Arc Workshop and strands

Character arcs record who a character is becoming. The Arc Workshop is the part that helps you and the player actually play one — beat by beat, together, without either of you scripting the ending.

Open it from any character arc.

Guidance on every beat

An arc component's description says what the beat is. Guidance says how to reach it. Each beat carries four things:

	What it gives you
Try this	Concrete things the player can do to steer play toward the beat
You will know it landed when	How the table recognises the beat actually happened
GM hooks	Openings you can set up so the player can reach for it
Seen in	The same beat in a story the player has probably already met

Signals are the useful half. "The rest of the table can state what your character did without you explaining why" is a test you can apply at the table; "the character grows" is not.

📝Note

Guidance is written for the table, not stored on the arc. It never becomes part of the record — the arc log still only holds what actually happened.

The brainstorm board

A shared board for ideas about where an arc could go, attached to specific beats.

Ideas are authored by you or the player, and each is private or shared
Each carries a status: Open, In play, Used, or Shelved
Sparks offer prompts when the board is empty and nobody knows where to start

The board is the place to put a "what if" without committing to it. A shared idea is a proposal; a private one is a note to yourself. Move an idea to In play when you start setting it up, and to Used when it lands — so the board reflects the arc rather than accumulating.

💡Tip

Open the brainstorm board from a beat's guidance panel and it opens with that beat preselected. Ideas attached to a beat are far easier to act on than a general list.

The current-state read

Alongside the beats, write a short read of where the character is now — a few sentences, "where they are, not what happened" — plus any unresolved threads still hanging, one per entry.

This is the paragraph you want in front of you before a session. It shows up on every surface that displays the arc, so you write it once rather than re-deriving it from the beat log each time.

Secondary strands

Sometimes play takes a character somewhere their arc doesn't cover. A Redemption arc runs into a genuine Found Family beat; a Chosen One starts descending.

Rather than abandoning the arc or pretending the detour didn't happen, open a secondary strand: graft beats from another arc type onto the running arc. Write why it opened — the player sees that note alongside the beats.

A grafted beat keeps the guidance of the type it came from, since that's the guidance that fits what's actually happening.

⚠️Warning

A strand is for a genuine turn in play, not for hedging. Two full arcs running at once dilutes both. If the new direction has really replaced the old one, complete the arc and start a new one instead.

Troubleshooting

A player can see a beat I haven't unlocked. Beats unlock progressively; guidance follows the beat. If a player is seeing something early, check the component's unlock state on the arc.

Brainstorm ideas the player shouldn't see. Set the idea to private. Shared is the default for collaboration — private is for your own planning.

A grafted beat's guidance mentions the wrong arc. That's intended. A beat carried over from another arc type keeps that type's guidance, because that's the guidance that fits the beat.