How to keep
a Reverie.
A complete guide to running a text-first, theatre-of-mind table — the philosophy beneath it, every instrument on the board, and the craft of preparing a world worth stepping into.
This handbook is for the Game Master — the one who lights the room and speaks the world into being. It assumes no prior knowledge of Reverie and nothing about which game you play. By the end you will understand not only what every control does, but why Reverie is shaped the way it is, and how to use it to make a scene feel present. Read it cover to cover before your first session, or keep it beside you and reach for the chapter you need.
What Reverie Is
Reverie is a virtual tabletop, but not the kind you may be picturing. There are no character tokens shuffling across a battle-grid, no hit-point bars draining in real time, no rules engine checking whether your attack lands. Reverie is a theatre of the mind rendered in light and text — a shared dim room where the Game Master reveals a world one beat at a time, and the players imagine the rest.
It is text-first: the heart of play is the written word, the way it always has been at the best tables. It is system-agnostic: it runs any roleplaying game, or none, because it enforces no rules of its own. And it is files-first: your adventures, your characters, and your sessions are plain, portable files you own — nothing is locked away inside the software.
What Reverie gives you is not automation but atmosphere. It simulates the feeling of a place — its light, its mood, its pace — and the presence of the people and things within it. It hands the Game Master a set of instruments for revelation: a way to change the very colour of the room, to bring a face into the firelight, to whisper a secret to one player alone, to mark a moment with weight. Everything else — what the dice mean, what happens next, who lives and who dies — stays where it belongs, with the people at the table.
If you have ever run a game over voice chat with everyone's cameras off, picturing the scene in your head — that is what Reverie is built for, made beautiful. It is the campfire, not the calculator.
Software Adjudicates Nothing
This is the single principle from which every design choice in Reverie descends, so it is worth stating plainly and dwelling on. The software decides nothing about the fiction. It does not resolve combat. It does not track hit points or subtract damage. It does not tell you whether a roll succeeded. It does not enforce a rule, gate an action, or compute a consequence.
When Reverie rolls dice, it rolls them honestly and shows you the numbers — and stops there. A four and a sixteen are just numbers; what they mean is yours to say. When a character sheet holds a stat, that stat is ink on paper: the software never reads it, never checks it, never acts on it. When you mark a stress track or darken a pip, nothing happens mechanically — it is a mark you made on a page, no more.
This is a feature, not a limitation. It is why Reverie can run Dungeons & Dragons and Troika! and Blades in the Dark and a freeform story-game with no rules at all, all on the same evening, with no configuration. Because it adjudicates nothing, it constrains nothing. The rules live where they have always lived best: in the minds and the agreement of the people playing. Reverie just makes the imagined room feel real.
You never have to "set up" your system in Reverie. There is nothing to configure, because there is nothing to enforce. Bring whatever rulebook you like — or none — and Reverie will hold the world while you run it.
A Stage, Not an Engine
It helps to think of Reverie as a stage. A stage has lighting, it has scenery, it has a way for actors to enter and exit and for one voice to carry to the back row or murmur to a single ear. A stage does not have rules about what the play means — that is the work of the playwright and the players. Reverie gives you the lighting board, the scenery flats, the wings, and the spotlight. The play is yours.
Everything that happens in a Reverie session is, underneath, a single growing record of moments — each one a small thing the Game Master or a player chose to reveal. A line of narration. A face entering the scene. The light changing. A whispered secret. These moments stream to everyone at the table in the instant they happen, and together they become the session. Nothing is hidden in a database the players can't trust; secrecy is real, enforced beneath the surface, never merely hidden in the interface.
Hold this image — the stage, the lantern, the unfolding record of revealed moments — and the rest of this handbook is simply a tour of the instruments arranged around it.
Opening a Table
To begin, you open a table as the Game Master. You give yourself a name and, if you like, a portrait and a title for the table — then you raise the curtain. Reverie hands you a join code, a short string shown in the header. Share it with your players, and they take their seats by entering it; each gives their own name and face. That is the whole of setup. There are no accounts to create, no system to install, no campaign to configure.
Once the table is open, the screen settles into its three regions. In the centre is the stage: the vision canvas above, where images and maps bloom, and the running log below, where the story is told. Along the left is the panel of things present in the room. Along the right is the cast — the player characters and the faces they have met. And at the foot of the centre sits the composer, your instrument for speaking into the world.
Most people will reach Reverie at a web address someone has set up. If you want to run your own — entirely yours, self-hosted, owing nothing to anyone — see Chapter Twenty-One. It is more approachable than you might fear.
The Composer
The composer is the wide panel at the bottom of the stage, and it is where most of your live play happens. Across its top sits a row of channels — the different kinds of thing you can send. Narrate, Vision, Sound, Table, Prompt, Callout. Choosing a channel changes what the composer expects from you and where your words will land.
