How to run a session with scenes
Plan a night as a handful of places, save each as a scene, and run the game by tapping them — and what to do when the party goes somewhere else.
A scene saves the environment and every board loaded with it as one thing, brought back in one tap. Build one for each place the party might reach, in the order you expect them, before anyone arrives. At the table you are then choosing places rather than building them — and a scene plays the way it did the night you saved it, whatever you change afterwards.
Write down the places, not the encounters
Before you touch the app, list the places the party might end up in tonight — the road, the village, the mine, the thing at the bottom of the mine. Four to six is a normal night. A scene is a place, not a fight: two fights in the same cave are one scene, and the same cave with the water risen is a second one.
Build the first place and save it
Set the environment how you want it and load the boards that belong with it, then press + New scene and name it. Whatever is on screen at that moment is what the scene remembers — the environment itself, every layer and every dial, plus the list of boards. Scenes are numbered in order for you.
Duplicate for every place that is nearly the same
Most places on your list are a neighbor of one you have already built. Open the scene’s ⋯ menu, press Duplicate — the copy lands right after the original and is loaded for you — change what needs changing, and press Save changes. This is how a night gets built in ten minutes rather than an hour.
Put them in the order you expect to need them
Move left and Move right in the same menu. The strip across the top of the Play screen is the only thing you will look at during the session, so it should read left to right like the evening you have planned. Leave Auto-play environment ticked — the chip shows a small ▶ when it is on — except where you want to arrive in silence and start it yourself.
Run the night by tapping places
Tap a scene and the environment switches, crossfading if something was already playing, the boards swap, and the new place starts. That is the whole of running it. You are not building anything at the table: you are choosing which place the party is standing in, which takes one tap and no reading.
Let the night drift, and save it if you like what happened
You do not have to leave a scene when the evening goes somewhere else. Swap a board, move a dial, add a layer — the environment never stops. When what is on screen no longer matches the scene a Save changes button appears beside it; press it if the drift was an improvement, ignore it if it was for one moment only.
How many scenes should a night have?
As many as there are places, which is usually fewer than it feels like. Four to six covers most sessions, and a strip you can take in without scrolling is worth more than one that anticipates everything. The scenes you already have are not wasted when the party goes elsewhere — see below.
What happens when they go somewhere I did not plan?
Two moves, in order of how little they cost:
- Stay where you are and swap a board. The environment keeps running. A cave is a cave whether or not the thing in it was on your list.
- Load the nearest scene and move one dial. A forest becomes a worse forest by pulling the birds out. You can do it mid-sentence and nobody notices you doing it.
Building a new scene live is the one thing worth not doing. Note the place down and build it before next week, when it is the thing you are actually planning for.
Why does editing an environment not change my scene?
Because a scene stores the environment itself, not its name — a full copy, taken the moment you saved. That is what makes a scene from March still play the way it did in March, and it is why deleting an environment can never break a scene that used it.
The cost of that bargain is that the two do not track each other, so both ways across are offered from the line under the strip once a scene is loaded. Save to my environments… writes this scene’s environment out to your environment list; Update from (name) pulls your list’s version into this scene, leaving its boards alone. Neither reaches any other scene. Scenes has the detail.
What is the difference between a campaign and an adventure?
A campaign is a game. An adventure is a thread inside that game. Both exist so a strip stays short.
| Holds | Use it when | |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign | Its own set of scenes | You run more than one game and do not want Tuesday’s places in Thursday’s strip |
| Adventure | The scenes of one thread, inside a campaign | One game has grown several threads — the mine, the village, the missing cat — and you want to see only the one the party picked |
Every campaign starts with an adventure called Main story, and until you make a second one nothing is filtered and there is nothing new to learn. Campaigns need an account, because they live on the server; without one you have the scenes you have, exactly as before, and no campaign bar at all.
Can I hand a night to another GM?
Yes — Export to a file on a campaign writes out its adventures, its scenes, the full environment each scene remembers, and any board those scenes load. Import a campaign… opens such a file as a new campaign beside the ones you have, and it never overwrites anything: a board it brings arrives as a board of its own even if you already have one by that name, and the campaign is renamed if the name is taken. Built-in boards you have never edited are left out, because whoever opens the file already has them.
Is a scene the same thing as a session?
No, and this is the question people arrive with. A scene is one place. A session is the handful of scenes you expect to visit tonight, in the order you expect to visit them, which is what the strip is. There is no separate thing to create and nothing to start or end — put tonight’s scenes in an adventure if you want them grouped, and the strip is your plan for the evening.
Next
Ready? Open Thaumaturgy — it is free, and there is nothing to install.
Updated 1 November 2026