Introducing The Cold Open
June 2026
The hardest part of running a campaign isn't game night — it's everything between game nights. Who's plotting what. Which threats are heating up. What the world did while the party slept. The Cold Open is a new GM tool that keeps all of it on a single dial, so you walk into every session knowing exactly where the pressure is.
You'll find it on the Campaign tab.
A boiler for your campaign
The Cold Open tracks your campaign's between-session tension as boiler pressure — one needle, one sentence telling you what it means. Feeding it are two things:
- Faction clocks — the off-screen schemes ticking toward something. Local, regional, or world-ender; the bigger the scope, the harder it pushes the needle.
- PC threads — every character's hooks and enemies, tracked on a heat board that floats the hottest threats to the top.
When the session ends, hit Campaign Tick: the world advances, schemes tick, threads escalate, and the cascade plays out in front of you — deterministic, every time. No AI, no dice you didn't roll. Just your campaign, remembering itself.
The opposition, made real
Factions used to be just a name. Now they're Organizations — first-class groups with rosters of real characters, leaders, and lieutenants. Tie a threat to an org and the heat meter shows you the face behind it, portrait and all, one click from their full sheet.
What your players see
Players get their own view: the Standing board — a constellation map of where your crew stands with the factions they've actually met. Who's friendly, who's circling, and which way the wind is turning. They never see your dials or your hidden schemes — only what you've chosen to reveal.
And revealing is a moment: bring a scheme into focus and The Cold Open offers you a timeline entry to log it. Keep it, tweak it, or wave it off — you're always the author.
Try it out
Open any campaign, head to the Campaign tab, and seed your first threads — or run a Cold Open to start a session. The board walks in populated and meaningful.
More to come. For now: light the boiler. 🔥
