Your first campaign
Four steps, about ten minutes. Make the campaign, tell it what a character sheet looks like in your game, invite your players, and add a face or two.
Do them in that order — step 2 is much easier before anyone has made a character.
1. Make the campaign
On your home screen, press Start new campaign. Give it a Campaign name and press Create. That's it — you now have a campaign and an invite code.
What's the System tag for?
It's a label for you, not an instruction to the app. Write “5e” or “Blades” or “the one Dave made up” — it shows on your campaign card so a shelf of six games tells you which is which at a glance.
Nothing behaves differently because of it. The app genuinely does not know what your game is, and that's on purpose (why).
Finding your way around
Everything in a campaign — the cast, the places, the notes, the settings — is behind the menu button in the top corner of every page.
Where did the row of buttons go?
On a phone the modules used to sit in a row of coloured buttons under the page title, three rows deep on a small screen, on every single page. That's a lot of the screen spent on getting somewhere else, and this app is meant to be used at the table.
They're the same buttons in the same colours — they just live behind the menu now. Press it and they slide out.
On a laptop or a wide tablet there's room for both, so the menu is simply always open down the right-hand side and there's no button to press.
2. Say what a character sheet looks like
Go to Backstage and find Starting Character Fields. Add a box for each thing a character in your game has — Strength, Bonds, Armour, whatever your game calls them.
Every character made after this starts with those boxes already on the sheet.
Do this before you invite anyone
Starting fields are applied to a character when it's created. Set them up first and every sheet is right from the start. Set them up later and there's a repair button in Backstage that adds the missing ones to existing characters — it works, but it's a fix, not the path.
So: fields first, people second. It's the one bit of order in this list that will actually cost you an evening if you get it backwards.
Players only, Cast only, or both?
Each field is marked Players only, Cast only or Players and Cast.
This is worth two minutes of thought. Your players probably track Bonds and XP; your NPCs almost certainly don't, and a shopkeeper with an empty XP box is clutter on a screen you'll be reading in a hurry. Meanwhile your NPCs might track Morale or Attitude, which would be strange on a player's sheet.
Mark it once here and every sheet after that is the right shape without anyone thinking about it again.
Writing the rule on the box
Any field can carry a short note that shows under it on everyone's sheet. This is where “half your Dex, rounded down” or “starts at 2, +1 per Bond” goes.
The app won't do that maths — it can't, it doesn't know your game — but nobody has to remember the rule or ask you mid-session, which was the actual problem.
Change the note later and every sheet shows the new one. House rules are one edit.
Or skip all this and import a setup
If someone's already built a setup for your game, a GM can import it whole — starting fields, tracked stats, pools and abilities in one go. The D&D 5e pack is exactly that.
You can also do it later. Re-importing a corrected version updates what's there by name instead of duplicating it, so a template can be fixed after the fact.
3. Get your players in
Your campaign page shows an invite code. Send it to your players — there's a share button next to it — and they enter it under Join a campaign.
They don't need to pay for anything, ever.
If a code gets out
Backstage has Regenerate invite code, which makes a new one and kills the old. Anyone already in stays in; anyone holding the old code is now holding nothing.
The same screen lists everyone who's joined, and lets you remove someone. If you do, they keep a copy of their character and you keep one too (how that works).
4. Put someone in it
From your campaign page, press Manage the cast, then Add character. Name them, pick Cast (NPC), done.
You can do this mid-session in about five seconds, which is the entire point.
The tickbox about tagging
When you add someone there's an option to Also tag as itself, so other entries can reference it, and it's on by default. Leave it on.
What it does: it makes a tag named after that character, so later you can file a Backdrop, a rumour or a Prop against them. Then their page shows everything connected to them — and the way you find out what that innkeeper knew is that you tagged three things with their name over four months without thinking about it.
Tagging as you go is the entire trick to this app. It costs nothing at the time and pays out months later.
What players can see of your Cast
Nothing, until you share that specific person. Everything you make starts private to you.
When you do share someone, players get the description you wrote for them — never your own notes, which live in a separate box for exactly this reason. That's where the twist goes.
You're set up. Now what?
Nothing else is required. Add people and places as they come up, tag them as you go, and press Center Stage when a fight starts.
The three things worth doing in your first session
- Write things down as they happen, not after. There's a quick-note box on your campaign page during a live session that drops straight into that session's log.
- Tag everything with everything. A Backdrop tagged with an NPC's name is a question answered in four months' time.
- Share a couple of things with your players. A shared NPC is one they can add their own private notes to, which is how the party starts remembering things without you.
This is help for ACT VI: The Tabletop Turns — a system-agnostic companion app for running tabletop RPGs. Players never pay, and a GM's first campaign is free.