Narrative Flow boards

A Narrative Flow board is a conversation you can actually run. Each node is a moment — someone speaking, something happening, a fork in the road — and the lines between them are what leads where.

The nodes

Node	What it’s for
Dialogue	Someone speaks, and the party can answer. Each choice becomes its own connection point on the node.
Beat	Narration with no choice — something happens, then you move on.
Branch	The story forks on what the campaign remembers, with no-one choosing.
Check	A dice roll decides. Success and failure lead different ways.
Oracle	A yes/no question answered by dice — the heart of playing without a GM.
Story change	Records something: the Duke is dead, the party has the key.
Portal	Jumps somewhere else, on this board or another one.
Outcome	An ending. Optionally written into your world’s timeline.
Random	Chance picks, by weight. Which door, which wandering monster.
Clock	A countdown that fills as the story passes through, then fires.
Stage the scene	Sets the map, the music and a handout at your table, in one press.

Writing a line

Add a Dialogue node, then select it and double-click the body to type what they say. Give it a speaker by picking an entity — then renaming that NPC renames every line they speak.

Each choice you add grows a new tab on the node’s right edge, coloured by what it does. Drag from a tab to whatever that answer leads to. A tab that leads nowhere yet is still shown, so a half-finished conversation looks half-finished rather than complete.

Drag people and places onto a node from the Library rail and they appear as cards inside it — a Beat is these three, in this room, not one name. The node wears one of their pictures; use the star on a card to choose which, or drop an image from the Assets tab to set a picture of your own.

Making choices depend on the story

Under Story in the right rail you declare the things your campaign remembers — flags, counters, names. Any node can change them, and any choice can be gated: only if the party has the key.

A gated choice a player can’t take yet is shown greyed with the reason, rather than hidden. You are looking at the whole conversation; they are not.

Changes are written as plain lines — suspicion += 1, toggle alarm_raised — and a condition can ask about a variable, a dice roll, or a live field on an NPC. Story logic covers all of it, including clocks and the {{ }} placeholders.

For the parts of a story that aren’t a line you follow — something that happens once per party member, a route that repeats until the alarm drops, a scene you want to use in six places — see Repeating, gating and calling.

Where it starts

A run begins at whichever node has nothing leading into it — fine for one thread, arbitrary once you have three. Select the node you mean and switch on Start here; it wears a green Start flag, and only one node can.

Running it

Read it through in the toolbar opens the Runner. Without a table attached this is a read-through — walk the conversation, see which branches are gated, and nothing is cued anywhere. Attach a room and cues fire for real.

Problems in the Runner tells you what’s wrong before your players find it: nodes nothing leads to, endings that lead nowhere, a gate on something nothing ever sets, a check with no failure branch.

Playing without a GM

Tick Playing alone and the board stops keeping secrets from you: no GM notes, no secret rolls, and every beat can be written to a journal page you keep. Oracle nodes are the piece that makes this work — a question the dice answer, so the story can surprise you.