest".

Each beat's badge toggles its lock state so you can test a thread without playing to its trigger (see Testing your world). Beats unlock one per turn, in order, only when their trigger is genuinely met.

Prompt & ImageHow art works

A world can be entirely text, but a handful of images transform it. The Lost Realms is built so that one line of visual direction — your Art Style — gives the whole world a consistent look, and so that the GM can write the individual image prompts for you.

Three ideas make the whole system click:

So the division of labour is: you set the style once and pick a provider; the GM writes the subjects; the app combines them and paints. The rest of this part shows where each of those levers lives.

Prompt & ImageThe Art › Style tab

Editor › Art · inner subtab: Style

This is the control room for your world's look. It has four sections.

Prompt & ImagePer-object prompts & the ✨ handoff

Almost every object that can have a picture carries its own image-prompt field and a small set of controls. The glyphs are consistent everywhere:

Where prompts live, by object:

• Rooms — a banner for each of six times of day. Each slot has its own prompt, a ✨ to suggest it, a per-slot art-style override, and Generate/Upload/Regenerate. So a tavern can look warm at evening and cold at dawn.
• Entities, items, factions, races, classes, spells, encounters, regions — a single portrait/emblem/scene prompt with a ✨, plus ⬆ upload and ♻ regenerate.
• Items — additionally, a generated icon: the item popup's ✨ mints a minimalist game glyph (a single bold symbol on a transparent field) that then shows in place of the emoji across the sidebar, sheet, story, and Compendium.

The "Override World Art Style" checkbox

Every prompt block has an Override World Art Style checkbox. Ticked, that one object is generated from its prompt alone, without your world style prepended — for the rare thing that needs to look different (a map, a UI-like sigil, a photoreal insert). Leave it unticked and the object inherits the world look.

Prompt & ImageThe Missing dashboard & batch Generate

Editor › Art · inner subtab: Missing

The Art tab opens on Missing — a dashboard of everything in your world that doesn't have art yet, grouped as Characters & Monsters, Races, Classes, Encounters, Rooms, Items (and, separately, their icons), Spells, Skills, and Factions. It's your worklist for dressing a freshly-built world.

The single Generate button at the foot batch-paints every card shown (respecting the name filter), one at a time: it writes any missing prompt first, then paints. While it runs, the button becomes Stop (click to finish the current card and halt), and each card leaves the list the moment it has art — so the tab shrinks as the batch works through it and what is left on screen is always what is still outstanding. A card whose generation failed stays, and the next run picks it up again. A summary is logged.

Prompt & ImageImage providers & keys

Prompts are provider-agnostic; the painter is a separate choice. There are two independent decisions: which image provider renders your pictures, and which optional keys you've supplied.

Choosing a provider

Providers are chosen in Settings (the gear), under Image AI (with parallel pickers for Icon AI, Map AI — the provider used for region maps (see World › Geography › Regions), Gallery AI, Sound AI, Music AI, Video AI, and Language AI):

Keys are entered from the login screen's API Keys dialog (Pollinations, Nano Banana / Gemini, Higgsfield, OpenAI, fal.ai, ElevenLabs for sound, Runware for video, Tripo for 3D) — each optional, each stored encrypted on your device. On a Server Vault realm they are held on the server instead, entered once on the admin page and never sent to a browser. When a provider that needs a key doesn't have one, generation quietly uses Pollinations and notes the substitution.

Tuning SANA

Choosing fal.ai reveals three optional fields under the model picker: Inference steps, Guidance scale, and Seed. All three are blank by default, and blank is the setting that matters most — a blank field is not sent at all, so the model you picked uses its own tuned default. That is deliberate rather than lazy: Sprint resolves a picture in a handful of steps where Base wants roughly eighteen, so any number pinned across all four variants would suit one and spoil the rest.

• Inference steps — how many denoising passes the model makes. More is generally finer and slower.
• Guidance scale — how tightly the picture is held to your prompt. Higher obeys the words more literally; lower gives the model more room to compose.
• Seed — pin one and the same prompt paints the same picture every time, which is how you refine wording without the composition shifting underneath you. Left blank, every generation gets a fresh seed.

A value out of range settles to the nearest one the API accepts, and clearing a field hands the decision back to the model. Whatever you set applies to every fal slot — Image, Icon, and Map alike.

Prompt & ImageVictory banners

When a player wins a fight, the story can carry one wide scene of the blow that ended it: that character killing that creature in that room, by the means they actually typed. It is the one picture in the game the DM does not author — and the one that most directly repays having authored everything else.

