Boards — the thinking canvas

A board is the surface for the part of prep that has not settled yet. You pin the pages you already have, drop notes for the things you have not decided, draw lines between them, and let the shape of the idea appear before you commit any of it to a record.

Start with anything#

Double-click anywhere on the canvas and write. That makes a note, which lives only on this board. When a note turns out to matter, turn it into a real page — an NPC, a place, a faction — and it keeps its position and its connections.

• Choose Show records to open the picker on the left, then drag pages to pin them.
• Double-click empty space for a note; press N for the same thing from the keyboard.
• Select a note and choose Make this a page above it to turn it into a page. Select several notes and each becomes a page named from its first line. A note keeps its text until its page is saved; if the page cannot be saved, or the note is too long for a page, it stays a note and the board says why.
• Select a timeline to add lanes and moments in the Info panel, then place anything on the board along a lane — at one point in the sequence, or stretched across several. Deleting something from the board takes it off the timeline too, and undo puts it back.
• On a page, choose More, then Start a board from this. It pins the page and what it is connected to, and the board opens with the AI tab ready to add notes, hooks and open questions — nothing is asked for until you choose to. If the new board cannot be saved, it is removed with everything on it and a message says so; the page itself is unchanged.
• Group things into a region to keep a thread together.
• Drop an image from the Assets tab, or from your desktop, to dress the board.

Tokens point at pages; they do not copy them#

Start a board and Show on a board are available only while Boards is enabled and you can author. A page pinned to a board is a reference. Rename the NPC and every board that shows them updates. Removing a token also removes its pending connection suggestions; undo restores them together. A path detached from an endpoint becomes DM only so its words are not newly revealed. Removing a token from a board never deletes the page — and if a page is moved to the trash, its token stays as a marker so you can see what went missing.

Two kinds of line#

Joining two tokens draws a line, which is just annotation — yours to label and style however helps. But when both ends are real pages you can make it a relationship instead, and then it is a real connection that shows up on both pages, not only here.

Boards are yours until you share them#

A board starts DM-only, and so does everything you put on it. To show players a board, open its Info panel with nothing selected and choose Players under Who can open this board. Then mark what they should see: select anything and choose Players in the Info panel, or use the eye button above the selection. On a shared board players get only what is marked Players, and a pinned page or image also has to be visible to them on its own. Showing something on a shared board asks first, because it cannot be taken back from anyone who has already read it. The View as player button shows you exactly what the table would receive — the real thing, worked out on the server, not a preview that greys things out. While it is on, the board is read-only: nothing on the canvas, in its panels or in the AI tab changes anything until you turn it off, and suggested changes wait for you to review them afterwards rather than being added or discarded.

Asking for a starting shape#

Open the AI tab beside a board, say what you are working out — who might have taken the reliquary, how these factions sit against each other — and it suggests groups, notes, pinned pages and the lines between them. Type @ to point it at pages you already have; it works from those, from what is already on the board and from what those are connected to, so it can pin and connect your own pages instead of inventing new ones. New things are laid out beside what the board already holds. Nothing is added while it thinks. You can also start from the Boards page: give a new board a name and say what it should lay out, and it opens with that waiting in the AI tab. Each suggestion costs one credit, shown before you ask.

