Every campaign I run gets a relationship map of who hates whom, and I love building it. At session zero it's the best thing on my desk. Then someone dies, a faction flips, a debt gets paid, and there goes a Sunday afternoon spent redrawing the map with the changes. Somewhere around the third redraw the same question arises: how am I going to keep this up for a year-long campaign? Keeping it true is an absolute slog, and it almost always goes stale.
So for my next campaign, Scurlock's Debt, I tried something different...
Starting from nothing
I've played Blades in the Dark, but I'd never run it. I had no crew, no setting, no name, and no books. So the first thing I did was spend $20 on the PDFs from DriveThruRPG, drop them into the campaign library, and let the Campaign Assistant read them.
My first message was straightforward: I've played but never run this system, I don't know where to start, what do I need to know right now? It went through the rulebooks and saved a quick reference guide as a note, which is the first thing I open.
Then came the fun part, picking what kind of crew the players would be.
I decided to go with a Cult that smuggles artifacts on the side to mix things up. From there we built the starting situation from the factions in the core book, and the key NPCs who would lead them:
- Lord Scurlock, an ancient noble bound by old magic to the demon Setarra, has found a nest of sea demons chained in stone beneath Doskvol's harbor and wants them free.
- The Spirit Wardens, who keep the city's dead in line, would burn the whole district down before they let that happen.
- The Fog Hounds, a small smuggling crew led by Margette Vale, just want a patron who pays on time.
Three faction leaders, a handful of notes. Then the Campaign Assistant asked if I wanted to see the whole web at a glance with a Canvas.
I said yes. Enter the new Campaign Canvas.
The first board
It embedded eight notes in three boxes, one per faction. Then the assistant automatically read the notes back and started drawing threads between them.
A thread joins two notes and carries strands, the reasons they're connected. A strand is either a line quoted straight from a note or your own thought about why the two belong together. Lord Scurlock and Setarra are joined by this one:
Lord Scurlock is bound by ancient magic to the demon Setarra. Who is master and who is servant has changed hands many times over the centuries.
The more strands a thread collects, the thicker it gets, so the relationships that matter most are the ones you see first.
The crew moves in
Next I asked for three pre-baked player characters who'd fit this mess:
- Corvin Thess, a Spider who plans everything
- Ilsa Vheyne, a Whisper
- Old Nask, a Leech
Once their notes existed, the Campaign Assistant suggested threading them into the web too.
This is where I got a taste of the value of this new process. Among the new threads the assistant had created, there was one from Old Nask to Lord Scurlock, from a line in Nask's note:
Old Nask could be brewing something Scurlock specifically needs for his harbor working (a ward, a catalyst, a poison for the chained sea demons).
I'd skimmed right past that line. It turns our alchemist PC into someone the villain could need, and now it was a thread, right in front of me. For the others, Ilsa got tied to Setarra as an old rival. Corvin linked to Margette Vale, the one who'd broker the Fog Hounds' deal.
All three characters had clear reasons to be in the story, and I had more hooks than I'd planned.
At this point the board was getting a little crowded, so I asked the assistant to sort the NPCs into their factions and put the PCs in the middle.
We didn't have a crew sheet yet, so we wrote one, and I pinned it to the crew's box. The Drowned Choir is now on the board.
Same notes, a different board
A relationship web is only one way I look at a campaign. For the first score, The Tideworn Stone, Scurlock hands the crew the tideworn stone itself, a fist-sized lump of harbor rock that stays cold and wet no matter how long you hold it. The job is to carry it down to the chained nest and learn what binds the demons, without the Spirit Wardens finding out. To get there unseen the crew needs the Fog Hounds' canal routes, so Corvin has to sign Margette Vale as Scurlock's smuggler first.
I wanted a board that showed how that job could unfold, not just who's who.
Four stages, eight connected notes. The threads read like a Blades flowchart: how the plan feeds the engagement roll, how we drop the players in medias res, how the opposition might tick up the clocks, and how our complications resolve into heat. It's the same campaign, seen from an angle I can use that session.
Then I made a third canvas, imported a map of the Docks, and laid out the crew's approach, the threat, and the opposition each in their own color.
My favorite strand on it comes from the Spirit Warden agent's note:
Codename: Bakoros (the name is likely shared/rotated among several Wardens, per the order's own rules)
So the Warden sniffing around the docks may or may not be the same one each time. My players are going to hate that.
What happens after session one?
Prep is actually the easy half. Session one is where my plans go sideways. Let's imagine Corvin pitched the Fog Hounds leader, Margette Vale, the patronage deal and told her the cargo was relics and ritual components. Then the tideworn stone in Ilsa's satchel started humming loud enough to hear over the water. Relics don't hum. Vale turned the boat around, and by the end of the night her second had sold the crew's canal route, and descriptions of all three of them, to the Spirit Wardens.
