The Workshop
Where a GM makes things before a game: worlds, campaigns, maps, creatures, people and pages. What each piece of furniture holds.
Last looked at 2026-10-30
Across the square
The workshop is where things get made.
You make them here and bring them to a game, never the other way round.
It's a room in the town, across the square from the tavern, at /town/workshop. Like every room here, you walk to a piece of furniture and press it, and there's a Show me round that stops at each piece in turn. The iPhone app has the same room.
It's shared. Anybody else in the workshop is drawn where they're standing, and what's said in the rail is the workshop's own talk, heard by everybody in the room and never by the tavern. Being in there together works; building one game together at the same bench isn't wired up yet.
And it's also a list. Everything in this room is on the VTT menu in the header as an ordinary page (worlds, campaigns, maps, creatures, people, files), opening the same panels. Walk or click, whichever suits the evening.
What's in it
| Piece | What it holds |
|---|---|
| The globe | Your worlds. Found one and file campaigns under it. |
| The book on the corner desk | Your campaigns. Begin one, find its invite code, set the next session. |
| The map board | Every map you've brought in, and every set-up you've kept. |
| Still on the go | Every game you're running that isn't over. |
| The calendar | When the next sessions are. |
| The filing cabinet | Everything you've brought in that isn't a map. |
| The portrait gallery | The people in your campaigns: NPCs, and each party at its table. |
| The specimen bench | Creatures, made once and used as often as a fight needs. |
| The workbench | What's on a campaign's table for the next session. |
| The fire | The workshop's own. Nobody feeds this one; it burns steadily by itself. |
Worlds
A world is one GM's setting, with its name, the system it's played in and a line about it. Open its sheet and there's room for the terrain, the climate, the period, the cultures, house rules, and a map of the whole thing.
Lore is pages filed under the world. Each page is either yours alone (your prep) or on the world's shelf, where anybody playing a campaign in that world can read it. Filing a page isn't handing it to anybody; handouts at the table are a separate act. A world's sheet can be exported as a PDF.
A world never grants anything. Owning one doesn't make you the GM of anybody's game, and it doesn't let anybody into one. It's a folder with a map on the front.
Campaigns
The campaign book has a chapter for each campaign you're in. Begin a new one from the contents, write its basics and an outline (Markdown works), and choose who may sit at it: On the floor, it's Reserved, open to watch, or open to sit. You'll find the invite code here, can join somebody else's campaign by theirs, set or change the next session, mark the campaign running, on hiatus or finished, and award achievements to your players.
Start a Game has the quickest way to a table, and Run a Session covers what happens once people sit down.
Maps and set-ups
The map board holds every map you've imported and every set-up you've kept from a bench.
- Import a map from a picture, or from a Universal VTT file with its walls and lights already in it.
- Pin it to the board for later, or open it on the workbench to lay it out straight away. Laying a map out opens it on the virtual tabletop, ready to be set up, and Set Up a Map takes it from there.
- A kept set-up is a whole scene, with its floor, its dressing and its traps, ready to be put on a table again.
People and creatures
The portrait gallery has two walls. NPCs is every person you've made for your campaigns. Party is everybody sitting at each of your campaigns' tables, with their characters. Both are grouped by world and campaign, with one search box over them.
Making an NPC walks you through the same steps as a player's character, with one question in front (a regular person, or somebody with a class?) and one behind it: which world and campaign they belong to, a portrait, and notes for your eyes only. An NPC never turns up in anybody's list of characters, and nobody can sit down as one.
The specimen bench is for creatures. Make a goblin once with its picture and size, and put six of them on the map when the fight needs six. After a save the picture and size stay filled in, because a warband is seldom one goblin.
Files
The filing cabinet is for everything you've imported that isn't a map: token art, scenery, handouts and sounds, each in its own drawer. Rename a file, move it to another drawer, note its licence and credit, or scrap it.
Games still on the go
Every game you're running that isn't over is pinned here as a notice: its name, how it stands, when it was last touched, and its room code. Press the notice to go back in. The three dots behind it hold the rarer errands: change its details (its name, whether it's reserved, whether people may watch), hand a one-off on to somebody else, close it for good, or throw it away. A closed game comes off the board and into its campaign's history.
Games aren't started from this board. A game begins when somebody sits down at a table in the tavern, or from the VTT menu, and waits here once it's rolled up for the night.