It is assembled from art you already made

Nothing about the banner is invented. Four things are gathered and handed to the image model together, each read from its own home:

How often, and what it costs

Each banner spends one image generation. Settings › Imagery › “All Victory Banners” governs how often, not whether. Left off, only a notable victory earns one — a fight worth 20 XP or more, or a foe at least the player's level — so a corridor of rats does not become a corridor of banners. Turn it on and every win is painted.

It also needs a provider that accepts reference pictures, since the whole prompt is written around its attachments. That is Nano Banana, and the banner runs on the Gallery slot to get it — the same slot the portrait Gallery and weathered banners use, which is hard-wired to Nano Banana Pro exactly as they are. So there is no provider to choose: all it needs is a Nano Banana key.

Without a key the banner is declined outright rather than painted from the words alone, and it now says so in the story, under the victory recap, as well as in the Logs.

What it will not do

• No second GM call. The narration already is the description of the scene, so nothing paraphrases it — the prompt is composed from the story and your world data directly.
• One duel per fight. With several foes down, the banner shows the last to fall — the death the closing narration describes, so the picture and the words above it agree.
• It keeps a dozen. The pictures live in Journal › Gallery — shared now with sleep pictures, merged newest first so the screen reads as a record of the campaign rather than as two lists — each folding the GM's own account of the kill beneath it; the story line only points at them. Past twelve the oldest drops out and its story line says the picture has aged out.

Prompt & ImageSleep pictures

The victory banner's quieter sibling. A full night's sleep or camp paints one wide scene of the night into the story — the player's own body render asleep in the room they slept in — assembled from two pictures the world already has.

Three prompts, and the branch between them is the feature

Each case exists because the obvious single prompt produces a specific wrong picture.

What it costs, and how to stop it

One image generation per night, which is a different rhythm from the victory banner's one per notable fight — nights come round every in-world day. Settings › Imagery › Sleep Pictures turns it off; it is on by default. Like the victory banner it composes from reference pictures, so it runs on the Gallery slot and needs a Nano Banana key — see Victory banners for why that slot and not Image.

Where it lands, and when

• Before the night, not after. The picture is painted and shown FIRST; the rest notice and its eight-hour clock sweep follow it. The other order reads backwards — the player watches themselves sleep, wake, and only then sees the bed they did it in. While it paints, the header clock is held and the action box is locked, so nothing can be typed into the gap between lying down and falling asleep.
• The clock sweep waits to be seen. The rest notice's progress bar does not start until the card is actually on screen. A freshly mounted picture reflows the story as it decodes, and a player who has scrolled up is not watching at all — and the notice is built showing the COMPLETED state, so a sweep that runs against a card nobody is looking at leaves them a bar that was finished before they found it. It gives up waiting after a few seconds and starts anyway, so scrolling away can never strand a night.
• Nothing to paint costs nothing. Every refusal is decided without waiting, so a world with the setting off, no Nano Banana key, or no room art starts the night exactly as promptly as it always did.
• In the story it is a room banner. Same size, same crop, and clicking it widens it to the full column exactly as a room banner does — it is a picture of a room and sits where that room's banner sits.
• It keeps eight. The pictures live in Journal › Gallery beside the victory banners, merged newest first. Eight rather than the victory dozen because nights come round far more often than notable kills, and the two caps are separate so a week of sleeping cannot evict a campaign's fights.

Prompt & ImageMusic & sound

Rooms can carry audio the same way they carry banners. Under a room's Audio section are Music and Sounds, each with six per-time-of-day prompt slots and a ✨ to have the GM write them. Sound slots add Generate Audio (synthesise a clip via your Sound AI provider and play it) and ▶ Play. Music's General slot has a composer of its own — see below.

Music carries one more, above the six: General — the mood score for the place itself, whatever the hour. It is the slot to fill when you want a room to have a sound at all, and the six times are for when a room sounds genuinely different at dawn than at midnight. Its ✨ asks a different question from theirs: where a time slot is written from that hour's mood, General is written from the room's name and description together with the world's tone and premise, so the score belongs to this setting rather than to any tavern anywhere. Sounds has no General slot — an ambient soundscape with no time attached is one the engine has no moment to play.

