Getting started with Threadmancer

Finding the demo

Sign in and navigate to any tool page — for example, the GM Assistant or the Extraction panel. At the top you will see the campaign bar. Click the Templates button (beside + New) to open the template browser.

The DEMO — The Iron Covenant template is listed there for every user. It comes pre-loaded with:

• The four player characters (Maren, Bram, Sable, Orren) with backstories and stats
• Four sessions of play — from the fire at Thorngate Archive through the first Ashfen expedition
• Dozens of NPCs, locations, factions, items, events, and clues pulled from the GM notes
• Key secrets the GM is tracking, each with a per-character knowledge state

Templates are read-only — you can't edit them directly. Duplicate one to get your own working copy (see below).

Making your own copy

In the template browser, click Use as template on the Iron Covenant card, give your copy a name, and confirm. Threadmancer makes a full private copy — all entities and relationships — owned by you. The template stays untouched.

Your copy picks up where the demo leaves off: four sessions in, with the party standing at a crossroads between the Covenant Wardens and the Ashen Brotherhood.

Campaigns can be in any language. The campaign language is simply the language your session notes and GM text are written in — Threadmancer processes whatever you paste, regardless of what language the interface is displayed in. You can write Italian session notes while browsing an English UI, or run a French campaign while keeping the app in English. The UI language and the campaign language are independent of each other.

What's in the campaign

Overview

The campaign Overview tab gives you a one-paragraph summary of the current state, regenerated automatically each time you add new content. It tells you where the party is, what they know, and what threads are live. Useful before a session when you need a quick re-read.

Characters and entities

Use the sidebar tabs to browse everything Threadmancer knows about your campaign:

• Characters — PCs, NPCs, monsters. Each card shows role, origin, description, current involvement, and connections to other entities. Try opening Grandwarden Sera Voss — her card shows her faction leadership, the events she appeared in, and the secrets she holds.
• Locations — from the city of Thorngate down to individual districts and the Barrowfen farmland. Parent/child relationships are tracked.
• Factions — The Covenant Wardens, the Ashen Brotherhood, the Unbound. Goals, descriptions, key figures.
• Clues — evidence the party has encountered, each linked to the entity it points toward.
• Secrets — GM-layer information. The key secrets in the The Iron Covenant demo are all hidden at this stage: the founding sacrifice, the Pale Architect's identity, Sable's patron.

Graph view and story scope

Click Graph in the sidebar for a visual map of the campaign — nodes for every entity, edges for every relationship. You can filter by entity type or focus on a single node to see its immediate connections.

The graph has a scope picker at the top. Selecting a level — Campaign, Arc, Adventure, or Session — narrows the view to entities present or introduced by that point in the story. The scope also controls which secrets and clues are visible in entity cards.

Asking the chatbot

Click the Chat icon (speech bubble) to open the campaign chatbot. It has access to everything in your graph and answers questions grounded in your actual campaign notes — not general RPG knowledge.

Things worth trying on the The Iron Covenant demo:

• "Summarise what the party knows about the Ashen Brotherhood."
• "What is the current relationship between Bram and Captain Erris?"
• "Orren wants to show the party his full monograph. What are the risks?"
• "What hooks are live going into session 5?"

The chatbot tracks what the party knows versus what you know as GM. Ask "What does Sable know about her patron?" and it will answer from Sable's perspective — not from the GM note that names Ixomandrel.

If you state something that contradicts the records — wrong session, wrong character, wrong outcome — the chatbot flags it rather than playing along.

Each assistant reply has an Extract to Campaign button. If the chatbot produces a useful summary you want to save, click it — Threadmancer will propose what to create or update, and you confirm before anything is written.

Your player roster

The Players page (nav link at the top) is a lightweight address book for the real people at your table. Add each player's name, a short description, and any preferred game elements — tags like roleplay, combat, or puzzles. Players are saved at the account level and are available across all your campaigns.

Linking players to characters

On the Overview tab of any campaign, each PC card has a + player button. Click it to link that character to one of your roster players, or to create a new entry on the spot. The link is per-character, so you can track who plays whom across every campaign you run. If a player is already linked, a pencil icon appears instead — click it to change or remove the link.

Suggestions from session notes

After each extraction, Threadmancer scans your text for player-name references and creates suggestions — draft entries that appear in a Suggested players section at the bottom of the Players page. Review each suggestion, edit the name and preferences if needed, then click Confirm & Add to add the player to your roster. Click Dismiss to discard it.

Effect on the chatbot

When players are linked to their PCs, the chatbot picks up their preferences as light context. It won't only suggest things a particular player likes — it will still address the full story — but it may note when a suggestion could be especially appealing to someone at the table.

Maps — placing your campaign on a map

The Maps tab gives you a spatial view of your world. You upload a map image, drop pins on it, and link each pin to a campaign entity so the spatial layout stays connected to your graph.

Creating your first map

Click Maps in the sidebar, then New Map. Give it a name and confirm. Select it in the map list, then click Upload Image to attach an image — PNG, JPEG, WebP, or GIF up to 20 MB. Once loaded, use the mouse wheel to zoom and drag to pan. Fit resets the view.

Dropping pins

Click Place Pin in the toolbar, then click on the map. Enter a label, add GM notes, and optionally link the pin to a campaign entity. Pins are colour-coded by type:

Drag any pin to reposition it. Click a pin to edit or delete it.

