Setting up encounters

Creating an encounter

From your campaign page, open Encounters (a subscriber GM feature, like the rest of the campaign toolkit). Creation asks only two things — a name and a kind — and drops you on the encounter page where everything else is edited:

• Objective and stakes — player-visible framing ("Cross the pass before nightfall", "If you fail, the caravan is lost"). Editable at any time, also mid-scene.
• Notes — GM-only, for whatever you need at hand.
• Visibility — party (default) or GM-only. A GM-only encounter is never named or even confirmed to members; use it to prep surprises.
• Turn order — on for combat (and locked on while the kind is combat), off by default for social, exploration and freeform. You can switch it on for any kind that wants structured turns.

New encounters sit in planning: build in peace, players see nothing until you press Start. At any point, append ?as=player to the URL to see exactly what the table sees.

The building blocks

Every kind draws from the same four blocks — participants, zones, clocks and discoveries. What follows applies everywhere; the kind sections after it show which blocks carry each scene.

Participants

• PCs — add campaign characters with one click; their level is the character's tier, and health stays on their own sheet.
• From the bestiary — search official creatures (plus your own workshop creatures) and import them as a snapshot: health, damage and Armor prefill from the stat block, duplicates number themselves ("Goblin 2").
• Quick NPC — a name and a level is enough; health defaults to 3× level and damage to the level, the standard Cypher math. Override either when the fiction says so.
• Hazards and obstacles — non-creature threats (the rockslide, the locked vault door). Hazards can start concealed: invisible to players until you reveal them — or until they strike.

Each non-PC participant also carries a disposition (hostile → friendly), GM-only motivation and leverage notes, optional per-category task modifications (this captain is level 4, but level 6 against social approaches), and free-form notes. Players only ever see what the visibility rules allow — never motivations, exact health, or concealed anything.

Zones

Zones are ordered, abstract locations — "The ford", "The scree", "Under the bridge" — not a grid. Adjacent zones are a short move apart; the move action carries players between them. A GM-only zone hides itself and everyone in it from the party. Two or three zones are plenty for most scenes.

Clocks

Encounter clocks are 2–16 segment countdowns typed by purpose — progress, danger, time, resource or custom — each party-visible or GM-only (GM-only is the default). Tick them as the fiction moves; a full clock is your cue (and can carry a completion effect). These are scoped to the encounter — the campaign-level clocks in your notebook are separate and persist across sessions.

Discoveries

A discovery is something findable: a name, a description, optionally the zone it hides in. Hidden until you reveal it — and once revealed, one click turns it into a party handout, a GM note, or staged loot in the party's reward queue.

Setting up combat

Combat is the roster-first kind: turn order is on and stays on.

1. Build the opposition. Import creatures from the bestiary — level drives everything in Cypher, and the import fills health (3× level unless the stat block says otherwise), damage and Armor for you. Add a quick NPC for anything the bestiary lacks.
2. Add the party so the turn order and targeting know everyone. PC health stays on the players' sheets — you never track it.
3. Sketch the ground with zones if positioning matters: melee reaches inside a zone, moving is an action, a GM-only zone holds the ambush. Skip zones entirely for a plain brawl.
4. Optional pressure: a danger clock ("the fire spreads", "reinforcements arrive") gives the fight a countdown; keep it GM-only or show it to the table for dread.
5. Start. Players roll initiative (a Speed task) and the list sorts itself as the rolls land — successful PCs by roll, then NPCs, then the rest; reorder manually anytime — and the engine walks the turns. NPC attacks send defense prompts to the players; damage, conditions and multi-target actions run from the web runner (Discord's /sheetwright gm covers the single-target essentials).

Watch for natural rolls: a 1 files an intrusion suggestion for you to propose or dismiss, a 19/20 offers the player bonus damage or the special effect the table agreed on.

Setting up a social scene

Social scenes are people-first: no initiative, no health bars that matter — the prep lives in who wants what.

1. Add the NPCs who matter and set each one's disposition on the hostile → resistant → neutral → open → friendly scale. Disposition is the temperature the players read; move it as the scene turns.
2. Write motivation and leverage on each NPC — GM-only. What do they actually want? What would move them? These notes are your script, and the payoff of the players' digging.
3. Set social resistance where an NPC is harder (or softer) to sway than their level: a per-category task modification makes the castellan level 3 in general but level 6 against social approaches. Player tasks in a social scene automatically count as social tasks against it.
4. Give the scene a shape with a progress clock ("winning the council over") and, if it can go wrong, a danger clock ("the duke's patience"). There's no forced progress bar — clocks move when you say the fiction moved.
5. In play, when the players establish leverage — uncover a motivation, call in a debt — record it: established leverage becomes a party-visible asset easing the chosen character's next social tasks. That's the loop: dig, establish, spend.
6. The spotlight replaces turns. A conversation has no initiative or rounds — anyone speaks anytime. Your view keeps a quiet strip of who has weighed in lately and who hasn't, so nobody disappears at the back of the scene.
7. When things turn violent, convert the encounter in place instead of building a fight from scratch: same cast, same log, dispositions become sides, and initiative rolls start fresh. A combat converts back the same way when someone calls for parley.

Running the scene once it's built — disposition suggestions, approach notes, the concession ladder, hidden leverage, promises, scene dice and the play-by-post flow over Discord — has its own page: the social encounters guide for GMs .

Setting up exploration

Exploration is place-first: the prep is a map of zones with things hidden in them.

1. Lay out the zones — the route, in order: the ford, the scree, the pass. Descriptions carry the read-aloud flavor. Add GM-only zones for places the party hasn't found (the cave behind the falls) — invisible until you flip them to party.
2. Hide the dangers: add hazards with concealed switched on and place them in their zones. A concealed hazard that strikes reveals itself — unless it strikes from a GM-only zone, where the mystery holds.
3. Seed the discoveries: the shrine, the cache, the tracks — name, description, zone. Reveal them as the party searches; convert the good ones to handouts or loot on the spot.
4. Track time and supplies with time and resource clocks: a segment per stretch of travel, a segment per camp without rations. Party-visible clocks make the pressure a shared fact.
5. In play, travel is zone movement, obstacles are group checks (a shared group name, m-of-n successes), and the engine keeps everyone's view spoiler-free while you see the whole map.

Freeform

The fourth kind is the blank sheet: every block available, nothing assumed, turn order off unless you want it. Use it for scenes that blur the lines — a chase that's half exploration and half combat, a heist with a social front.

Templates: prep once, run often

Save as template keeps a reusable copy of any encounter — roster, zones, clocks, discoveries and framing included. Start encounter on a template stamps out a fresh, playable copy: health back to maximum, clocks back to zero, discoveries hidden again, live state clean. Templates never appear to players and can't be run directly. Build your recurring ambush or your tavern scene once; instantiate it every time the party walks in.

Starting and resolving

Start flips the encounter to active — for combat, initiative rolls come first and order the list as they land. When the scene is done, Resolve asks for an outcome (player-visible, it becomes the record) and lets you stage rewards — cyphers, artifacts, equipment, currency — straight into the party's loot queue for claiming or assigning. Open intrusion suggestions block resolution until you answer or explicitly override them, so nothing falls off the table.