Beneath the channels is a row of targets. By default you speak to Everyone. But you may instead aim a line at a single player, or at yourself alone — and when you do, the composer takes on a veil, a visible reminder that what you are about to send is private. This is how a secret stays a secret. (More on this in the next chapter.)
Then the voice selector, which lets you speak as someone other than yourself — an NPC whose face and name will appear in place of your own. And finally the line itself, where you type, and the send.
Speaking in shorthand
You needn't always reach for the channel chips. The composer understands a handful of slash-commands typed directly into the line:
Voices & Whispers
A Game Master is many people at once — the narrator, the innkeeper, the dying king, the thing in the dark. Reverie gives you two instruments for this multiplicity.
The voice selector
Set your voice to an NPC you have created, and every line you send arrives wearing that character's name and face. The players never see that it was you; they see the innkeeper speak. Set it back to Myself and you are the narrator again. When you speak as yourself, plainly, the players can tell — your lines carry a faint mark, so the world's voice and the Game Master's own voice are never confused.
The whisper
This is the instrument no ordinary chat can offer. Aim a line at a single player using the targets, and it goes to that player's screen and no other. Not dimmed for the others, not hidden behind a click — simply never sent to them. The keen-eyed rogue notices the bruise on the survivor's wrist; no one else does. A god whispers to its chosen; the rest of the table hears silence. Split knowledge is the engine of intrigue, and the whisper is how you wield it.
Spheres
A Sphere is the mood of the room made manifest — and firing one is, to my mind, the most quietly magical thing Reverie does. A Sphere re-lights the entire table at once: the background colour, the typeface, the texture over the stage, the depth of the shadows at the edges, the warm accent of the lantern. When you move the scene from a firelit tavern to a drowned crypt, you do not describe the change and hope. You fire the Sphere, and every player's screen turns cold and blue-green in the same instant.
Reverie ships with a set of Spheres, and you can shape your own in the Spheres panel — the moon button at the lower-left. You choose the palette (the deep background, the text, the lantern accent, the secret-violet), the display font from a broad shelf of faces, a texture (parchment, fog, ink, grain, stars, vellum), the vignette's weight, and how the change arrives — a gentle fade, a soft dissolve, or an abrupt cut for a shock.
Match the Sphere to the feeling, not the place. A "wrong" colour — a sickly green where warmth should be, a corpse-pale light — tells the players something is amiss before you say a word. Lower the vignette and the room opens and breathes; raise it and the walls close in. The Sphere is mood you can fire.
Spheres can be saved and shared as files, and an AI assistant can build one for you from a described mood (Chapter Eighteen). They also tint everything else — including the character sheets a player conjures — so the whole table belongs to the world you have lit.
Visions & Maps
Above the log is the vision canvas — the place where the table looks when there is something to see. Send an image to it and it blooms onto the stage, sphere-styled and softly framed: a portrait, a vista, a strange door. A caption may sit beneath. When the moment passes, you take it back into the dark.
A map fires to that same canvas, and Reverie understands two kinds. Draw a map as an ASCII grid — walls and doors and corridors in monospace, with whatever legend you please — and it renders as a glowing, aligned grid. Or write a map as evocative prose — a place described in Markdown, with its features in a list — and it renders as a beautifully typeset gazetteer entry. Use a grid when the layout matters; use prose when the feeling does. Either way the map stays plain text: it round-trips through your files cleanly and needs no image to be uploaded anywhere.
Sound
Reverie can carry a sound bed to the table — a low wind, a distant drone, a heartbeat under the floor. Send a sound to play once, or to loop beneath the scene, or to fall silent. Sound asks for a direct audio link and a single first click to wake the browser's audio (a rule of all web pages, not of Reverie). Used sparingly, an ambient loop does more for dread than a paragraph of description.
Dice & Prompts
There are two ways to bring dice to the table, and the difference between them is worth understanding.
A roll is dice cast in the open. Anyone may roll — "/roll 2d6+1" — and Reverie rolls honestly and shows the result to the table. It is a fact, a set of numbers, nothing more.
A prompt is the Game Master asking a player to roll. You name the dice and write the request in your own words — "Roll 2d6, and tell me whether your hand finds the lamp before the dark does." The player receives a single tappable card that rolls exactly those dice. Reverie does the rolling honestly; it does not judge the result. What a four means, what an eleven means — that is the conversation that follows, and it belongs to you and the player, never to the software.
