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PostRoll Help

Tips and tricks

A grab-bag of patterns that come up after using PostRoll’s timeline for a few sessions. Read this once, return when you hit the specific need.

Campaign-day mode without a calendar

Section titled “Campaign-day mode without a calendar”

If your campaign tracks days from session 1 (“It’s Day 47, the party arrives at Vael”) and you don’t care about in-world dates, you have two options:

  1. Use session precision for everything. Author events with the When field set to Session N — they sort by session number, no calendar required. The Chronicle groups them by session automatically.
  2. Build a one-month “Campaign Days” calendar. Single month of length 99,999 with no weekdays / eras. Author events with the day set to the campaign-day number. Display format Day {year} reads as “Day 47”.

Either works. Path 1 is zero setup; Path 2 lets you query “events between Day 30 and Day 60”.

Fuzzy dates for ancient events

Section titled “Fuzzy dates for ancient events”

For events that happened “long ago” without a specific year, give them an unknown date and put the freeform text in the Display override field:

  • “before the Shattering”
  • “sometime in the Second Age”
  • “long before written record”

The event sorts to the Undated drawer on the Timeline canvas but displays naturally in the Inspector and the Chronicle.

For events you want to roughly anchor to an era but not a year, give them an era date with an era selected — the event displays as “during the Sundering Age”.

Deep-linking specific events

Section titled “Deep-linking specific events”

The workspace reads two URL params:

  • ?event=<id> — opens the event in the right-rail Inspector on page load.
  • ?tab=<key> — switches to a specific tab on page load. Valid keys: timeline, calendar, chronicle, agenda, cycles, mystery, relationships, settings.

So a link like /app/worlds/<id>/timeline?tab=chronicle&event=<event-id> takes you to the Chronicle with the event pre-selected. Useful for bookmark-style sharing or “see this event” links inside player- facing notes.

The IndexNode embeds use ?event=<id> automatically — clicking an event in a wiki embed deep-links into the workspace.

Foreshadow with Foreshadowed, not GM only

Section titled “Foreshadow with Foreshadowed, not GM only”

Reach for GM only only when players shouldn’t even know the event exists. For “there’s a hidden truth here, but the players have clues” situations, use:

  • World visibility (so the event is visible).
  • Foreshadowed reveal status (so its content stays hidden).

This way:

  • Players see a “Something happened here…” placeholder where the event should be.
  • The Chronicle player-safe mode shows the placeholder.
  • When the players actually find out, you click Reveal in session… and the placeholder fills in.

Use the Player summary for redaction, not deletion

Section titled “Use the Player summary for redaction, not deletion”

When an event has spoiler-laden text in its Summary or body, don’t shorten the summary — write a full-truth Summary and a deliberately-redacted Player summary. Players see the redaction; GMs see the truth. Switching the Chronicle to Player-safe shows you exactly what each side reads.

This pattern also works for morally-grey truths: write a neutral Player summary for hand-outs, keep the GM’s editorial commentary in the Summary and GM notes.

Importance budget

Section titled “Importance budget”

A canvas full of importance-5 events is unreadable. A canvas of importance-0 events is dim. A useful budget:

  • 5 — campaign-defining moments. Reserve for ~3-5 per arc.
  • 4 — major faction shifts, deaths, prophecies fulfilled. ~10-20 per arc.
  • 3 — significant but not arc-defining. Most “headline” events.
  • 2 — colour. Festivals attended, NPCs encountered, places visited.
  • 1 — atmosphere. Background facts.
  • 0 (default) — the long tail. Authoring without thinking about importance is fine — most events end up here.

The horizontal Timeline shows pill labels only for importance ≥ 4, so importance is also your “show this name on the canvas without me having to click it” knob.

Audit your prophecies

Section titled “Audit your prophecies”

Periodically:

  1. Filter the Timeline to layer = prophecy.
  2. For each prophecy, check whether it’s been resolved.
  3. Resolved prophecies → link them with a caused by link to the event that fulfilled them, OR mark them Revealed if you’d rather just retire the foreshadowing.
  4. Unresolved prophecies → either let them stay open as ongoing plot threads, or move them to a floating date and put them on the Agenda.

Prophecies in the system are valuable but bit-rot fast — keeping them either open-and-relevant or resolved-and-linked makes the world legible.

Section titled “Related”