Under the General prompt is ♪ Generate Music. Pressing it opens a dialog: while your Music AI provider composes, the dialog says who is working and how long it has been at it; when the track arrives it shows the name it will be filed under, where that name came from — your provider's own filename, or the room's (“The Village Square Theme”) when the provider sends none — and a player, so you hear it before you commit to it. The gold Accept button does the filing: the bytes are stored, the track is added to Art › Audio as an Area sound, and it is selected in this room's Music box. Cancel discards the take and changes nothing — the generation is already paid for either way, so turning down one you don't like costs you nothing but the call. Press again for another take; accepted tracks pile up in the library rather than replacing each other.

Only General has it, and that is deliberate — a room loops one Area track, so a score per time of day would be six generations billed and five of them unhearable. The hour is what the Sounds prompts are for.

Under every one of the music prompts, General included, is ⬆ Upload Music — the other way a track gets here: write the prompt, feed it to a music model elsewhere, and bring the file back. It opens the same Add a Sound dialog the Art › Audio tab uses — same four fields — retitled Add Music, and pressing Add does three things at once: stores the file, adds it to Art › Audio as a new entry, and selects it in this room's Music box. Area is pre-picked and kept even if you swap it out, because a room's Music list holds Area sounds and nothing else — a track without it would land on the Art tab and then be missing from the very picker you opened the dialog to fill.

Whichever door a track came through, it ends up in the room's Music box near the bottom of the card — a short picker listing the world's Area sounds, with a ▶ beside it. Pressing ▶ plays the selected track and turns into ■; pressing it again stops. Only one preview plays at a time across the whole editor, so starting one here silences a sound you left playing on Art › Audio, and that card's button goes back to Play.

Where the audio goes — generated or uploaded — depends on how you are running. With a vault, the bytes land in its media store and your world keeps a short reference — which matters more here than anywhere else, since a music track is the largest thing you will upload and an embedded one is rewritten into your save on every write. In Direct mode there is nowhere to put it, so it is embedded and travels with the world. If an upload fails you still get the track, embedded, and you are told so rather than left to wonder.

Ambient beats of the "sound" kind can carry a play-with-ambient flag: when the beat fires in play, the app makes sure a clip exists (authoring the sound prompt via the GM and synthesising it if needed), stores it so it isn't regenerated, and plays it so the text and the sound land together.

The Sound AI and Music AI providers (currently ElevenLabs for both) are chosen in Settings and keyed from the API Keys dialog. They are separate pickers because they are separate services — a sound effect and a composed score are different endpoints, even on the same account — but one ElevenLabs key covers both, so there is nothing extra to enter. As with images, the standalone Music and Sounds Art subtabs are shells today — room-level audio is where sound authoring lives.

Running & GrowingTesting your world

Authoring and playtesting are the same loop: build a little, play a little, fix what the play reveals. A set of DM-only tools lets you test without grinding through your own content.

The // debug console

As a DM, prefixing a typed line with // issues an out-of-character command that changes the live game directly — no story turn, no time passing. Use it to jump to the state you want to test:

// heal            — full HP/MP
// set dex 14      — set an attribute
// gold +100       — coin, xp, fame…
// level up        — jump a level (to test progression)
// give me a torch — conjure an item
// scar face left three claw scars      — give a lasting mark (// unscar 1 · // unscar all)
// tear clothing: torn at the front     — damage the one piece worn there (// mend clothing)

Quest & hint testing

• unlock the quest beat <name> / lock the quest beat <name> — jump a beat's state so you can test a thread without meeting its trigger. (The Quests tab's per-beat badge does the same by click.)
• /hint — ask the GM for a subtle nudge toward the nearest quest thread. Useful for checking that a beat's trigger and nearby NPCs actually point the player where you intend.
• verbose on / verbose off — lengthen or tighten GM narration while you read your own scenes.

Holding the world still while you work

The ⏸ Pause Story button in the story panel's corner stops the in-world clock and, with it, the whole living world — encounter rolls, ambient beats, NPC routines, weather, respawns, restocking. That is more useful while authoring than it sounds. Reading a scene you just wrote, checking a room's data against what the GM actually narrated, or stepping away mid-playtest all take longer than a turn, and without it the realm carries on: an encounter fires into an empty chair, a merchant restocks, the hour turns and the banner you were assessing is repainted for a different sky.

It lifts on your next game action and on nothing else — so a // debug line does not lift it, which is exactly what you want while poking at state between turns. It is unavailable during combat, which runs on its own clock. A held world is marked on the header clock, so it never reads as a hung app.

