Adventure Builder

The Adventure Builder lets you organize a narrative into acts and scenes with GM guidance attached to each. It is a prep tool — adventures are private by default and not visible to players during play.

📝Note

Publishing adventures to the marketplace is a separate feature. This article covers building and running adventures for your own table.

Structure

Adventures follow a three-level hierarchy:

Adventure — the top-level container. Attached to a world and optionally linked to a campaign. Gives the narrative a title and a brief premise note for your own reference.

Acts — major divisions within the adventure. Think of an act as a chapter. You can have as many as you need; most adventures work with two to four. Drag to reorder acts.

Scenes — ordered narrative beats within an act. Each scene is where the real planning lives. Drag to reorder within an act, or drag a scene from one act to another.

/help/screenshots/adventure-builder/01-act-scene-layout.gif

The Adventure Builder showing the act/scene tree on the left and the open scene editor with GM guidance fields on the right.

Record: open an adventure with 2+ acts and several scenes — click a scene to open the editor and show the full layout with act tree, beat type label, and GM guidance fields visible

Scene beat types

Every scene has a beat type. Beat types are a vocabulary for what kind of narrative moment this is:

Beat type	What it means
Explore	Players discover or investigate something
React	Something happens to the players; they must respond
Unfold	The world responds to earlier player choices
Escalate	Stakes increase; pressure mounts
Resolve	A narrative question gets answered
Transition	Connective tissue — travel, downtime, scene-setting

Setting a beat type does not enforce any mechanical behavior. It is a label that helps you vary the rhythm of a session and avoid stacking five consecutive React beats.

Scene contents

Each scene contains:

Title — a short label for your reference ("The Ambush," "Elara Explains the Pact")
GM guidance — a rich-text field with four sub-sections: read-aloud text, GM notes, contingencies (what if players do the unexpected), and pacing notes
Linked encounter — attach an encounter entity you built in the Encounter Builder. A launch button appears directly in the scene view during Session Mode.
Linked entities — NPCs, locations, or items relevant to this scene. These appear as quick-access cards when the scene is active.
Branch point — see below

💡Tip

Keep read-aloud text short — two to four sentences. Long read-alouds lose the table. Put the rest in GM notes and improvise from there.

Branch points

A branch point is a trigger question plus two or more outcome options. Each outcome points to a different scene. Example:

Trigger: "Do they let Caretaker Voss go, or do they detain him?"
Outcome A → Scene 6 (Voss delivers the warning, faction shifts)
Outcome B → Scene 7 (Voss's contacts retaliate at dawn)

Branch points are planning scaffolding. During play, click the outcome that matches what actually happened and the builder highlights that path. You can override at any time — plans change.

The Adventure Cast

The Cast is a panel listing the key entities in this adventure and their narrative roles:

Role	Usage
Primary	Central to the adventure's main conflict
Supporting	Recurring characters with meaningful involvement
Antagonist	The force or person working against the party
Background	Present in the world but not driving events

Cast entries link to your world entities. If the NPC's article gets updated, the cast entry reflects it automatically.

Narrative Threads

Threads are cross-cutting story elements that span multiple scenes or acts. Add a thread for:

Foreshadowing — a detail planted early that pays off later
Recurring NPC — a character who appears across multiple scenes
Escalation trigger — a condition that changes the stakes (if the party takes too long, the ritual begins)
Mystery — a question that drives investigation
Theme — a thematic element you are weaving through the adventure

Threads do not attach to individual scenes — they live at the adventure level. During prep, they are a checklist to ensure you have planted what you intend to plant. During play, glancing at the thread list reminds you what is still unresolved.

Running an adventure in Session Mode

Adventures appear in the Session Mode sidebar under Adventures. Open the active adventure to see the scene list. Click a scene to expand it — GM guidance, linked entities, and the encounter launch button are all accessible from the scene view without leaving Session Mode.

📝Note

Adventures are GM-private. Players with the companion link cannot see the adventure structure, scene text, or GM guidance. Only explicitly revealed entities are visible to players.

Troubleshooting

My adventure isn't appearing in Session Mode. Adventures appear in the Session Mode sidebar under Adventures. Confirm the adventure is attached to the same world you opened Session Mode from. If you created the adventure in a different world, it won't appear. Also check that the adventure has at least one scene — adventures with no scenes may not surface in the sidebar.

I linked an encounter to a scene but the launch button isn't showing. The encounter launch button appears only when the scene is the active/expanded scene in Session Mode. Click the scene to expand it — the linked encounter and its launch button should appear in the scene content area.

I reordered scenes by dragging but the order didn't save. Scene reordering saves immediately on drop. If the order reverted after a page refresh, check your connection at the time of the drag — a dropped connection can prevent the save. Reorder and wait a moment before navigating away.

The Cast panel is empty even though I have linked entities. Cast entries are distinct from the linked entities on individual scenes. You add cast members from the Cast tab at the adventure level — they're not auto-populated from scene links. Open the Cast tab and use Add Cast Member to link the relevant entities with their roles.