Storyteller's Toolkit
Built for the road you keep.
The Toolkit helps Storytellers do the work of the road: build journeys, keep campaign continuity, reveal handouts during play, and adapt when a crew leaves the prepared path.
It is designed to reduce preparation and bookkeeping while leaving judgement, tone and ownership entirely with the Storyteller.
The Toolkit supports Storytellers. It never replaces them. It is optional — not required to own or play the Core Rulebook.
Your Archive
Your Archive is the private workspace where a campaign lives and grows — the people, places, debts, rumours and traces belonging to your road. It is separate from The Hidden Archive.
From here you keep what your campaign needs, and reveal what players should see when the time comes.
Working tools
These are the tools used to build and expand Your Archive throughout a campaign. They are not separate destinations — they populate the Archive.
Create towns, stations, camps, boarding houses, roadside businesses and other places where a crew might stop.
Create ordinary people, members of The Hidden, The Damned, travellers, allies, enemies and people whose intentions are harder to determine.
Create bargains that can follow a crew down the road. A debt might cost money, work, information, a promise, a favour returned later, or something stranger.
Create things the crew might hear without knowing whether they are true.
Create work, warnings, favours, missing crews, requests and unfinished business.
Create or record signs used by travellers to leave information for the crews that follow them. This is connected to The Hidden's own evolving language descended from hobo code.
Create letters, reports, newspaper clippings, notes, photographs and other physical evidence that can enter a campaign.
Create entries for songs, voices, broadcasts, field recordings and other sounds connected to a campaign.
Build a journey between stops. A route can contain major stops, side routes, optional locations and different ways forward.
Keep the things that belong to a particular campaign together. Characters, current location, attention, favours, debts, discoveries and unfinished business can be tracked here as your table needs.
Shem
Shem is a Shepherd — one of those who have walked The Hidden roads longer than most people admit. He belongs to this world. When you ask him for help, you are speaking to Shem himself — not stepping outside the game to consult something else.
Ask him how something works and he answers as someone who has seen it on the road, keeping the table inside the world. Before a session, he can help a Storyteller prepare — shaping rumours, people, locations, crews and encounters when the road needs something ready. When a crew leaves the prepared route, he can help the Storyteller recover without stopping play. Across a campaign he helps keep continuity: what happened earlier, who was owed, what was left unfinished — so players and Storytellers can remember the road they have already travelled.
Where that help is welcome, he can also support accessibility — still as a companion inside the world, not as a detached tool sitting outside it.
He never replaces the Storyteller. He never takes control of the table. He supports when asked, helps when needed, and then steps back — so the road belongs to the players and their Storyteller.
The road is ready. Join the first journey when Kickstarter opens.