The effects canvas

Most cards are a short, straight line: roll, hit, damage. The Effects list shows those perfectly well. But the moment a card has paths — do this on a hit, that on a miss, something else on a 1 — a list stops being able to show you the shape of it.

The canvas is the same effect drawn as a map. Open it with the ⌥ icon beside any effect’s name.

Reading the map

Each box is a step. Its colour comes from what kind of step it is — amber for flow, indigo where dice are thrown, green for things that happen to someone, grey for bookkeeping.

The lines between them are the paths:

Line	What it means
Solid, labelled	A route you drew. “On a failed save, go here.”
Solid, “then”	You told this step exactly where to go next.
Dashed grey	Nothing was drawn, so it simply runs the next step down.
Red	Something is wrong — it points at a step that’s gone, at an outcome this step no longer produces, or it repeats a path an earlier line already claims.

The dashed lines matter. They’re not decoration: they’re what actually happens when nothing else does, and a card with no routes at all is all dashed lines.

Drawing a path

Every step has a row of dots down its right-hand side — one per outcome it can produce, plus a blue one at the bottom for “then, always”. Drag from a dot to another step and you’ve drawn the route.

You can only route on outcomes the step really produces, which is why the dots are the only way to do it. A hand-typed condition would be a path that quietly never happens.

Drop the line on empty space instead and a menu opens right there, offering the steps that usually come next. Pick one and it gets created, placed and wired up in a single go. Press / to open the same menu without dragging.

What happens on a miss?

Hover any line and everything that isn’t on that path fades out. That’s the whole answer: hover the miss line, and what you can still see is what a miss does.

Run it and watch

Press Run to test the effect against practice targets — no scene, no character, nothing saved. When it finishes, the canvas lights up the route it actually took and each step shows what it produced.

Fixing what’s broken

The problems button lists everything wrong with the effect. Click one to jump to the step. Where there’s only one sensible fix — a route pointing at a step you deleted, a missing targeting step — there’s a button to apply it.

Two things the canvas shows that the list can’t:

Unreachable steps. A step nothing leads to will never run, however perfectly it’s written.
Card fields. Each step shows the card fields it reads, like @damage. If one turns amber, this card has no such field and the step is quietly falling back to its default — usually because the field was renamed.

Reusing a pattern

Select some steps, press Save snippet, give it a name. It’ll be waiting in the menu on every other card you build. Handy when you’re making ten variants of one thing — which is most of homebrewing.

Snippets are private to you unless you choose otherwise. Routes that led outside what you selected can’t come along, and you’ll be told how many were left behind.

Getting an older version back

History lists every saved version of a template’s effects. Select one and the canvas shows you that older version, with rings marking what’s different from what you have now, so you can see what restoring would do before you do it. Restore loads it into the editor — and since your current version is already saved, you can always go back again.

Undo

Cmd/Ctrl + Z undoes anything you do on the canvas, including a mis-dragged node. You can also copy steps and paste them onto a different card.