Prep is where a GM gets ready: one sheet per session, written over a few evenings, with the tools in
the margin putting what they make straight into it. 181 features across four surfaces, 148 of them built
today — most in PREP-2’s tools, which is where the product has grown fastest and been
designed least.
Prep is a document, not a form. Design A settled the shape; this lane settles what the
sheet keeps, how it saves, what “pin” means (D39), and where the generator that writes a whole plan
belongs (D38).
Same campaign. Session 14 is on Monday, five days out. Dana has been prepping it on and off since
Tuesday. Pike, the party’s marsh hound, has been travelling with them since Session 11.
Look
Found, settled, and open
Nothing open
D41 was adopted on review: the planning page is PREP-4 now, in the Contents, and
the arcs live there.
What the coverage check found
After review, every row the catalogue places on these surfaces — 211 placements — was
checked against the page. 68 had been dropped without a word. They are drawn now, in the sections above:
Four tools were only a chip. Read-aloud, random tables, loot parcels and voice cues had no inputs and
no results drawn, and neither did the arc suggester’s suggestions.
Three places a result can go were missing: Save to the wiki, Append to an article, and Copy. The plan
even said “not in the wiki” beside an NPC, with no way to put him there.
Foundry’s split button and its states: sending, sent, not sent, and an update to push.
Failure and waiting. The plan failing, a tool failing, a tool busy, no NPC ready, names not ready, the
page loading, and history empty or broken.
Arcs could not be edited or deleted anywhere, and the suggest-a-title still showed suggestions for the
first session of a series, which has nothing to suggest from.
Quest management was about to fall between two lanes. Seven quest-tracker rows were placed only on
PREP-2, so moving quests to the quest log would have dropped them. They are placed on
WIKI-13 now, for lane 6. The arc rows moved to PREP-4 the same way.
Reviewed by the owner on 21 September: no changes. D41, the planning page, is kept as drawn.
A strict second pass the same evening (coverage/lane5.py, committed): 223 placements now, and 16 of
them had been counted without a still — a sheet before it is written; Planning for a campaign just started; the three
Improv tools asking for their one required field; the article picker inside a tool; an arc change that failed; the
names being warmed; a title used, and one that did not save; a one-off session; renaming a scene, and a card with no
scene; the NPCs drawer with no Foundry to send to; and leaving with text unsaved. All drawn now: 156 drawn, 40
replaced by a decision, 9 behaviour, 16 on other surfaces, 2 deferred.
Settled before drawing
D38 — The plan is the sheet’s own section under Beats, not one more generated block.
D39 — the sheet keeps everything, and “pin” means carry forward. It is the shelf’s
pin (ShelfPin, #254), extended to the sheet: an interval over the campaign’s sessions, so a
past sheet keeps what it carried. History’s retention-only pin goes.
D40 — autosave, keeping the conflict protection the beat notes already have.
D42 — one column on a phone, tools behind a button.
D43 — scenes are built in the Shelf section; arranging cards stays in Table mode.
D44 — “At the table” is now “Improv”.
D41 — the planning page, settled on review.
And the calls you let stand: Beat Planner folds into Beats (#534), the arc and quest drawers show what is
open, Add to shelf goes to this sheet’s session, Names joins the other tools (#693), and deleting history
can be undone.
What rendering it caught
Nine things, none of them visible in the source.
Two records disagreed. For later on the planning page kept eight Kettlebridge names that History said
would clear in 28 days. Both cannot be true, and it is the kind of contradiction a reviewer would take as the
design.
History said the Instant NPC tool had made Pike’s stat block. It makes people, not stat
blocks.
A replaced plan offered Insert, which would have put two plans on one sheet. It offers Use this draft
now.
A rule was set as a stat line — a sentence about fog in monospace, as if it were numbers.
The Names tool had no icon, because names is the icon set’s list of its names, not an
icon.
A lone still stretched across a paired row, the fault lane 4 first caught, with its heading floating
a thousand pixels from its content. It has a partner now: the moment of pinning.
The Shelf section’s two actions split, one beside the heading and one alone on the next line.
On a phone, “Suggest a title” squeezed into two lines beside the heading. It wraps below it
now.
Every section drawn on its own carried an empty rule above it, and stacked rows of stills had no space
between them.
What this lane leaves for later
Building any of it. The sheet needs a place to keep what is put into it (today only the
beat notes are stored), “What I want” needs a column, and a sheet item needs to share the shelf’s
pin. Asking the rules (IS-189) is still speculative, so the Rules & bestiary drawer draws
search only.