Campaigns and sessions

Two containers hold the work you do at the table. A campaign is the long-running game (months, sometimes years). A session is one evening of play inside that campaign. The two are easy to mix up because both have a player list, both have a name, and both can have content attached. The distinction matters because they hold different kinds of state.

What lives on the campaign

Anything that should outlive a single evening of play belongs on the campaign:

• Player roster and invites. Adding a player to the campaign means they show up at every future session by default.
• Characters. A character belongs to a campaign and can attend any session inside it. The same player can have multiple characters in one campaign.
• World content. NPCs, locations, factions, plot threads, calendar, lore. The encyclopaedia of your game world.
• Custom rules. A campaign can pin to a specific framework version and even override individual rules for the whole table without touching the master framework.
• Permissions. Who can edit shared content, who can roll secret dice as the GM, who joins as observer-only.

What lives on the session

A session is everything that is true on one specific evening. It pulls in the campaign's content but tracks per-evening state on top:

• Attendance. Who actually showed up tonight, and which characters they brought.
• The active scene. The current map, the current encounter, what is on the table right now.
• Initiative and turn order, when combat is running.
• Live chat and the dice-roll log are campaign-scoped, not session-scoped: the same continuous log carries forward from session to session under the campaign. A player who joined late can scroll back through the campaign log to see what was rolled and said before they arrived.
• Voice and video, when those are in use. Voice channels open with the session and close when it ends.

Campaign lifecycle

A campaign goes through a small number of phases:

• Setup. GM creates the campaign, picks a game system, invites players, and prepares enough content for the first session.
• Active. The campaign is being played. Sessions come and go inside it. Most campaigns spend most of their life here.
• Paused. Real life happens. A campaign can sit dormant for weeks or months and pick up exactly where it left off; the system does not garbage-collect inactive campaigns.
• Archived. The story is finished or abandoned. The GM archives the campaign, which removes it from the active list and the campaign-limit count without deleting any content. An archived campaign can be restored later.

Session lifecycle

Sessions are simpler. A session is created (usually by the GM, ahead of time), runs for an evening, and ends. After it ends the session record keeps its name, scheduled times, and any GM notes; chat and dice history sit on the campaign and carry forward across sessions.

Most groups create the next session as soon as the current one ends, with a placeholder date. That keeps the table set up and ready to go.

Where to go from here

• If you have never run a campaign, the Create a campaign how-to walks through the first ten minutes from blank account to a campaign you can invite players into.
• If you are about to invite players to an existing campaign, the Invite players to a campaign how-to covers both the email-invite and share-link paths.
• If you are about to start your first session, the Start a game session how-to gets you from prep into the live table.