🛠️ Campaign Guide

How to build a campaign in the RpgMeister app — campaigns, NPCs, encounter templates, zones, and parties — without leaving your couch (or your laptop, or your phone).

What this guide is

This is the manual for the GM side of the app: the screens, the buttons, the workflow. It assumes you already know roughly what a tabletop campaign is and what a GM does — if not, the Game Master Overview is the kinder starting point.

For the actual rules of the game — rolls, combat, damage, prices — head to Rules overview. This guide doesn't repeat them; it just shows where in the app each piece lives.

What you can do today

The campaign builder lets you assemble everything you need for a session ahead of time, then run it at the table from the same app:

  • Campaigns — a named container for one game world.
  • NPCs — a catalog of characters and creatures, reusable across encounters.
  • Encounter templates — bundles of NPCs you can drop into a location.
  • Zones & locations — the map graph the party moves through, with notes and encounter references.
  • Parties — the player characters that will join your table, imported from your players' clipboards.
  • Play at the table — pick a party and zone, navigate locations, and run encounters with the built-in GM screen.

Everything is JSON underneath, everything copies to the clipboard, and everything stays on your device until you choose to share it.

Honest gear guide

Build on a PC or laptop; run from a tablet when you can. Phone works in a pinch — mapping a big dungeon on a six-inch screen usually doesn't.

Export zone or NPC JSON to the device you'll run from; index cards still own plot twists. Minimum viable prep: NPC catalog + a few encounter templates. Workflow: How it works — PC to tablet.

Read in order

  1. How it works — the app, your data, and the clipboard hand-off with players.
  2. Quick start — the shortest path from "empty app" to "a campaign with one NPC, one zone, and one party".
  3. Campaigns — the campaign list and the five-panel editor.
  4. NPCs — building characters and creatures, with capabilities, attacks, and loot.
  5. Encounter templates — packaging NPCs into reusable encounters.
  6. Zones & locations — the location graph, links between rooms, notes, and encounter references.
  7. Parties — importing player characters and resolving collisions.
  8. At the table — running the campaign with Play mode during a session.
  9. Troubleshooting — common issues and current limitations.

Each page is short and focused so it reads well on a phone in the middle of building something.

Pro tip

On a widescreen, keep this guide open in one tab and open the Campaigns list in a new tab so you can read and click without losing your place.

Start building

Open the Campaigns list →

New to the app entirely? Skim How it works first — it's short and it'll save you from a "wait, where did my campaign go?" moment later.