How to submit a Session Dossier (and Why)

How to Submit a Campaign Dossier:

If you've filed a dossier and it read back like your recap with some labels stapled on, this is for you — with real examples from Titan's Gate (high fantasy) and SingaporeZ (zombie survival), so you can see the same rule apply across very different tables.

Overview vs. Everything Else

Overview is your recap — the narrative, in the order it happened. This part comes naturally to anyone who's run a table; it's just storytelling, and it should read like it.

Everything else on the dossier — quickFacts, locationFacts, statTiles, threatAssessment, objectives — is not a retelling of the overview. It's the state the session left behind. A different question entirely: not "what happened," but "what's true now that wasn't true before."

quickFacts — the situation, at a glance

General facts about where things stand right now — the kind of thing a player would want to see in the first three seconds of opening the dossier. Label/value pairs, short.

• Titan's Gate: STATUS — "The village of Ashfen now owes the party a life-debt" · LOOT — "A rusted key of unknown origin, taken from the crypt"
• SingaporeZ: STATUS — "Water supply at the CC contaminated" · SUPPLIES — "2 days of rations remaining"

Notice both examples say what changed, not what's always been true about the setting. "Ashfen is a farming village" isn't a quickFact — it's backstory, and it belongs in the overview or the world's own lore pages, not here.

locationFacts — the same idea, pinned to a place

Use this when the fact is specifically about a location rather than the party's overall situation — useful once a campaign starts tracking more than one place at a time.

• Titan's Gate: REGION — "Northern Reach" · GARRISON — "Understaffed since the raid three sessions ago"
• SingaporeZ: DISTRICT — "Toa Payoh — blockaded by the CDF" · SAFEHOUSE — "Compromised, relocate before next session"

statTiles — anything you'd want to watch trend over time

A number plus a short label. These are for facts that move up or down across sessions — morale, a countdown, a resource level — where the trend itself is the information, not just the current value.

• Titan's Gate: 12 — "Party Morale" · 3 — "Days until the eclipse"
• SingaporeZ: 40% — "Infection risk, this sector" · 6 — "Survivors sheltering at the CC"

threatAssessment — how dangerous is this, right now

A meter with a label and a level (low / medium / high / very-high). This is deliberately coarse — you're not writing a paragraph here, you're giving a player a fast read on "should I be worried about this."

• Titan's Gate: "Local Faction Tension" — medium (the Thorne Cabal is recruiting openly since the raid)
• SingaporeZ: "Horde Proximity" — high (a breach at the north checkpoint, moving toward the CC)

objectives — point forward, not back

Not a running log of everything the party has ever wanted to do. Just two things: what's newly open (a lead, a threat, a thread nobody's pulled yet), and what got resolved this session specifically. An objective closed two sessions ago doesn't need restating — it already did its job.

• Titan's Gate — open, primary: "Find the missing courier" — "Last seen heading north along the old trade road."
• Titan's Gate — done, secondary: "Deliver the sealed letter" — "Handed off to the garrison captain this session."
• SingaporeZ — open, primary: "Restore power to the CC water pump" — "Generator's intact but the fuel line is upstream, in contested territory."
• SingaporeZ — done, tertiary: "Confirm the north checkpoint's status" — "Confirmed breached; folded into this session's Horde Proximity meter above."

When You Don't Know, Leave It Blank

This is the one that's easy to get backwards under time pressure. An absent fact is safe — it just means nobody's filled it in yet. A guessed one, stated with confidence, actively misleads whoever reads it next. A wrong "fact" is worse than a missing one, because a missing one at least looks unfinished.

A blank field you fill in next session beats a plausible-sounding invention every time. Nobody's grading you on how complete the dossier looks the night you file it.

Good tables make good stories. Good dossiers just make sure the story is still findable three sessions from now.

— Drafted by Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant), at the webmaster's request. Reviewed by the C&F team before publishing.