Sharing things, and finding them again

Two description boxes, and the difference is the point. Public description is what players read. Notes is yours — the twist, the real name, what they'll do when cornered.

Sharing hands over the first and never the second. There's a What players see preview so you can check before you commit, and it's the same code that renders it for them, so it can't quietly drift from the truth.

Something unshared isn't merely absent from their list — it can't be reached by guessing its address either.

Stop sharing takes it back. Any party notes stuck to that thing go quiet with it — there's no second switch to remember, which is exactly why those notes live on the thing rather than on a separate board.

Players keep their own private notes and tags on it, because those were never yours to withdraw. They just have nothing to hang off for now.

The short form only starts it. The draft's own page is where the rest lives — whatever fields this campaign gives that kind of thing, and any files you want to attach.

Nobody can see a draft you haven't proposed yet — not the other players, and not the GM. It's yours to abandon or finish. The GM's view of it starts the moment you press Propose.

The Pitch box is for the GM only — why it belongs — and never reaches the table. Name and public description are the same two boxes anything shared uses.

The GM sees the pitch and any fields behind a Proposed (n) link on their own list page. Accept takes it into the campaign as an ordinary thing the GM now owns; Decline sends it back, with an optional note saying why.

Accepting is not sharing. Whether the table gets to see it stays its own separate step, exactly like anything else the GM makes — accepting only means it's really in the campaign now, not that anyone else has met it yet.

A declined draft isn't gone. It waits in the player's own Your proposals list, editable, with the GM's note under it if they left one. Re-submit puts it back in the GM's queue; Withdraw deletes it for good.

Until the GM accepts it, it's the player's own to edit — Save draft keeps changes. The moment the GM accepts it, it becomes theirs to edit like anything else they made; the player keeps seeing their own creation, just not editing it any more.

A Cast member proposal has one more choice than the others, because a brooch and a rival NPC aren't the same kind of yes. Accept, I’ll run them takes the NPC over — the GM runs it, exactly like anything else they made. Accept, they run them leaves it with the player instead: full editing control on their own creation, the same as any character sheet, still unshared until the GM decides otherwise.

The archive button on a row shelves it for the whole campaign: it leaves everyone's lists but nothing about it is deleted — notes, tags and fields all wait exactly as they were. An Archived (n) link at the foot of the list opens the shelf, and Unarchive puts a thing back like it never left.

Players can still open a shared thing from the shelf — last arc's villain stays readable — they just stop tripping over it in the working list. On the Characters screen this applies to Cast only: a player character is somebody's live sheet, and shelving it isn't a thing.

If someone had pinned a thing you archive, their pin waits invisibly and returns, in its old position, when you unarchive.

Every field has a Type. Writing something down gets a roomy multi-line box, full stop — there's no smaller shape to pick instead, so whatever you type gets room to grow. Set it to a number and the app will refuse letters in it; set it to a checkbox and it reads back as ticked or not. There are 3 to choose from — the pick-one and pick-several lists are richer, and they exist for fields defined in Backstage, where their choices live.

When a field you typed on one thing turns out to be worth having everywhere, you don't have to go and type its name again in Backstage. Press Make standard on it. It becomes a Backstage field for that kind of thing, keeping the shape you gave it. If that shape would change what's already written elsewhere — a value that would stop saving, or one that would be silently replaced by whatever the new shape can hold — you're told which things, and which of the two, by name, before you press the button that goes ahead anyway.

Everything that already has a field by that name takes the new shape at once — they're matched by name, and pressing Make standard itself never touches anything: nothing is copied, and nothing already written changes at that moment. What happens next depends on which warning you saw. A value that would stop saving is undone by deleting the template in Backstage — nothing was ever written, so the field is exactly as it was. A value that would be replaced isn't: the change lands the next ordinary time that other thing is saved, and once it has, deleting the template stops it happening again but can't bring back what was overwritten.

Making a field standard is about reusing it, never about showing it to anyone. If you want players to read it, that's still the tick in Backstage.

A field you define in Backstage lands on every set, prop or ensemble you make after it. Ones that already exist keep exactly what they have.

That's on purpose rather than unfinished: pouring six new fields onto two hundred things you wrote months ago isn't something you could undo. When you do want it, Apply missing fields to existing is the button that does it — matched by name, so nothing already written is touched, and pressing it twice changes nothing.

Deleting a field in Backstage works the other way round: everything that already has it keeps it, and its value. Only new ones stop getting it.

Nobody, until you say so. Tick Players can see this field in Backstage and it becomes readable — on every one of these you've shared, or none of them — and, since a GM can share a player's sheet with the party, on every shared character too.

There's no per-item switch, and that's deliberate. A tick box on every field of every object is a lot of small decisions to get right, and getting one wrong is the kind of mistake you only find out about after somebody has read it.

So when you want the same thing said two ways — the official story and the real one — make two fields: a public Government and a private Who actually runs it. Or leave the field private and put the public version in the shared description, which is what that box is for.

While you're editing, the fields players can read are marked. The unmarked ones are yours.

Every tag belongs to whoever made it. Your GM can't see yours, other players can't see yours, and nobody can see how you've connected things up. There is no shared tag and no campaign-wide tag — the GM has their own set and so does everyone else.

Which means you can tag the friendly baker definitely-a-vampire and take that entirely to your grave.

The trick is to tag things with each other. Make a tag named after an NPC, then put it on the tavern they run, the rumour about them, and the dagger they're looking for. Now their page answers "what do I know about this person" by itself.

That's why there's a tickbox when you create something offering to tag it as itself — it's building that habit for you. Leave it on.

Beyond that: tag by arc, by session, by who-cares-about-it, by unresolved-question. It costs a second at the time and pays out four months later, which is the only honest pitch for any note-taking system.

Individual fields can be tagged too — the odd one out, since it's part of a character rather than a thing of its own. A tag on a field takes you back to that field on that sheet rather than to the top of a long page.

Useful for the field that's actually a plot thread: a Bond, a Debt, a curse someone's tracking.

• Tag all with one name — one tag across everything ticked. Tick nine things and call them all Marketplace.
• Tag each with its own name — one tag per thing, named after it. Tick nine things and get nine tags, so each becomes something else can be filed against.

The list is what you haven't tagged rather than what's newest, so it empties as you work and stops nagging when you're done.

Tag at the moment of invention, not later. The innkeeper you named on the spot gets a tag in the ten seconds while your players are arguing about something else — that's the entire investment.

The version of this that fails is the one where you promise to tidy up after the session. Nobody tidies up after the session.