📜 Plotlines

👤 For: Game Masters · 💳 Plan: All plans · 🔄 Updated 2026-10-16

Plotlines are the story threads running through your campaign — the main quest, side adventures, and the personal stories tied to individual characters. You can break each one into subquests, attach a checklist of objectives, track its state through its whole lifecycle, and push the player-facing version straight to phones during a session.

What it does

• Lists your quests as a tree — a main plot with nested subquests, indented under their parent.
• Tracks each quest through a lifecycle of five states (plus an amber pause), with a colour-coded card border.
• Gives every quest an objectives checklist you can tick off, hide from players, or delete.
• Lets you mark a quest visible to players and push it live to their phones as a quest log.
• Links each quest to NPCs, scenes, locations, characters, items, deities, world events — and to the sessions where it advanced.

When to use it

Use Plotlines when you want a place to keep "what is actually going on" — the threads you are weaving, which ones the players have picked up, and what still needs paying off. It is the difference between a campaign that feels like it's going somewhere and one that drifts.

Step by step

1. In the sidebar, open 📜 Plotlines.
2. Click + Plotline.
3. Give it a Title (e.g. The Lost King) and a Description — what the thread is about. Only you see the description; players never do.
4. Pick a Quest Type (🔥 Main, 📋 Side, or 🎭 Personal) and a starting Status.
5. Tick 👁️ Visible to players if you want to be able to push this quest to phones later. Leave it off for secret threads.
6. Click Create Plotline.
7. On the new card, click ➕ Subquest to nest a child quest under it, or ▾ Details to add objectives and links.

💡 Tip: Keep the Description as your private seed for the thread, and put the player-facing beats into objectives. Only non-hidden objectives of a visible quest ever leave the server when you push — descriptions stay GM-only.

Quest types

Status & the lifecycle

A plotline moves through a lifecycle. The card's left border colour tells you the state at a glance:

The 🔄 button on a card cycles through the states in order:

Active → On Hold → Resolved → Abandoned → Completed by Other → Active → …

This is the most common in-session action — when the players finally act on a parked thread, click 🔄 to move it forward. You can also set the status directly from the ✏️ Edit modal — or let a world event 📈 The plot moves on do it: it makes a foreshadowed or on-hold plotline active and can tick off one of its open objectives, planned ahead if you like.

Older campaigns: a legacy 🌱 Foreshadowed status exists only for campaigns created before the quest-system rework. It still shows up if it was already set, and cycling it moves the quest to Active. New plotlines can't be set to Foreshadowed — use the Foreshadowing panel to plant hints instead.

Subquests — the quest tree

Click ➕ Subquest on any card to create a child quest beneath it. Subquests render indented under their parent, with a ↳ marker, so you can read a multi-stage quest top to bottom. You can nest as deep as the story needs; the view indents up to three levels before flattening visually.

A typical shape:

🔥 The Order of the Black Sun        🟢 Active   🎯 1/3
  ↳ 📋 Find the stolen medallion     ✅ Resolved  🎯 2/2
  ↳ 📋 Track Captain Morr            🟢 Active   🎯 0/4
  ↳ 🎭 Lyra's revenge                ⏸️ On Hold

Objectives — the checklist

Open a card's ▾ Details to reveal its objectives. Each plotline carries a checklist of concrete goals.

• Type a goal into New objective… and click + Add.
• Tick the checkbox to mark an objective done — it gets struck through, and the card's 🎯 done/total badge updates.
• Click 👁️ / 🙈 on an objective to hide it from players (it shows in italics for you and never leaves the server on a push).
• Click ✕ to delete an objective.
• A world event 📈 The plot moves on can tick off an open objective, too — reverting the event unticks it again.

The 🎯 done/total badge on the card is your at-a-glance progress meter for that thread.

Linking a plotline

In a card's ▾ Details, the Links row connects a plotline to the rest of your campaign. Plotlines can link to:

• 👤 NPCs — the antagonists, allies, and witnesses in this thread
• 🎬 Scenes — set-piece moments belonging to the thread
• 📍 Locations — where it plays out
• 🧑 Characters — whose personal arc this touches
• 🎁 Items — custom or SRD items the thread revolves around
• 🐉 Monsters — custom or SRD creatures tied to it
• ⚡ Deities and 🌍 World Events — the cosmic forces behind it

Why link?

1. Visualization — the Story Web auto-draws edges between plotlines and everything they touch.
2. Cleanup hint — at the end of a campaign you can quickly spot threads that were never resolved (sometimes a feature, sometimes a mistake).
3. Context for Story Coach (AI) — when Story Coach analyses the campaign, it sees which threads are active and which NPCs, scenes, and events advance them.

Plotlines and sessions

A plotline's ▾ Details has an In Sessions block where you link the sessions that advanced it. The other direction matters too: in the Sessions tab, each session lists its linked plotlines with a status snapshot and two handy controls:

• 📤 Push — sends the visible quest to players' phones (only enabled when the quest is marked 👁️ visible; see below).
• ↪ Carry forward — at the start of a new session, pull every still-open (Active or On Hold) plotline from the previous session into this one in one click. This is the Lazy-DM habit of "what's still hanging?" made automatic.

Pushing a quest to players

When you mark a plotline 👁️ Visible to players, you can push it to phones during a live session as a quest log card.

1. Start a live session from the Live tab.
2. In the Sessions tab (or session plotline list), click 📤 on a visible plotline.

Players' phones buzz and a quest card appears:

Tapping the card closes it.

Players only ever see the title and the non-hidden objectives — never your description, and never an objective you've marked 🙈. The push is blocked on the server too: a quest that isn't marked visible sends nothing, even if you try.

Editing a plotline

Click ✏️ on a card to open the edit modal. Title, description, quest type, status, and player visibility all autosave as you change them — there's no separate Save button. Click Close when done.

Plotline counts and complexity

The Overview dashboard shows your Active Plotlines and rolls plotline count into the campaign Complexity score, weighted at ×1.5 — the heaviest of any entity, because plotlines are the most cognitively expensive thing to track.

A rule of thumb (the dashboard's own tip):

• 2–3 active plotlines is comfortable. Players can hold them in mind; you can balance focus.
• 4–5 active starts feeling busy — lean on the Story Web to keep them straight.
• 6+ active is usually too many. Resolve some, park a few as On Hold, or fold them into subquests.

Resolved, Abandoned, and Completed-by-Other plotlines stay in the list for retrospection but don't count toward "active" complexity.

Troubleshooting

Related articles

• 📊 GM Dashboard — see plotline complexity at a glance
• 📅 Sessions — link, snapshot, push and carry forward plotlines
• 🌱 Foreshadowing — plant hints before a thread goes active
• 🕸️ Story Web — visualize plotline ↔ NPC ↔ scene links
• 📖 Story Coach — analysis of your campaign, including plotline pacing (AI)
• 📈 Tension Arc — see when plotlines resolve over the campaign