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).

Two things to know about how the GM writes it:

• 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

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) — a placeholder ("coming soon"). It is not the region-map editor; that lives on the World › Regions tab. Don't confuse the two.

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, Regions & Factions

Editor › World · inner subtabs: Profile / Chunks / Regions / Factions

The World tab holds the world's framing and its highest-level structure. Four inner subtabs sit along its bottom edge.

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. Do this often.

World › 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 › 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" · "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.

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 locked 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).

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.

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.

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

The Dungeons tab is a reserved shell. It carries the standard toolbar — filter, Import/Export, Collapse/Expand — and its Import/Export already work against a world.dungeons list, but the dungeon model isn't defined yet, so the card view shows an empty state and the GM box politely reports that dungeon authoring isn't available.

Nothing to build here today; it's included so the guide matches the app you see.

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".

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, routine, ambient, portrait) minus race. 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 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".

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

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

Everything arcane lives here, split three 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).
• 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.

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, 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, 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); when it's done it turns green to Confirm, which clears the now-arted cards off the list. 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 › Regions), Gallery AI, Sound AI, and Video 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 & 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.

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 provider (currently ElevenLabs) is chosen in Settings and keyed from the API Keys dialog. 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

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.

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 & 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.
• 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.

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.