Callouts
Sometimes a moment deserves weight — a framed card that stops the eye and says attend to this. A callout is that: a special beat, set apart from ordinary narration, that punctuates the story. It carries a title and an optional line beneath, and a tone that gives it its character and its glow:
Use them sparingly, as you would a chapter heading or a tolling bell. A chapter callout to open a new act. A warning when the ground gives way. A triumph to mark a hard-won victory, a grief to honour a death. Fire one live from the Callout channel, or place a @callout in your prep to have it ready (Chapter Sixteen).
The Paper Sheets
A character in Reverie is a sheet of paper. Not a database record with fixed fields, but a page you build from blocks and fill as you like — as spare as an index card or as elaborate as a four-page playbook. The guiding feeling is paper: a thing you conjure, write on, and fold away. And, true to the first principle, the software reads none of it. A number on the sheet is a number you wrote; a darkened pip is a mark you made.
Building a sheet
You stack blocks to make a sheet. A field is a label and a value — short text, a longer description box, a number with steppers, or a yes/no toggle. A header titles a section. A rule draws a dividing line. A note holds prose. And pips are a row of clickable dots — for a clock, a stress track, harm, ammunition, conditions — which fill and empty at a touch and mean exactly nothing mechanically, because they are marks on paper. Add blocks from the palette, edit them where they sit, drag them to reorder.
What is private, what is shown
Every block carries two independent choices. Its visibility — private (only you and the owner see it) or shown to the table. And whether it appears on the card — the compact summary in the cast rail. So a player's core stats can show on their card at a glance, their secret can stay private, and their long backstory can be visible but tucked away in the full sheet. New blocks begin private; you choose what to reveal.
Conjuring the full sheet
The compact card lives in the rail. To see and edit the whole page, conjure it — a full-screen sheet of paper that takes the centre of the table, sphere-styled to the world it lives in, opening with an unfold and folding away on a touch. Double-click a card, or use its sheet icon, or the expand control. The same blocks, given room to breathe.
Templates & portability
A sheet is a file you own. Export a character as plain data; import one to fill a seat. And because a template is simply an unfilled sheet, Reverie ships a small library of starters — an Index Card, Troika!, Blades in the Dark, Mörk Borg, a light 5e — which you import and fill. You can save any sheet you've built as a template of its own. (And an AI can turn a photograph of any game's sheet into a Reverie template — Chapter Eighteen.)
The Cast Rail & NPCs
Down the right side runs the cast — the player characters gathered ("the others") and the figures the party has met. Each is a small presence card: a face, a name, an epithet, and whatever highlights its owner chose to show. The cards enlarge on hover so the small portraits are legible, and open to reveal more.
As Game Master you also keep a roster of NPCs — your cast of faces. You create one, give it a face and a sheet, and keep it hidden until the moment is right. Then you reveal it: just its name and face, perhaps, leaving the rest a mystery — partial revelation is the soul of intrigue — or the whole sheet at once. You can bring a face into the scene, walking it into everyone's panel as a presence in the room, and walk it out again when it departs. Revealing is permanent; you cannot un-send a thing once seen, so reveal with intent.
The Out-of-Character Pane
Not everything said at a table is part of the story. "Back in five." "Wait, did we lock the door?" "That was a great scene." This is the human layer, and it deserves a home that is not the story log — because the log is the fiction, and the fiction should stay unbroken. The out-of-character pane is a small circle, stacked by the Sphere button, that opens into its own quiet conversation. When someone speaks there while it's closed, the circle glows softly to let you know. The main log stays pure story; the table-talk has its corner.
Preparing an Adventure
You can run Reverie entirely live, narrating from the composer as you go — many do, and it is a fine way to play. But Reverie's deeper instrument is prep: an adventure written ahead of time as a sequence of beats you fire one by one as the scene unfolds. Prep is not a script that runs itself; it is a spine. It holds your best phrasings, your prepared reveals, your mood-shifts, ready at a tap — and it leaves all the spaces between beats for the living, improvised play that is the real thing.
What a prep file is
A prep file is ordinary Markdown. Plain prose and headings are your private reading — your script, your stage directions, your coaching notes — and the players never see a word of it. Interspersed are tagged blocks, each beginning with an @ at the start of a line. Only these blocks can be fired; only what you fire reaches the players. So you can write yourself as much guidance as you like around the beats, knowing it stays yours.
This prose is yours alone — the players never see it. Open gently. Fire the Sphere first, then speak. @story You crest the last hill as the light fails. Below, the waystation stands dark — and its great lamp, which the keeper has never let die, is cold. Let them approach. Then, when they step inside: @image: vision https://example.com/cold-hearth.jpg Caption: The common room, lamp cold
Because the format is plain text, a prep file is yours forever: it opens in any editor, lives happily in version control, and is never trapped inside Reverie. This is the files-first principle made practical.