The Logs tab

Every GM handoff — world edits, prompt authoring, turns — is recorded on the DM-only Logs tab, including the raw model responses. When an edit doesn't do what you expected, the log tells you what the GM actually returned.

Running & GrowingEvaluating & fixing a world

Editor › World · inner subtab: Evaluate

Playtesting finds what feels wrong. The evaluator finds what is wrong — a door that opens onto nothing, a shop the player can never afford, a lore hook worth no experience, a quest beat that needs an NPC something else kills. It compiles your world the way a build does, reports what it can prove, and names a remedy for each finding. Fix World then hands the remedies it can back to the Game Master in one press.

Running the pass

Open Editor › World › Evaluate and press Evaluate this world. It runs on the Server Vault using the same compile pass as the command line (Tools/build-evaluation.js), so the two can never describe the same world differently. Without a vault there is nowhere to run it, and the tab says so.

It reads the draft in front of you, not the published library world — they differ mid-session, and the source line at the top of the report names which world was read. Art and audio are stripped before sending: a measured world export is 99% base64 pictures, and the evaluator never looks at one.

What comes back is three things stacked:

• Six headline figures — objectives, findings (split error / warn / info), authored XP and the level it reaches, authored wealth and the purse it starts from, and what the economy reads as against the archetypes.
• The action plan — the remedy cards, described below.
• The findings themselves, worst-first, each with an Action button that jumps to the card that remedies it.

The action plan — and who each card belongs to

Every card aggregates one kind of finding and states the remedy precisely: why it matters, the act that closes it, which subjects it concerns, and — where the fix depends on another card — what it is blocked by and what it unlocks. Cards are ordered by leverage, not severity: declaring an economy before grading one saves three later cards, so the pass puts it first even though a dangling exit is the louder error.

The badge at the head of each card says whose job it is, and this is the distinction Fix World turns on:

Each card carries Done and Dismiss (and Reopen after either). That checklist is stored per world in your browser, not in the world file — it is your working state, and exporting a world must not carry one author's half-finished checklist to whoever opens it next. A tick survives re-running the pass, which is the point: if a card you marked done comes back in the next report, it says so plainly rather than showing you a tick and letting you move on.

An Ask the GM card can be run on its own with its Execute button — it confirms, then puts the prompt in that roster's own GM request box and runs it where you can watch. A card offering two or more branches also offers Plan placement, which asks the GM to decide where each subject belongs first and opens the result for review before anything is written.

Fix World — the whole plan in one press

Working a report card by card is precise and slow. When you would rather defer the whole thing to the Game Master, the gold Fix World button at the top right of the Evaluate tab does it in one press.

It appears only once a report exists — before that it would be offering to fix a list nobody has compiled. When a report exists but holds nothing the GM can act on, the button stays visible but disabled, and says why on hover; hiding it would only leave you wondering where it went.

Pressing it opens the Fix World dialog, which shows the plan before it runs anything:

1. What the Game Master will fix, numbered, in the order they will run — each with the instruction that will be sent and the roster (Rooms, Items, Quests, NPCs, Monsters) it will be sent to. A card blocked by another says so, and runs anyway: the edit still lands, it simply cannot be graded until the blocker is settled.
2. What is left for you, greyed, each with its reason. These are not omissions — they are the dialog saying how much of the report this button can honestly close.
3. Execute Plan. Nothing is written until you press it.

While it runs, each step shows its own state — waiting, asking the GM, done, or failed — and the dialog stays up throughout. It has to: each roster switches the Editor to its own tab as it goes, and a dialog that closed would leave you watching tabs flip with nothing saying why. It also stops taking input, because pressing Execute twice would run every roster again over a world the first pass has already rewritten.

A failed step does not stop the plan. The remaining edits are independent, against different editors; stopping at the first problem would leave you with a half-run plan and no way to finish but to start again from the top. The failed step is marked, the rest carry on, and only the steps that actually succeeded are recorded as run — so a failure still shows as open in the next report instead of quietly ticking green.

When the last edit is in, it re-runs the evaluation itself, so the report behind the dialog describes the world you now have rather than the one you started with.

Running & GrowingGrowing a live world

Worlds are meant to expand as play pushes at their edges. You have three ways to grow one that's already in motion:

• From the Editor. Everything in Part III works on a live world — add a room where the player is headed, a quest to chase, an NPC who just became relevant.
• World chunks. On World › Chunks, have the GM author a whole new region and stitch it onto existing rooms, or stub a large area to flesh out room-by-room from the Rooms tab as the player approaches.
• In play. The DM command expand the world <brief> grows the world mid-session from a one-line description.

