How a campaign fits together
The top-level mental model. How a Campaign holds its cast, places, arcs, and play log, and how the pieces refer to each other.
Ultimo aggiornamento 12/09/26
Wyrdli · Aiuto e documentazioneThe top-level mental model. How a Campaign holds its cast, places, arcs, and play log, and how the pieces refer to each other.
You've got a town, a cult, four players, and three months of weekly sessions ahead of you. Everything you're going to write down (the harbour master's gambling debts, the burned letter, the cannery, last Thursday's session notes) has to land somewhere a future-you can find it. The Campaign is that somewhere.
One Campaign is one story arc, in the broad sense: one town, one cast, one ongoing investigation. Everything you create in Wyrdli lives inside exactly one Campaign. Switch Campaigns and you switch into a different world, with its own people, places, and history. Nothing leaks across.
That isolation matters more than it sounds. When you sit down on a Wednesday night to prep, you don't want last year's pirate game's NPCs surfacing in a search. You want this town, this cult, this set of suspects, and nothing else.
A handful of things live at the top level of a Campaign:
Characters populate it: the Player Characters (PCs) the players run, and the Non-Player Characters (NPCs) you drive. Both are characters; the role decides who's at the wheel.
Locations are anywhere the story can happen. They nest, so a basement inside a tavern inside a city is exactly three Locations stacked the way the world is.
Factions group NPCs that share interests, like the cult, the local police, the longshoremen's union. A Faction has Goals of its own, separate from any one member.
Items are the objects that matter narratively. The burned letter, the Alderman's pistol, the key the harbour master swallowed.
Sessions are the sittings you've played. The Campaign's Session list, read top to bottom, is its play log.
These lists are what you see most often in the Campaign sidebar.
A Campaign isn't five flat lists sitting in parallel. The pieces point at each other, and that's where the work happens.
An NPC belongs to a Faction; the Faction has Goals; those Goals turn into the Threats the party will eventually face. An Item is owned by a character or hidden at a Location. A Location can hold Scenes (the moments that play out there) and Clues (the evidence the party finds). A Scene happens at a Location, and playing it puts new Clues into the party's reach.
That last cluster (Secret, Clue, Scene, Location) is its own machinery. It's the discovery graph, and it has its own article.
The Secret is the Campaign's other big top-level thing, and it's the one that takes the longest to get used to. A Secret in Wyrdli is a whole arc, not a single hidden fact. It's the multi-faceted shape of "what's actually going on at the cannery", not the one-line answer.
A Campaign holds several Secrets over its life. They don't run on a schedule. As the party closes in on one, you prep the next one that fits the Campaign's logic, drawing on the NPCs and Locations already in play. The list of Secrets, read top to bottom, is the arc-by-arc history of what's been on the table.
A Campaign without Sessions is a setting. A Campaign with Sessions is a story being played.
Each Session is one sitting: a date, who showed up, the notes you took, and (if you recorded it) the audio and the recap that came out of it. Sessions are also where advancement happens. Ending a Session grants every Character in the Campaign an advancement point, recorded automatically against their sheet.
The Session list is what you scroll when a player asks, "wait, when did we meet that guy?"
If you're new to a Campaign, you can build it in any order. The thing that ties it together is later: the moment you start drawing Clues between Locations on the Canvas, the pieces stop being a list and start being a story.