Secrets
GMTales controls who reads what, down to the paragraph. Hide a whole article or a single passage; everything around it stays open.
Visibility Levels
Everything written in a campaign sits at one of three levels:
Public — every campaign member can read it. The default.
Group-restricted — only the named groups can read it, and always the person who wrote it.
Author-only — only the person who wrote it can read it.
Groups
A group is a named set of campaign members. Each group has a display name and a key used in directives.
Two groups belong to the campaign's roles, and exist from the day the campaign does:
gm("Game Masters") holds the Creator and every GameMaster. The Creator counts as a game master.players("Players") holds every Player.
Their membership follows the roles. Give someone a role in Settings → User Roles and they join the matching group; take it away and they leave it. Nobody owns these two, so nobody can rename them, change their keys, delete them, or add a member to them by hand. The keys gm and players are reserved for them, and so are the names Game Masters and Players.
Every other group is made on the campaign's Groups page. Whoever makes it owns it, and its owner is the one who adds and removes its members, from Groups → Members.
Groups are never created from article text: a secret block or visibility directive naming a group key that doesn't exist is a validation error, in articles and notes alike. Create the group first, then write the secret.
Sharing with a group you are not in
You can address any group in the campaign, member of it or not. A player writes <!-- start: secret; gm --> to tell the game masters something; a game master writes <!-- visibility: players --> to reveal a section to the party.
What you write is always visible to you: a secret addressed only to gm still shows in your own article and still loads into your editor, even if you are no game master. Sharing your text never takes it away from you.
Group names and keys are visible to every member; who belongs to a group is not. The Groups page lists the groups you are in, and any you own, with their members. Every other group appears by name and key alone.
Sharing is also one-directional. Addressing a group does not make you part of it: you see your own writing shared with the group, and nothing anyone else shared with it. Leaving a group you once shared with keeps your own writing readable to you.
Article-Level Visibility
The visibility directive restricts the whole article. Targets are me and group keys, comma-separated; without the directive, the article is public.
When the directive names a group, readers see a Visible to box under the article's header listing who the article is shared with, the same way a secret block's footer lists who knows it.
Secret Blocks
A secret block hides a passage inside an otherwise visible article:
The first block is visible to the party group. The second names no group and is therefore author-only: omitting the list is equivalent to writing me. To write a secret for the game masters you need not be one; see Sharing with a group you are not in.
Readers outside a secret see no trace of it. The paragraphs around it close up, with no gap where it was.
Nesting
A secret block cannot be nested inside any other block, another secret included. A secret only hides when it stands on its own, so nesting one is a validation error. Write separate blocks side by side, or put the surrounding block inside the secret:
Combining with Article Visibility
An article can be restricted broadly and a passage of it further:
What visibility carries with it
One rule covers everything that is not an article: a thing is read by whoever can read a place it is shown. What differs is how many places each thing has.
A note has one place, the article it hangs on, so its own visibility narrows within that article's audience. See Notes narrow, never widen.
An image has many: its own page, open to whatever its visibility directive names, plus every passage in an article or note that shows it. Its audience is all of those added together.
Showing an image somewhere shares it with that place's readers. Put a picture in a public article and it is public. The image's own
visibilityadds an audience and never removes one.A picture shown only inside a secret block is read by that secret's readers.
A picture placed nowhere is the uploader's alone.
It follows that you can only show an image you can already see. Referencing somebody else's private picture is the same validation error as referencing one that does not exist. See Images.
A secret block in an image's own description narrows, like any other. It hides a passage of the description from part of the image's audience, and shares the picture with nobody. Say who can open the image with visibility; use secret blocks for what only some of those people should read. See Secrets in a description.
A marker or region is read by whoever can read the passage that placed it. A pin written inside a secret block is part of that secret, and absent from the map for everyone else. To give one point two audiences, place it twice at the same coordinates, each in its own passage; readers who may see both get a single pin they can page through. See Artifacts.
A link is read by whoever can read both of its ends: the passage it sits in and the article it points at. See Visibility of relations.
Notes narrow, never widen
A note declares its own visibility: everyone, a group, or me. It is read by the people it addresses who can also read the article.
So you never need to restate the article's visibility: an open note on a GM-only article is read by game masters alone, because nobody else can read the article. And a note can only narrow: you can address the game masters alone on an article the whole table reads, but an open note cannot make an article reach more people.
Reactions and the activity feed follow the same rule. Neither shows an article you cannot open, nor anything written about one.
A note hangs on the article, not on a paragraph of it: an article that is public apart from one secret block is public, so an open note about that secret is public too. See Notes for writing them.
Presentation Mode
Reading your own campaign aloud at the table, or sharing your screen, puts your secrets in front of the players. Presentation mode takes them off your screen for as long as you want.
The toggle is the eye in the sidebar, and only game masters and the Creator have it. Turned on, three things change in everything you open:
Secret blocks disappear, in articles and in notes, the same way they are absent for a reader outside them.
Automatic links to restricted articles become plain text. The words stay; the link does not, so a click can't take the screen somewhere it shouldn't go. A link you wrote by hand is left alone.
The Visible to box under a restricted article's header disappears. Who may see the article is table talk, not table content.
Your choice is remembered until you turn it off, so it survives a reload mid-session.
Revealing Your Secrets When a Campaign Concludes
When the story is over, you can open your secrets so the campaign can be read whole.
On the campaign Settings page, under My secrets, turn on "Reveal my secrets to everyone when this campaign is concluded." Each member controls this for themselves, and it affects only content you authored, not secrets that were merely shared with you.
The setting takes effect when a Creator sets the campaign's Status to Concluded:
Your secret blocks become visible to everyone. Their "Available to" footer keeps listing who originally knew each secret, joined by an everyone portrait and an info icon explaining that the author publicly shared it.
Articles you hid with a
visibilitydirective become readable. A box under the header shows who could originally see the article, with the same everyone portrait and explanation.
Nothing is destroyed. Turn the setting off, or set the campaign back to Active, and your secrets are private again exactly as before.