Run a Session

The shape of it

Three objects, and it helps to keep them apart:

• A party is people. It doesn't end.
• A campaign is a game that party plays. It has a roster, a schedule and a status.
• A session is one sitting — a table in the tavern with a room code on it.

A campaign can point at a party, and sessions belong to a campaign. You can also start a game with no campaign behind it, for a one-shot or a pick-up game.

Every game is played at a table in the tavern. That's the one rule, and the server holds it: there is no such thing as a session floating about with nowhere to sit. What you get to choose is how you reach the table.

Two ways in, one game

They are two doors onto the same things, not two sets of things. A campaign begun on the plain page is the one the book shows; a game started from the list is on a table in the room, lamp lit, where anybody walking past can see it. Use whichever suits the evening. (If you only want the short version of the plain route, it's Start a Game.)

Every plain page also says where its thing lives in the tavern and has a Show me that walks you there. That's on purpose. The list is the quick way in; the room is where the place actually is.

1. Start the campaign

Skip this for a one-off. For anything that comes back next week:

From the VTT menu. Start here, then under Start a game pick A campaign. Give it a name, choose how it sits on the floor (below), press Start. That makes the campaign and puts tonight's game on a table in one go.

From the tavern. Go out of the front door, across the square to the workshop, and to the corner desk and open the campaign book. Begin a new campaign opens a chapter of three pages — The basics, The outline, The table — and Begin it writes it in. The book is where a campaign is kept: its outline, its next session, its invite code. It doesn't start a sitting; a table does that (step 3).

How it sits on the floor is one choice of three, worded the same in both places:

• Reserved — the room sees a game is on and nothing else. Your party walks straight in. This is what a new campaign starts as.
• Open to watch — anyone can find it and look on. Nobody new sits down.
• Open to sit — strangers may take a chair, as many as you say.

Which means "open to watch" is a real and useful thing: a game people can see being played and nobody can join. Seeing a table and sitting at it were always two questions.

You're the GM of it automatically, as the person who made it.

2. Get players in

Two completely separate codes, which is the single most common source of confusion here.

An invite code doesn't get anyone to tonight's table and a room code doesn't put anyone on your roster.

Your players don't have to know which one they've been handed. There is one box, labelled Join with a code, and it takes either — or the whole invite link, pasted in as it came. It can tell them apart by shape, says which it's got as they type, and the button reads Sit down for a room code and Join for an invite. The box is in three places: Join a game on the VTT menu, under Got a code? on Start here, and in the campaign book above Begin a new campaign.

Somebody who joins a campaign from the plain pages lands on its card under Games you're in, with Pick your character already open: who they're playing, and their token and label colours. It saves as they go, and a session picks it up when it starts.

If you start from the plain page you don't even have to go looking for the codes. The moment you're seated it shows you both, each with a ready-made link — Link to tonight’s table and Link to join the campaign — and a link fills the box in for whoever follows it. Signed out, they're asked to sign in and brought straight back with the code still in it.

If you'd rather be found than send codes out, set the campaign to Open to sit and it's pinned to the notice board by the tavern door, and listed under Looking for a game? on Start here.

3. Put it on a table

From the VTT menu. Start here → Start a game. One question — What are you starting? — and three answers:

• A campaign — a new one, as in step 1.
• A one-off — tonight only. No name needed; it's called after the evening.
• One of mine — a campaign you already run, or a game you packed up. (Only offered when you have one.)

Then you're told You’re at a table., and which one. Nobody asked you to pick: you get the smallest free table that seats your roster with a chair to spare, and the showpieces by the hearth are kept for when nothing plainer is left. From there, Go to the table opens the map, and See it in the tavern shows you where you've been put.

Your own games are also listed under Games you run, each with its own button: Start for a campaign that hasn't been played yet, Lay it out again for one that's packed up, and Resume for one that's on a table now.

From the tavern. Walk to an empty table and take a chair. A folded map appears on the boards in front of you reading Lay a game out. Press it and the table asks what you're laying out:

• Something new — a fresh game on this table.
• One of yours… — your campaigns that haven't been played, and anything you packed up.
• A game… — draughts, not a dungeon. That's the shelf, and a different evening.

Either way it's the same act underneath. Starting a campaign's game seats everybody on the roster, carrying their characters and colours across, and you land in /vtt/{room code}.

Two people can't end up on one table. If somebody takes yours in the second before you press, the plain page quietly picks another; if every table really is taken you're told The room’s full tonight. Try again in a minute.

4. Prep, then open it

A new game starts in setup. The setup wizard opens by itself on an empty one and walks six steps — Name your scene, Add a map, Line up the grid, Draw walls for line of sight, Add NPCs and monsters, Ready to play — see Set Up a Map, which goes through each.

Two things do not work while a game is in setup, both on purpose and both surprising the first time:

• Nobody can join by room code.
• Fog of war doesn't render at all. If you're testing fog and seeing nothing, this is almost always why.

When you're ready, press Open to players. It's on the wizard's last step, and on the Session layer of the build dock. There is no way back — a game goes setup → open, and ending it is separate.

Open it before the room code is any use. The plain page hands you the links before you've seen the map, because the first thing a GM with a new table needs is somebody to sit at it. That's the right moment to send the campaign invite, which works whenever. The room code and its link only let people in once you've pressed Open to players.

When you're done for the night

On the Table station, Roll it up for tonight puts the map away and gives the table back to the room. Everything on it keeps — scenes, tokens, fog, chat, whose turn it was — and it lays back out later at that table or another. End Session is the other button, and it's the one that means it.

A game nobody is at gets cleared by the landlord on his own after a while. It isn't lost. It shows as Packed up on Start here, with Lay it out again, and under One of yours… at any table you sit down at.

5. Running it

Once it's open, everything is on the rail beside the map: Talk, Rolls, Turns, You, Room and Table for everybody, and Figures, Scene and Cues for you alone. Press one for its panel; press it again to fold it away.

• Initiative. On Turns. Roll initiative rolls a d20 plus each token's modifier server-side and sorts them; Next turn walks the order and bumps the round when it wraps; End combat clears it. Click a total to correct it. Whose go it is is written across the top of the map, and a player can end their own turn from there — only their own, and only once, so two presses never skip the goblin after them. Anything on your GM layer or invisible is in the order as Something unseen for the players; you see its name.

• Fog. You don't need to switch to Building to lift it as the party walks in: the brushes are on Scene.

• Chat. In the room, for everyone in it.

• Rolls. The bit that catches people: there's no dice roller inside the VTT room, and there isn't one anywhere else on the website either. The room has a roll log, not a roller. A roll reaches the table from your phone: you're in the session in the app, you tap a die, and the app sends the roll to that session, where it lands in the log for everyone. The server checks you're actually in the room before it broadcasts — a roll into a session is a write onto other people's screens, so it's authorised like one.

  This sounds like a limitation and isn't: it means every roll at the table came off a physical object somebody picked up, which is the entire point of the thing.

• Tokens. A player can move their own tokens and nothing else. Colours, visibility, layers, HP and deletion are all yours.

• Getting up isn't ending. Press your own face and Get up, and you're back in the tavern with the game still running and your chair still yours. Only End Session ends it.

The one that will bite you

Players who join the campaign after you started tonight's game don't get a seat in it. Seats are filled once, when the game is put on the table. Joining the campaign later adds them to the roster and not to the game already running, and if that game is still in setup they can't room-code their way in either.

The workaround for now: get everyone on the roster before you put the game on a table, or roll it up and start a fresh sitting once the latecomer is in. Once the game is open they can also come in on the room code like anybody else.