Extracting pins from a map key

Click Extract from Key and paste your legend text. Threadmancer proposes a pin for each entry and matches labels to existing campaign entities where it can. Review and confirm — accepted pins are created instantly.

After creating pins from a key, click Analyze Image to have the vision LLM estimate where each label appears on the image. Drag any pin that landed in the wrong spot.

Linking a map to a location

Click Link Location to connect a map to an existing Location entity in your graph. The map will then appear when you browse that location's card.

Adding session 5 — a practical extraction walkthrough

The demo campaign already includes the pre-session 5 prep notes — Barrowfen, Duff, Maret, Wynn, and the seal site are already in your graph. Session 5 itself is what you add next: the recap of what actually happened at the table.

# Session 5 — The Northern Seal

**Date played:** Week 5  
**Players present:** All four  
**Location in fiction:** Barrowfen valley — village, seal site, borderland farmland  
**Act:** II (early)

---

## What Actually Happened

Two days of travel north. The wrongness started before they could see the village.

There is a moment in the journey — approximately two hours out from Barrowfen — where the road begins to feel slightly off. Not dangerous, not dramatic. Just: the shadows fall at angles that don't correspond to the sun. A fence line seems to extend further than it should before the perspective resolves. A crow sitting on a post watches the party pass and the watching has too much intention in it. Orren noticed first. He said: *"We're in the proximity zone."* He pulled his notes. He checked the map from the box. He said: *"The seal site is approximately here"* — pointing to a field to the west. *"We're already inside whatever's failing."*

**Barrowfen village** had forty-three residents at last count. They had been noticing things for six weeks. They had sent a petition to the Thorngate regional administration three weeks ago. No response. A farmhand named Duff had gone to investigate the wrongness in the western field personally, nine days ago. He had come back, taken off his boots, set them neatly by the door, and not spoken since. He was eating and sleeping. He was not speaking.

Bram handled the villagers. He is the character built for this — steady, plain, not frightening. He established quickly that no one had come from the Wardens. He did not explain what was failing or why. He said: *"We're here to look at the problem. Then we'll come back and tell you what we think you should do."*

**The seal site** was a field about sixty meters across. The ground was correct to stand on but the air above it was not. Orren described it as a place where the material and immaterial planes had been compressed together — the seal had been keeping them apart and was no longer doing so with consistency. He could not repair it. He could assess it. The failure was recent in acceleration but the degradation had been ongoing for years — he estimated the seal had been compromised gradually, then more rapidly in the last several months. Not by entropy. By interference. Something had been pushing on it from the other side.

Combat was unavoidable. Three Unbound entities came through a gap that opened while the party was examining the site — described as entities approximately humanoid in proportion but with the specific wrongness of things that were not designed for material existence: too many points of articulation, an impression of transparency that wasn't transparency, sound that was slightly behind their movement. They were not intelligent in any conversational sense. They were hungry and disoriented and in pain from the material world pressing on them.

The fight was harder than the party expected. Orren was nearly incapacitated by proximity to one of the entities — the immaterial bleed from the gap affected his casting. Bram held the line. Maren used Inflict Wounds to devastating effect; it turns out necrotic damage feels native to these things, which is disturbing in a way the party discussed afterward. Sable's Eldritch Blast collapsed one of them cleanly; Hunger of Hadar on the gap itself stopped anything else from coming through long enough for Orren to apply a temporary seal — not a repair, just a bandage, built from materials in his notes and several hours' concentration.

**The temporary seal held.** Orren said it would last two to four weeks. He said: *"I'm not a Warden artificer. I don't have the tools for a real repair. I've stopped the bleeding. Someone still needs to close the wound."*

Bram told the village to prepare to leave. He told them it wasn't optional and that he'd explain more when he could. He left them his real name and said he would come back.

---

## Deviations from Plan

**Barrowfen becoming a named community** with specific residents was planned in the arc revision. Duff (the non-speaking farmhand) was improvised. He exists now. His condition is caused by prolonged immaterial bleed exposure. He may or may not recover. The party does not know this yet.

**Orren's temporary seal** — not in any plan. His player asked if his Divination background and the contents of his notes gave him enough to attempt a patch. I said yes, with a high-difficulty check and the cost of several hours' concentration. He passed. The seal is temporarily stable. This matters for Session 11 (the seal fails when the patch expires).

---

## State Changes

**Secrets discovered this session:**
- Party: Barrowfen seal failure is caused by interference from the Unbound side, not entropy — something has been pushing on it deliberately
- Party: Orren has enough knowledge to apply a temporary patch but not a real repair; Wardens have exclusive access to repair techniques

**NPC states:**
- Barrowfen residents: Told to prepare to leave; trust Bram's word

**Seal integrity:**
- Barrowfen (northern) seal: Temporarily stabilized by Orren; will fail in 2–4 weeks

---

## Table Notes

Maren's player asked after the session whether necrotic damage being effective against the Unbound entities was meaningful lore or just game mechanics. I said it was meaningful. She's thinking about it.

Continuing from here

That's the core loop: run a session, paste your notes, confirm the proposal, ask the chatbot questions. Your campaign graph grows with every session and the chatbot gets more grounded as the record fills in.

When you're ready to start a campaign of your own from scratch, click + New in the campaign picker to create a blank campaign and begin by extracting your character sheets and any world notes you already have. Browse the Iron Covenant template any time via the Templates button — it's a good reference for what a populated campaign looks like.