What comes back arrives as a list you tick through, grouped into layout, pages and connections, with a line saying what each change would do. Untick a group and the things that need it come off with it; tick a connection and both of its ends come back on. Only what is still ticked is added, and anything it wanted to invent arrives as a private draft page with a note about what you already have that might do instead. What you add wears the AI draft marker until you keep it: select it and choose Keep, or Discard it, and with nothing selected the Info panel can keep everything on the board at once. Moving or editing a draft does not count as keeping it. Select a few things and choose Summarise into a note in the Info panel to have it propose one note beside them, reviewed the same way. Select one page, note or region and choose Illustrate to make a new image for it from a description you can edit. The description starts only from words players can already see on it, never a DM-only section, because it is saved with the image; the image lands beside it as an AI draft to keep or discard, and each one costs three credits. With nothing selected, Suggest connections proposes relationships between the pages pinned to the board as dashed lines; accept one to write it through the usual connect dialog, already filled in, or dismiss it. Players see nothing of a suggestion, not even its line, until you accept it, and the accepted line is labelled with the relationship you confirmed. Duplicate board, in the same panel, makes a DM-only copy with everything on it. Turn on Use as a template there and the Create board dialog, from the Boards list or New board on a board, offers that board under Start from: the new board is a DM-only copy of it under the name you give, and is not a template itself. With a page's token selected, the panel lists the other boards that page is on; from the page itself, More, then Show on a board…, opens a board with its token in view. The command palette also finds the words on boards: notes, region titles, captions and labels. An image can be cut to an arch, a torn parchment edge, a soft vignette or any vector shape from Assets, with a soft edge where the shape allows one, and a region can carry its own background image; players who cannot see that image still see the region, without it. The Anchor tool places a door to another board, a page, a view on this board or a web address, and Go follows it; players only see an anchor to a board they can open. The Icon tool places an emoji, a symbol or a small image, with an optional label. The Construct tool places one of a faction's agenda clocks, which ticks the faction's own clock; a random table that keeps its last roll; a quest or an adventure as a small map of its steps; a map from the atlas with its markers and regions; or a window onto a realm calendar that lists what comes next from the campaign's current date. Open goes to the quest or adventure, or to Maps for a map. Open on a calendar window goes to Calendars, for you and for players alike, rather than to that one calendar. Roll all random tables, in the board's panel, rolls every table at once, and undo puts them back. Players see a construct only when they can see what it shows. On a board, the Help button in the top bar walks through its tools and panel. Snapshots…, in the board's panel, keeps a named copy of the whole board; restoring one asks first, puts the tokens, links, views and background back, and keeps a snapshot of how the board was just before. Undo starts over from the restored board, so that snapshot is the way back. Calendar and map constructs are named in the Outline and exports, with event and marker counts. DMs see a quest card’s status for the active campaign. Players see the quest’s own status, and View as player matches their view. Campaign progress stays private to DMs. The Export panel downloads the board as an SVG or PNG picture of everything on it, including what players cannot see, with drawn shapes, arrowheads and paths attached to moved tokens, or sends an outline of it to Publications as a private draft, where it can become a PDF.

Changing what is already there#

Double-click a note to rewrite it right where it sits. Enter starts a new line; click away or press ⌘Enter to keep what you wrote, or Escape to leave it as it was. Select a region to give it a name and to choose whether it groups what is inside it or only draws around it. Select a pinned page and open Edit beside the board to change its name and summary without leaving — everything else about the page is on its own tab. Select one or more pinned pages to tag them from the Info panel; a tag that only some of them have shows how many, with + to put it on all of them.

The board opens with compact tools and the canvas clear. More tools contains drawing, shapes, anchors, icons, constructs and timelines; the active tool stays visible, and stroke controls appear while drawing. More board actions contains Tidy up, List view, View as player, saved views and zoom, plus Show all tools to expand the toolbar.

Show records opens the Directory's Tree and Library views, with the same folders, search and pages. This rail is read-only: click a page to preview it, or drag it onto the board; use the Directory to create, edit or refile its records. Right-click an element for its actions, or right-click the background for board actions. When several elements are selected, right-click one of them to act on the whole selection; right-click another element to act on that one. Use the actions button at the bottom left, or open the menu from the keyboard with Shift+F10 or the context-menu key. Player view offers only reading and navigation actions.

You do not have to drag. Add record in the toolbar, or @, finds a page to pin; Insert image, or ⇧I, places one of this realm's images. Type to narrow the list, use the arrow keys, and press Enter. You can also drop image files from your computer straight onto the canvas — each one uploads privately to this realm's images and lands where you let go of it. Progress stays at the drop point. Retry a failed upload or cancel it there; an image already saved may remain in Assets. Successful images from one drop are added together and one undo removes that placement. Leaving the board cancels pending placement. Images that finish during player preview wait until you exit it, then choose Place image. Anything that is not an image is turned away, and web links are not fetched. In the image picker, Upload images opens a file chooser for the same upload workflow.

Select an image to resize it with Keep proportions, show the whole image or fill its frame, change opacity and rotation, add a caption, give it a shape — a circle, a hexagon, rounded corners — and an edge. Replace image keeps its placement and styling. Crop image opens the shared crop editor and saves a virtual crop in Assets while preserving the source. Undo restores the previous image. Slider gestures commit once when released.

A map behind the board#

With nothing selected, open Details and choose a background image — a city map, a sheet of parchment, a photo of the table. It sits behind the grid and moves with the board as you pan and zoom, so a token you place on a street stays on that street. Show it once or repeat it, and turn the opacity down until the tokens read clearly over it.