The workshop
A workshop is a campaign that never plays. It has every content editor a campaign has, measured against a stand-in party you declare, and nothing to narrate. Build a world there once, then import it into as many campaigns as you like. Workshops, campaigns, characters and individual assets all clone.
The shelf and the hub
Workshop on the home screen opens the shelf: your workshops with covers, plus prepared worlds from a registry, if your server has one set, that install as workshops. Opening one shows four starting tasks: Prepare a fight, Make a map, Create an NPC and Build a world. Each opens the Create chooser on that task; all the tool cards remain below. Use only what your game needs; the counts describe what you have, not a list to finish. A command palette (on a desktop) jumps to any tool or entry.
The tools
| Tool | What you make |
|---|---|
| WorldForge | The world as one document over the records the table plays: a Character is a cast member, a Location a place, a Faction a faction. A wiki, a web of links (family trees, chains of command, as truth or as belief), a timeline with converting calendars, an atlas with pins and regions, secrets with their keepers, and a stub scan. Forge, Ask the world, Draft and Paint appear when the server has the AI for them: Draft turns an idea into an outline with counts that you review before anything is made, and builds its creatures and items through the Bestiary and Homebrew so they play; Ask answers from the world's passages and cites the ones it rests on; Paint keeps its pictures waiting beside the entry's own until you keep one, and earlier pictures can be put back. WorldForge files import and export whole, and the AI Dungeon Master is told each NPC's hidden truth and the secrets the party has not learned. At the table the campaign's copy opens from the World tab for whoever holds story authority. |
| Storyboard | The arc as beats and acts. A fight card uses the fight it picked, arrows can be one route of several or "only if", and a later board joins an arc already played as its next act. Imported into an AI campaign, it becomes the plan the Dungeon Master follows. |
| Party | The stand-in target party and any pregens, with a level mismatch warning. |
| Battle maps | The map studio, Map Forge and Map Editor. See Maps for dungeon masters. |
| Region | The region map editor with imports and PNG export. |
| Encounters | Monsters and placements with live difficulty against the party, hidden enemies, overrides, rewards, a private note, and a "How hard is this?" workbench. |
| Cast | NPCs with role, portrait, voice, gender, location (offered from the region map and geography lore) and relationships. An NPC can fight as an SRD stat block or one of your own. |
| Factions | Standing, goals and power, and who belongs. |
| Bestiary | Monsters from a catalogue pick or from scratch: the full stat block, a sectioned trait editor, spells known searched from the catalogue, passive perception derived in the right order. |
| Homebrew | Items (weapons, armour, magic items with every part of their magic), spells with the engine's whole mechanics, feats, backgrounds, species, subclasses, and hazards (traps, poisons and diseases the engine runs by name). Start from copies a published entry, marked Variant, and the copy plays at the table exactly like the original. A checker under the editor reads each kind against the SRD's norms, with a link to the rule's page. |
| Lore | The binder. See The binder. |
| Tables | Roll tables with x3 weights, rows that point at another table, a monster, an item or an NPC (picked from what the workshop holds), nesting four deep, and draw without replacement. |
| Rules | Rulesets: house rules and the homebrew a ruleset ships. |
| Plugin | A world pack built from this workshop, with guided setup, catalogue pickers, browser-resized pictures and a Publish tab. |
| Share | The bundle export, listing what it will carry. |
Create and playable records
Create asks what you want to make and shows where it will live. An NPC opens Cast, a creature opens Bestiary, an item or spell opens Homebrew, a player character opens the builder or the workshop's pregen roster. Start blank, copy an existing record, bring in a picture, draft with AI, or extract from notes where the selected tool supports it. Drafting and extraction appear only when the required model is available.
WorldForge, Cast, Region, Factions and Lore show the same underlying records. Edits update across tools and tabs, and an editor asks before you leave unsaved work. A World entry and its record's tool link directly to one another; the workshop URL remembers the selected tool and entry.
A World entry called Monster or Item is descriptive until it is linked to a playable record. Use at the table lets you make or choose a stat block or item and open it in its own editor; a linked monster can enter an encounter as that exact creature. Cast shows a person's faction and home, while relationship links apply those fields only when the author chooses to apply them.
WorldForge files and revisions
Each entry has one main account; other versions of its text keep their own names. Lore whose WorldForge entry is draft, alternate or retired is withheld from the party; marking it canon and choosing its audience are separate decisions. DM-only lore and hidden truths retain their visibility through a WorldForge file. Before importing or exporting, review any report naming content the chosen format would leave out.
Reimporting the same world preserves campaign edits and reports conflicts when both versions changed a value. A campaign's deliberate choice to publish an imported DM-only entry stays published. Worlds with overlapping internal IDs remain separate. Place illustrations travel inside workshop bundles. A storyboard card remembers the WorldForge entry it came from, so opening the same file again updates its cards, and a world pack built from a workshop carries its factions; the Publish tab lists what a pack leaves out before anything is published.
At the table, Reveal to the party on a secret turns it into a lore entry every player can read, in that campaign only, and the DM seat can show it as a handout.
Homebrew at the table
A species can borrow published traits by name and select resistances by damage type, so the editor can say what the engine will apply. The feat checker explains which mechanics its wording grants. In Bestiary, specialist monster fields are grouped by purpose; open the group for the details you need.
Tours, guides and glossary
The shelf, the hub and every tool have a spotlight tour, completed once per account on that server and replayable from Help across browsers and apps. A tool's tour walks into its own editor where the work happens. Help inside the workshop is a written guide per tool: what it is for, a first session in order, and the things people miss, with the tool you have open first. A glossary sits beside conditions, schools of magic, weapon properties, damage types, skills and alignments.
Pick from a list
Wherever a tool used to ask for the name of something that already exists, it now offers the list beside the field and still accepts typing: monster search in the encounter workbench, a picker that writes table rows, lore links from a dropdown, tags you already use, an NPC's location from the region map, languages and conditions from their lists.
Addon imports
On a browser or desktop connected to a host with a configured importer addon, Import with an addon reads your chosen file and previews the workshop bundle it produces. Installation belongs to the host's administrator. See Addons.
Bundles
Share writes a .odm-workshop.json bundle with pictures inside; homebrew, pregens, Market shops, the WorldForge document and every link between the pieces travel too. A chapter workshop can draw on one shared workshop: its pickers list the shared cast, places, maps and fights, and the links stay live. Importing offers every kind as a tick. See Importing workshop prep.
The Plugin tool
One draft per workshop. A guided identity wizard, builder tabs for races, classes, backgrounds, spells, items, features, monsters, factions, locations, hooks, a glossary and name seeds, pickers from the SRD and the content pack so no id is typed, Pull from this workshop to lift the factions, places, lore, hook cards and cast names (WorldForge entries included) into the setting, pictures resized in the browser, and a Publish tab that runs the validator and downloads the manifest or installs it on this server (administrators only). The draft rides in the bundle and through Duplicate. See Make a campaign plugin for a walkthrough.