This is the moment my old maps used to die. Every board I'd built that week assumed the Fog Hounds were the crew's way into the harbor.
I wrote up a post-game session summary, then asked the Campaign Assistant to update any other notes the summary had changed, and reopened the campaign web canvas.
I can see all six updates. Every card whose note had been affected wore a gold "changed" pill, and the threads quoting those notes got a gold halo as well. Nothing had been redrawn or rewritten. The board was simply telling me which of the original claims were no longer backed up by the notes.
One request brought it back to current
I clicked "Regenerate from notes" and it wrote the message for me in the Campaign Assistant chat. It named the six changed notes, asked the Campaign Assistant to re-read them and bring the canvas up to date, and finished with "Do not edit any note." I sent it as written.
Two old threads came back rewritten. Corvin's thread to Vale used to be about brokering the deal. Now it quotes his updated note:
Corvin told her the cargo was only relics and ritual components. When the stone gave the lie away, she walked, and she won't deal with him again.
The old reason isn't gone, either; it's kept in the thread's history.
Then there were six threads that hadn't existed an hour earlier. The Fog Hounds now run straight to the Spirit Wardens, on three strands from three different notes, starting with this one:
They sold the Drowned Choir's canal route and descriptions of all three PCs in exchange for the Wardens looking away from their own runs.
The Wardens picked up threads to Corvin and to Old Nask, because they have their descriptions, and one to Ilsa, labeled as hunting "a woman who hears stones." A few older threads were still flagged afterward: Ilsa's rivalry with Setarra, and Nask brewing for Scurlock. Their notes had changed, but not the lines they quote, so I hit Ignore and the warning cleared.
I didn't manually redraw a single line. Before session one the Spirit Wardens card had one thread. Now it has five, and we can see the whole campaign tilting toward them, which is exactly what the session did.
What changes when the campaign is three years old?
Scurlock's Debt is one session old, so it only has a few boards. The maps I struggled with most were on my long campaigns, and that's where I think the Canvas is a game changer. So let's picture session 60.
Your notes outlast your memory. By year three, nobody at the table remembers why the Fog Hounds won't take the crew's money, me included. Before ScriptoriumGM, I might have logged a line on a faction sheet somewhere that said "hostile". Now I can click the thread, open the note where the faction's status changed, and see the context. So when my players say, "Let's just ask the Fog Hounds", I know exactly how that conversation is going to go.
One edit, every board. I change a note at session 60, and the 26 canvases with threads quoting it are all flagged. The threads show what that edit changes on every board it touches, so I don't have to do a single manual check.
No need to limit your notes and canvases. Notes aren't copied onto a board. The card on the canvas just points at the note, so the Spirit Wardens, by now one of the major antagonists of this epic campaign, can have their faction note on nearly every canvas without it ever going out of sync. An old canvas just flags what's been updated since I last opened it. I don't need one giant board holding every note so nothing gets lost, and my antagonists stay true throughout the years.
Connections it can't make up. Every passage the Campaign Assistant puts on a thread is checked word for word against the note before it's saved, and a quote it can't find is skipped and reported. Sixty sessions in, I can't fact-check every claim about my own world, so the board can't be allowed to invent one.
Thicker threads for more strands. A thread strengthens with every strand it collects. The more sessions and strands connect your notes, the more the canvas points you to the relationships that really matter. That's usually where the juiciest stories are going to come from.
The years of planning you already have. If those campaigns currently live in Obsidian, the vault importer brings the notes across and turns your .canvas boards into ScriptoriumGM Campaign Canvases, with groups as boxes and connections as threads. Then you can ask the Campaign Assistant to back those threads with passages from the notes.
Most mapping tools keep a drawing of what you believed on the day you drew it. The Canvas keeps the line from your notes that made it true, and checks it against your notes every time you open the board.
What else does the Canvas do?
Some of this you've already seen above: tinted boxes on the score board, the crew sheet pinned to the Drowned Choir's box, and the Docks board sitting on a background image. The rest I haven't needed yet. Multi-selecting moves a whole faction at once, and the board works on a phone or tablet so it's ready to reference at the table.
Canvases are private to you for now. There's no sharing with players, co-editing, or export yet.
Try it on your campaign
The Campaign Canvas is available on every tier, free included. If your notes are already in, these are the three requests I'd start with:
- Make a canvas of the factions in my campaign and thread together how they're connected.
- Build a board for my next session: what the players know, what they don't, and who's looking for them.
- I just updated my session notes. Check my canvases and tell me what's out of date.
If you're starting fresh, the first hour with ScriptoriumGM gets your world in, and why your AI doesn't know your campaign explains why everything here quotes your notes instead of guessing.
Start your campaign free, and come show me your Canvases on Discord.