Secrets and clues
A secret is a truth about your world your players don't have yet. A clue is a piece of one. The Secrets & Clues dashboard is where you see, in one place, what each table has actually uncovered — across the whole world, not one session at a time.
Open it from Secrets in the world sidebar.
Creating secrets
Secrets and clues are entities, like NPCs and locations. Create one from the sidebar, or with New Secret from the empty dashboard.
Write the secret as the truth, not the hint. "The Duke's steward has been forging his seal for six years" is a secret; "a letter with a smudged seal" is a clue pointing at it. Link the clue to the secret and both to the entities involved, and the dashboard can tell you which threads a party is close to pulling.
Disclosure status
Every secret carries one of three states:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 🔒 Hidden | Players don't know this yet |
| 🔍 Partial | Players suspect, or have a clue |
| 🔓 Revealed | Players know the full truth |
A secret with no status set counts as Hidden.
Advance the status the moment a table earns it — during the session or in the debrief. The value of the dashboard is entirely in it being current.
Per-campaign disclosure
This is the part that makes the dashboard worth keeping. Disclosure is tracked per campaign, not per world.
The same world can run three campaigns whose parties each know a different amount. The steward's forgery is Revealed to Tuesday's group, Partial to Thursday's, and Hidden to the new table that started last month — one secret, three truths about who knows it.
Switch to the By Campaign view and pick a campaign to see and set that table's disclosure. The world-level status stays as your canonical default; a campaign that has diverged from it is flagged so you can see at a glance where a table is ahead of or behind canon.
Disclosure status is a record of what the table knows. It is not a visibility control — it doesn't hide anything from anyone. Use visibility levels to control what players can actually read.
The three views
| View | Answers |
|---|---|
| By Status | What's still hidden, what's half-known, what's out |
| By Entity | Which NPCs, locations, and factions are carrying undisclosed secrets |
| By Campaign | What this particular table knows |
By Entity is the prep view — before a session touching the Ashen Court, it tells you every secret attached to it and how much of each the party already has.
Notes
Each secret carries a disclosure note: how they found out, what they think they know, what they got wrong. A party that reached a half-truth by a wrong route is more useful to record than a status flag alone, and campaign-scoped notes let each table's misunderstanding be its own.
Troubleshooting
A campaign shows no secrets. Secrets belong to the world; disclosure belongs to the campaign. If the world has no secret entities yet, create one — the campaign view has nothing to track until then.
A secret's status looks wrong in one campaign. You're probably looking at the world-level status. Switch to By Campaign and select the campaign; a campaign that has set its own status is marked as diverged from the world default.
Revealing a secret didn't show players anything. Disclosure tracking and visibility are separate. Set the entity's visibility to Party as well.
See also
- Visibility and secrets — actually controlling what players can read
- Investigation boards — the player-facing side of a mystery
- Narrative threads — tracking the arcs the secrets belong to
- Post-session debrief — where to update disclosure after play