Every Block, in Full
Here is the complete set of tagged blocks you can place in a prep file and fire as beats. Each begins a line with @type, optionally @type: argument, followed by its content until the next tag or heading.
A vital habit underlies all of these: a prep file round-trips. Whatever you write, edit, and save reads back exactly as you left it. Your files are safe to hand-edit, to export and re-import, to keep across years. Nothing is mangled in the keeping.
The Three Ways to Edit
You may write a prep file however you please — in any text editor, on your own machine — and load it into Reverie when it's ready. But you can also build and edit entirely inside Reverie, three ways, each suited to a different moment:
- The whole text. Edit the entire prep as Markdown in one box. Best for big rewrites, or pasting in a draft.
- The block editor. Each beat shown as a card you can shape, reorder, add to, and remove — no syntax to remember. Best for structuring an adventure. You can begin a wholly new prep this way, from a single blank beat.
- Inline, beat by beat. Hover any beat in the teleprompter and edit just that one in place, without leaving the running view. Best for a quick fix mid-session — mend a typo, reword a line, and keep playing.
And at any time, export the prep back out as a Markdown file you own. Write from scratch in the block editor, paste a draft into the whole-text box, or hand-edit the file elsewhere — every path leads to the same place, because they are all the same underlying file.
Conjuring with AI
Because everything Reverie reads is a plain, well-described format, a capable AI assistant can make these things for you. Reverie itself contains no artificial intelligence and sends nothing anywhere; instead, it offers three skills — short guides you copy to an assistant of your choosing, which then hands back a file you import. You'll find them gathered under "Skills for AI" on the landing page, each ready to copy or download.
- Write an adventure. Describe a one-shot or a campaign — "a three-act mystery in a city of glass, with two NPCs and a tense finale" — and receive a complete prep file to load and run.
- Light a Sphere. Describe a mood or place — "a cold, drowned chapel, eerie and oppressive" — and receive a Sphere to import and fire.
- Convert a character sheet. Hand an assistant a photograph or PDF of any game's character sheet, with this guide, and receive a Reverie template — fields, sections, and tracks, as blank structure, ready to import and fill.
This is the files-first principle at its most useful: the intelligence lives outside the tool, the tool stays light, and you keep the files. An assistant is a collaborator, not a dependency.
Running a Session
With a prep loaded, the drawer becomes a teleprompter — your beats in order, each with a fire button. You read the private prose, you fire the beat when the moment comes, and the players receive it. But the prep is a spine, not a cage: the best play happens in the spaces between the fired beats, where you narrate live, answer what the players do, and let the scene breathe.
A few habits make for good keeping:
- Light first, then speak. Fire the Sphere that sets a scene before you narrate into it. Let the room change, then fill it.
- Leave room. Fire a beat, then stop. Let the players talk, approach, wonder. Theatre of the mind lives in the pauses.
- Whisper often. Split knowledge between players. A secret given to one is worth more than a fact given to all.
- Mark the great moments. A callout for the turn of an act, a death, a triumph. Used rarely, they land hard.
- Improvise freely. You need not have prepped a beat to send one — type narration straight into the composer whenever the moment calls for it.
Saving & Resuming
A session is itself a file. At any time you may save the whole record — every beat, in order — to keep, and a readable transcript besides. Later, you resume from that saved file and the table is restored: the story so far, the cast, where you left off. A campaign across many evenings is simply a sequence of saved sessions, each one yours to keep, to read back, to hand to a player who missed a night. Nothing of your table is ever hoarded by the software; the record is always yours to carry away.
Where Reverie Lives
You may simply use a Reverie that someone else hosts. But the files-first, human-owned spirit of the thing extends to the foundations: you can run your own Reverie, beholden to no one. It is a small, self-contained program — a lightweight server and a handful of plain web files — and it can live on a modest machine for a few coins a month, or on a computer in your own home.
You need not understand the machinery to keep a good table, and so this handbook leaves the particulars to the deployment notes that travel with the software. But know the shape of it: there is no vast cloud dependency, no account you must hold with a company, no data gathered about your play. Reverie is yours to keep, in the fullest sense — the adventures, the sessions, and the lantern itself.
Plain files you own, a tool that adjudicates nothing, a stage that becomes any world — and a story that belongs entirely to the people telling it.
A Last Word
Everything in this handbook serves one end: to make an imagined scene feel present. The Sphere that turns the room cold, the whisper only one player hears, the face that enters the firelight, the callout that tolls like a bell — none of them resolve a rule or settle an outcome. They make the table feel like a place. That is the whole of Reverie's ambition, and it is enough.
So light your first Sphere. Bring a face into the scene. Whisper a secret. The lantern is lit and the room is waiting — and the story, every word of it, is yours and your players' to tell.