# A tabletop campaign setting — a players’ guide on one link, the game master’s secrets kept apart Recipe No. 45, Hobbies and play. From The know.sh Cookbook: https://know.sh/cookbook/campaign-setting - For: a game master running a homebrew fantasy campaign for five players every other Friday - You bring: a notebook of world ideas, a rough map, the notes you scrawl during play, the fifth-edition rules from the SRD 5.2 if your table uses them, and the AI assistant you already use - You get: a players’ guide, a places document, a factions document and a session log that players read from links, a second shelf of secrets they never see, and an index of the names that recur on both shelves - Time: an evening for your assistant to file the world and a weekend for you to put it right, then twenty minutes the morning after each session - Keep it: private while you work; share one document by a read-only link Every campaign has two versions. There is the one your players know: the harbour town, the ferryman who overcharges, the rumour about the abbey under the water. And there is the one behind the screen: who really runs the town, what the abbey is for, and what happens if the party ignores it for three sessions. Keep both in one notebook and sooner or later a secret gets read aloud. This recipe keeps them apart. You hand your notebook to whichever assistant you use — Claude, ChatGPT or a local model — and it files the world on two shelves: the players' half, with a guide, places, factions and a session log, each on its own read-only link, and the game master's half, which never gets a link at all. Then you open the editor and make it yours. The index at the back covers both shelves, and only you ever see it, so at the table one search finds Magistrate Venn's public face and her real motive side by side. The map, the dice and the miniatures stay where they are, and the world stays your invention: the assistant sorts and files what you wrote; it does not dream up the plot. ## What you will use - **Your AI assistant**: Files the world from your notes onto two shelves, logs each session from your scrawl, checks the table shelf for spoilers, and answers "what does the party know?" from the log alone. - **Shelf**: Two shelves: *Tidewrack — at the table* for what players may read, and *Tidewrack — behind the screen* for everything they may not. - **Research document**: The players' guide, places, factions and faces, and the session log on the first shelf; secrets and fronts, NPCs in full, and session prep on the second. - **Finding**: One per place, NPC, faction and session; turning points marked **Key**, open mysteries filed as *Question*. - **The editor**: Where you rewrite the player-facing text in your own voice, drag places into travel order and move anything secret off the table shelf. - **Proposed notes**: Your assistant flags any player-facing finding that gives away a secret, as a proposed note you accept or dismiss. - **Public link**: A link per player-facing document, with a password, and the places the party has not reached left out until they do. - **The A–Z index**: The names of NPCs, places and factions that recur on both shelves (*Venn*, *Quay*, *Saltwardens*), for your eyes only. ## Method ### 1. Hand your assistant the notebook Connect your assistant to know.sh once, following the support page. Then give it what you have — typed notes, a long document, photos of handwritten pages if it reads images — and ask it to build two shelves: *Tidewrack — at the table* ("What the players know") and *Tidewrack — behind the screen* ("Never shared"). On the first shelf go a players' guide, *Places of the Tidewrack*, *Factions and faces* and a *Session log*; on the second, *Secrets and fronts*, *NPCs behind the screen* and *Session prep*, with a finding per place, faction and person. Tell it two rules. Player-facing findings describe only what a traveller would see and hear. And where your notes leave a gap, it files a *Question* instead of inventing an answer: the world is yours. ### 2. Put it right in the editor Read the table shelf as a player would. Press **Edit** and rewrite anything that sounds like a summary rather than your world; drag places into the order the party will travel; mark the turning points **Key**; change a finding's type where the assistant guessed wrong. Anything secret that slipped onto the table shelf moves to the other one. Check the titles as you go. "Lantern Quay, the night market" is better than "The market", because the index learns capitalised names from finding titles and first lines, and *Quay* will recur there. When the truth about a person sits behind the screen under the same name — "Orlaith Venn, magistrate of the Ashen Court" — the index gathers both findings under *Venn*: the public face and the private one, a line apart. ### 3. Write the parts of the players’ guide that must be yours Your assistant can lay the guide out from your notes: *The premise*, *Character creation*, *House rules*, *Lines and veils*, *Credits*. Two of those you write yourself. *House rules* are your rulings, in your words. *Lines and veils* is what the table agreed at session zero — what stays off-screen and what never appears — and nobody else should phrase it. Mark it **Key**; it is the section a new player most needs. Put the SRD attribution in *Credits* exactly as the note below gives it. Margin notes are hidden from link readers, so a small reminder can sit beside a player-facing line ("Venn is lying here"); anything bigger goes behind the screen. ### 4. Log each session the morning after Give your assistant the scrawl from last night, a photo of the page or a few typed lines, and ask it to add a finding to *Session log*, such as "Session 14 — Captain Morrow's warning", with four headings: *What