Gather close, game masters. Today we shall perform a ritual feared by blank notebooks everywhere: we will begin a campaign and actually know where we put it.
Our training adventure is called The Lantern Below. It contains a rain-soaked city, a missing cartographer, several suspicious statues, and one door that is much too warm. Sensible people would leave it alone. Fortunately, sensible people rarely become adventurers.
Quest 1: Create your vault
Choose Create vault and give the new vault a name. For this expedition, the vault is called Your First Quest in Moonvault.
A vault is an ordinary folder of portable Markdown files. Put it on your computer or in the cloud folder you already trust. Moonvault supplies the enchanted furniture; you still own the dungeon.
Quest 2: Speak a world into existence
Create a world and write down only enough truth to make trouble possible.
Our world is The Lantern Below. Beneath Bellweather, an ancient lantern shows possible futures and charges one memory per revelation. That gives us a place, a danger, and a terrible bargain. The campaign beast has a heartbeat.
Do not attempt to write the complete history of seventeen empires before play begins. Three truths and one mystery are plenty. The players will manufacture the missing history with alarming speed.
Quest 3: Add the pieces your players can disturb
Create a campaign and choose its rules system. We used Shadowdark for The Bellweather Company, a fellowship of brave debtors and professional bad-decision makers.
Then add the pieces that make the world playable:
- The Drowned Stairs, a location where reflections move first.
- Mira Vale, a missing cartographer with silver ink on her fingers.
- A party, created with the campaign and waiting for heroes.
Each page belongs to the same world and campaign, so the sidebar becomes your campaign map. Links and backlinks reveal which pieces know about one another. This is extremely useful when a player asks, “Have we met Mira before?” with the confidence of someone who absolutely has not taken notes.
Give every page something usable at the table: a vivid detail, an immediate desire, and one secret worth discovering. Encyclopedias are magnificent, but a statue that moves whenever somebody lies has considerably better initiative.
Quest 4: Prepare the first session
Press Session, choose the campaign, schedule the date, and begin with the Session Prep template.
Moonvault gives you places for a strong start, possible scenes, secrets, fantastic locations, important NPCs, monsters, and rewards. These are not iron rails. They are torches. Arrange enough of them that you can see the next chamber.
For Into the Drowned Stairs, our strong start is simple:
The midnight bell rings underwater. Every statue turns to face the company.
That is a situation. It demands action. It also makes the players suspicious of masonry, which is a healthy adventuring instinct.
Quest 5: Run the table
When the dice arrive and all responsible plans flee the room, press Run session.
Active-session mode gathers your live notes, party, encounters, and quick tools into one calm view. Your prepared material is already there, ready to be consulted, contradicted, or heroically ignored.
Record rulings, clues, NPC reactions, and the consequences of whatever magnificent catastrophe the party creates. When the session ends, Moonvault can hand the tale forward to the next one.
Your turn, game master
Your first vault does not need a continent. It needs:
- One world with a dangerous truth.
- One campaign with a reason to act.
- One location worth entering.
- One person worth finding.
- One session that begins with motion.
Build those five things and the blank page is defeated. The vault is open, the lantern is lit, and somewhere below the city a statue has just turned its head.
Roll for courage.