Because merges are additive, growing a world never overwrites what's already there — new rooms and quests are added, existing ones are left intact, and only catalogue collisions ask you to choose.

Running & GrowingKeeping it consistent

A few habits keep a growing world coherent:

• Export often. Use World › Chunks → Export World as a backup before big changes. A world file is small and portable.
• Lean on World Rules. Because your Rules are fed to the GM every turn, keeping them accurate is the single biggest lever for consistent play. Update them when the world's reality shifts.
• Let reveals be earned. Faction reveal conditions, hidden lore loreKeys, and quest triggers all keep secrets until play earns them — resist spelling things out in public descriptions.
• Write a key as the whole of the gate. The Game Master reads a loreKey as written and judges only whether the player did what it says; it will not add a person, a skill, a reputation or a second visit the key does not name. A key that asks the player to say something (“examine the hull and say aloud that it was burned from within”) is met once the examining is done and the words are said — the player is articulating what they understood, not submitting proof. If you want proof, a skill check or a particular person, put it in the key.
• One Art Style. Resist per-object style overrides except where genuinely needed; a single Style Prompt is what makes the world look like one place.

Running & GrowingWhat it is costing you

Authoring a world is the expensive half of this app, and it is expensive in a way that is easy not to notice: every ✨, every GM box request, every Update button and every world generation is a paid call on your key, and none of them announce a price. Typing /usage in play opens the ledger of what they have actually come to.

It is the same dialog the player has — the Field Guide describes it for them — but a DM reads it for a different reason. A player wants to know what a session cost; you want to know which of the things you do is costing it.

It is scoped to one character in one world, so it is a per-playthrough figure rather than an account total — and a fresh test character starts a fresh ledger, which is the cleanest way to price a change: play the same stretch twice and compare. Your real bill is in the Anthropic console; this is computed from the token counts the API itself returned.

The output budget, and the one row worth acting on

Every call the app makes sets a ceiling on how much the Game Master may write back — its output budget. You never set these; they are part of the app. But you can see them now, and the reason you should is that a call which runs out of room is billed in full and returns less than it meant to. That is the most expensive thing that can happen per unit of work: you pay for every token and get an answer that was cut off in the middle.

It is not hypothetical. A region map prompt for a nine-room region ran past its ceiling in September 2026 and came back mid-sentence — “…a torch-lit archway opening on” — and what the DM saw was a ✨ button reporting that the Game Master had returned nothing at all. The budget has been raised and the engine now rescues what it can, but the general shape of the problem is permanent: the app ships one number per call, and your world decides how much writing that number has to cover.

What you can actually do about it is the honest part, because you cannot edit these numbers. Two things. The first is that you control the input: the calls that run long are the ones whose prompt is assembled from your world, and a region map prompt has to name every room filed under the region. A region of thirty rooms asks for a far longer reply than one of six, so splitting an overgrown region, or filing fewer rooms under one, is a real fix rather than a workaround. The second is to report it — a call site that keeps appearing in that column is a budget that wants raising in the app, and the table is the evidence for it.

AppendixWhere to go next

This guide covers authoring. For the rest of the system, these companions go deeper:

The in-app Field Guide (guide.html)

• Part II · The Dungeon Master — the app-reference view of every Editor tab and the // commands.
• Part III · The Game Master — what the GM sees each turn, the rules it plays by, and its authoring behaviour.
• Appendix A · Change-field reference — the complete JSON vocabulary the GM speaks (quest updates, state changes, discoveries). Read this to predict how your data behaves in play.

The Player's Handbook (players-handbook.html)

The player-facing rules — attributes, combat & dice, skills, spells, containers & traps, reputation & factions, time, XP & leveling. Know these to author fair challenges.

Design deep-dives (Designs/)

AppendixData-object cheat-sheet

The world's building blocks and where you edit each. Fields are detailed in the linked sections above.

AppendixGlossary

The Lost Realms — Dungeon Master's Guide. Companion to the Field Guide and Player's Handbook. Copyright © 2026 Brave You Worlds, LLC. All rights reserved. This guide is Game Content, not software: licensed under LICENSE-CONTENT, with no Change Date — it does not become open source on any future date, the way the engine does. Free to read, print and use in personal or non-commercial play, permanently; commercial use needs a separate licence — licensing@braveyouworlds.com.