happened*, *What the party learned*, *Who they met*, *Open threads*. It should write only what happened at the table, and list anything from behind the screen for you separately, to go in *Session prep*. Open the finding and correct it: an assistant turning notes into a recap will smooth over the one detail that mattered. When a mystery opens, such as who seals letters with ash, give it a *Question* finding in the log so the open threads sit where players look. ### 5. Have your assistant check for spoilers Before you share anything, ask your assistant to compare the table shelf with the behind-the-screen shelf and leave a proposed note on any finding that reveals, or strongly hints at, something the party has not discovered. Proposed notes arrive in the margin with a dashed rule and **Accept** and **Dismiss**; they never change your text. Some flags are real leaks: a description of the ferry that mentions an ash seal before the party has seen one. Others are foreshadowing you meant, and you dismiss them. ### 6. Share the players’ documents, one link each Press **Share** on each of the four player documents. The full link is shown once, so copy it the moment it appears. Set a password the whole table knows and leave it with no expiry (the default), since the campaign may run for a year, then post the four links in your group chat. Links show the current text, so a place filed on Thursday is there on Friday. Places the party has not reached stay hidden: on each finding's own page, leave it out of the link, and include it the night they arrive. If someone leaves the group, replace each link: the old addresses stop working, but replacing also resets the expiry and the left-out places, so set both again before the new links go out. ### 7. Keep it open at the table During play, **Look up** (⌘K, or /) finds any name as you type, from either shelf. When a player asks what their character would know, ask your assistant to answer from *Session log* and the table shelf only. It can read your whole library, so the instruction matters: without it, a careful answer may include the secret. Read the answer before you read it out, and open one or two of the sessions it cites. ## Prompts to try Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, read only the document Session log and the other documents on my Tidewrack — at the table shelf, and tell me what the party has learned about the Ashen Court. Cite the session for each point, and list separately anything they have guessed but not confirmed. Do not use anything on the Tidewrack — behind the screen shelf. Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, compare every finding in Places of the Tidewrack (on my Tidewrack — at the table shelf) with Secrets and fronts and NPCs behind the screen. Where a player-facing finding reveals or strongly hints at a secret the party has not discovered, leave a proposed note that quotes the line and names the secret it gives away. Do not change any text. Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Here are my rough notes from tonight’s session: [paste or attach]. Using know.sh, add a finding to the Session log on my Tidewrack — at the table shelf, titled ‘Session 15 — ‘ plus a short title, with four headings: What happened, What the party learned, Who they met, Open threads. Include only what happened at the table. If my notes mention anything from behind the screen, leave it out and list it for me separately. ## Variations - Running a published adventure rather than your own world? Keep only your own prep and the session log, and keep the adventure's text out of anything you share: it is someone else's work. - If the world is also the setting for fiction you are writing, give the lore its own shelf and follow the [fantasy world encyclopedia](/cookbook/world-encyclopedia). - For a one-shot at a convention, one document holds the premise and the pre-generated characters, shared with an expiry the day after. - Running a fantasy league instead of a campaign? The [fantasy league almanac](/cookbook/fantasy-league) keeps a season current with a scheduled update. ## Where it falls short - No maps or handouts. There is no image upload, so maps stay in your mapping tool or a shared album, and the places document says where to find them. - Players read; they do not write. Backstories, character sheets and questions between sessions reach you in the group chat, and you file them or pass them to your assistant. - Four player documents mean four links. A shelf cannot be shared, so there is no single link to the whole table shelf. - Your assistant can read the whole library, secrets included, and keeps to the table shelf only when told. Smaller local models follow such instructions and call tools less reliably, so read what any assistant files; Revisions shows every change it made. ## A note on rules, settings and credit If your game uses the fifth-edition rules released under Creative Commons, the licence asks for one line of attribution, and the players' guide is the place for it: "This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2 ("SRD 5.2") by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd." The licence covers the rules in that document, not the publisher's named settings, iconic monsters or trade dress, so build a world of your own and keep other people's worlds out of anything you share. A link is a kind of publication, even with a password. Use characters' names, not players' real names, and respect your table's lines and veils in the log as well as at the table. AI assistants make mistakes. When yours sums up what the party knows, check it against the sessions it cites before you treat it as settled. Indexed under: Game masters, Players’ guides, Session logs, Spoilers, SRD 5.2, Non-player characters, Worldbuilding.