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Quickstart: From Signup to a Queryable World

Build a campaign in fifteen minutes: NPCs, factions, and locations as connected data, browsable as a database, drawn as graphs, shared with your table.

By the end of this guide you will have a campaign with a handful of connected NPCs, factions, and locations, a political map that drew itself from your data, and an invite link ready for your players. Nothing here requires reading anything else first.

Want to poke around a finished world before building your own? The live demo on the homepage opens a fully built campaign with no signup.

Step 1: Create your account

Sign up with an email and password, or with Google or Discord. Every account is a full Grimoire account: you can run your own campaigns and join other people's games as a player with the same login.

Step 2: Create your campaign

Click Create Campaign and walk the three-step wizard:

  1. Basics. Name your campaign and give it a one-line description. The description shows up on your dashboard and your players' portal, so write it for the table.
  2. Game. Pick the system you play (for example D&D 5e) and Grimoire sets a matching genre and ruleset, or choose Custom and pick your own.
  3. Setting. Answer a few questions about your world: are there higher powers, are there vehicles, how common is magic, how advanced is technology. Your answers tune which categories appear in your sidebar and what they are called. A world without vehicles simply has no Vehicles category.

None of this is permanent. Everything the wizard sets can be changed later under Settings → General.

Step 3: Meet your dashboard

You land on the campaign dashboard. Three things worth noticing before you add anything:

  • The sidebar groups your world into categories (people, places, story, and so on). The labels match the genre you picked.
  • The search bar at the top of the sidebar, and the palette on Ctrl K (⌘K on Mac), reach everything you will ever add.
  • The dashboard itself fills in as you play: your latest session recap, open story threads, and where you left off. It is empty now. That is normal.

Step 4: Add your first records

Start small. Five NPCs, two factions, three locations is plenty to see the system work.

  1. Open NPCs in the sidebar and click Add NPC.
  2. Give each a name and a line or two: who they are, what they want. Skip everything else; fields are never required.
  3. Do the same for a couple of Factions (each needs a goal worth fighting over) and a few Locations.

Each category is a typed database with fields that fit the type, and every category can be browsed as cards or as a sortable table. The Entity Database guide covers the full system, including custom fields.

Step 5: Connect what you made

Connections are what turn records into a world:

  1. Open an NPC and set their Faction.
  2. Open a location and set its Parent Location (the tavern sits in the city, the city in the region).
  3. Open a faction and add an Ally or Rival faction.

Step 6: Watch the world draw itself

Open Knowledge → Graphs. The Political Web tab already shows your factions and NPCs connected by the alliances, rivalries, and memberships you just entered. The Geography tab shows your location hierarchy as a tree. You built no graph; you filled in fields.

This is the core Grimoire loop: keep records like a database, read them back as maps. The Knowledge Graphs guide shows what feeds each graph.

Step 7: Decide who sees what

Every record has a visibility tier. Before players arrive, skim what you made and tuck away the secrets.

The three visibility tiers: Common Knowledge is seen by everyone, Player Knowledge by your table, GM Secret only by you. Inherit follows the parent. Common Knowledge Everyone at the table sees it Player Knowledge What the party has discovered in play GM Secret Only you. Never the portal, never player AI Inherit: wiki blocks can follow their page's tier instead of setting their own
Set a tier on any record from its edit form. When in doubt, GM Secret: you can always reveal later.

Step 8: Invite your table

Go to Settings → Player Portal → Invites and create an invite link. New campaigns start on the Wiki only preset, meaning players see shared wiki pages and nothing else until you choose otherwise. The Player Portal guide covers the presets and what each reveals.

Where to go next

  • Knowledge Graphs: every map Grimoire draws and the fields that feed it
  • Running Sessions: log recaps so the campaign remembers itself between games
  • The Wiki: longform pages, co-editing, and the three wiki spaces
  • Connect to Claude: query your world from an AI assistant, one click, no config files