Questions

If you are a player, ask your Ref

Genuinely, that is the whole answer. They press Rotate on your seat, which takes about four seconds, and your sheet, your journal and every roll you have made come back with the new link. Not Invite: that makes a new seat with nothing in it.

Refs: look for the email first

The link went to the address you gave when you started the campaign. It is sent automatically, so it is in your inbox unless the send failed and said so at the time. Search for The Murder. That email is the campaign.

Still nothing? Ask for it again

There is a box on the front page. Put in the address you signed up with and I will send back every Ref link registered to it.

The answer looks identical whether or not I have ever heard of the address, because telling a stranger that somebody runs a campaign here is not mine to tell. If nothing turns up, it is the spelling or the spam folder.

What does and does not survive

• Your address survives everything: a new phone, a lost phone, a wiped browser. Ask for your links on the front page and they come back.
• The list of links on the front page is not a backup: when you open a campaign, that browser quietly remembers the link so the front page can offer it back next time. It never leaves the machine. It's not on your phone, it's not in your account, and it goes when you clear your browsing data. Handy, but don't rely on it.
• Your browser history has it too: unless you clear your cache and cookies.

So sign up with an email address you will still be able to open in a year. New phone, wiped laptop, browser reinstalled, link deleted by accident: none of it matters, because you can always ask for your links again and I send them to that address. Use a work address you might lose, or one you never check, and that safety net is the thing you have thrown away.

Why do I need a code?

Because this is an early alpha and it is meant to be small. When something breaks, and it will, there need to be few enough people affected that every one of them gets a proper answer rather than a queue number.

The links are part of the test too

No passwords. Your link is your key. That is a choice rather than a finished answer, and it is worth saying which way it cuts: nobody should have to make an account to try a play aid once, and equally a link can be lost, pasted into the wrong channel, or left sitting in the history of a laptop you borrowed off someone.

So the way back in is as much under test as the dice are. If it catches you out, tell me. If you catch yourself doing something daft to hang on to a link, definitely tell me, because that is the bit I cannot see from here.

Accounts may come later, at least for Refs. Nothing would be lost if they do, since your campaigns are already registered to your address and would come across with you.

How do I get one?

Off somebody already using it. A person, not a queue.

Start a campaign with a fresh alpha code and you get a handful of your own to hand on. Start one with a passed-on code and you do not, and the same goes for a second table you start yourself. Codes come with joining, not with every game you run, or this would be twice the size by Friday.

I have a campaign. Where are my codes?

Open your campaign and look down the right-hand column for Ref console, then Codes to pass on. They belong to whoever started the campaign, so if you cannot see that panel you are either on a player's link or holding a Ref role somebody lent you. Take the Ref role back and they reappear.

Each code opens one new campaign for one other person. A code that has been spent says so, and one I have withdrawn says that; the rest are yours to hand out.

Do I need a code to join a game?

No. Codes are only for starting a campaign of your own. If a Ref has sent you a seat link then you're already in, and there's nothing to do but open it.

Your sheet and your tracker: not secret

The Ref can open anybody's sheet, and does, because somebody has to know how close you all are to dying. The other players see your row on the crows table: your crow's name, your Stamina, your wounds, your Speed, your AD, anything written in your Conditions box, your cruelty, whether you are carrying a light, and the names of any crows you have already lost. Writing is a different question. Only you and the Ref change yours.

Your journal: nobody but you

The delve pages are yours alone. Not the other players, and not the Ref either.

One exception, and it is deliberate: the settlement page bound into your journal is shared with everybody, because a settlement belongs to the whole table rather than to whoever wrote the notes.

If you run more than one campaign

You can. In the Ref console, near the bottom, there is a box marked another campaign: type a name, press Start it, and you get a second campaign with its own link, its own crows and its own everything. It costs you nothing: you're already in, so it doesn't use up one of your codes. Four per address while this is in alpha.

They all sit under Your tables in the Ref console, so you can hop straight from one to another without hunting for links.

Worth knowing what that means, because it cuts both ways. They are linked by your email address, so recovery brings all of them back at once. It also means any one of your Ref links can reach the others. If a Ref link of yours ends up somewhere public, whoever has it can see your other campaigns too, so replace it.

I have posted a link somewhere I should not have

Replace it: the old one dies immediately. In the Ref console every seat has a Rotate button, and that includes your own. Press it and that link stops working for everybody, including whoever copied it, and you get a fresh one in its place.

You lose nothing by it. The sheet, the journal, the rolls and the crow all stay exactly where they are. Tell your players to use the new link, and if it was a player's link you rotated, send them theirs.

Do it as soon as you notice. A link is a key and anybody holding it is you, so the sooner it is dead the less it matters.

On the server

The campaign name and the nicknames you type in, everything on your sheets and your tracker, everything in your journal, every roll with the time it happened, and the Ref's clock, rests and deaths, including any pictures you paste into the journal. Whatever the Ref types in as well: their roll tables, their settlements, the item cards they hand round. The road too: which day you are on, both encounter numbers, who took which role on which day, and the Ref's own words for every nudge they gave a number. And if you send me a bug report I keep that, along with your nickname, which campaign it came from, the page you were on, the version you were running, and anything you put in it.

Your email address, and only if you started a campaign

The one personal thing I hold. Its main job is sending your own links back to you when you lose them. It also quietly ties your campaigns together, which is how Your tables knows about them and how the four-tables limit is counted. Nobody at your table is ever shown it, and it goes when the campaign does.

Joining somebody else's campaign asks for no address at all. If a Ref sent you a seat link, I know nothing about you whatsoever.

What I do not keep

Passwords, because there's nothing to log in to. Not your device, not your location, not where you came from.

On your device

A few display preferences, and the links to seats you have opened on that device, which the browser keeps on its own without asking so a closed tab isn't a lost campaign. None of it is sent anywhere. Clear your browsing data and it's gone.

No tracking, at all

No analytics, no advertising, no third-party scripts, and no fonts pulled off somebody else's server. Your browser is told to refuse anything from outside this site, so you do not have to take my word for it.

Mid-session, keep playing

Export your sheets to PDF, carry on with paper, roll real dice. Crows was written to be played that way and it works perfectly well. The shared log is a convenience and there is not one rule in the game that depends on it, so whatever else happens, do not let this thing cost you an evening.

Then tell me

There is a Something's wrong link at the bottom of your seat page. Type what happened and send it. The version you were running goes with it automatically, which saves me asking.

No address needed. If you want an answer back, put yours in the message.

Who is this, then?

Just me, fitting this around a job, sometimes of an evening and sometimes instead of something else I should be doing. So things get done when they get done, and it will slow down at some point. If the whole site is down that gets looked at a lot sooner, mostly because I will have noticed too.

The quickest way to reach me is the Crows TTRPG channel in the TeaPK Adventures Discord: discord.gg/TT87dYbPFH. Bug reports are better through the Something's wrong button, since that tells me which version you were on.

Found a problem with the game rather than the app?

That one goes to MCDM, through their own playtest survey, which is the only place they take feedback. This is unofficial, and nothing you tell me reaches them.

A campaign nobody opens

The plan is that a campaign untouched for a year gets deleted, sheets, journal, rolls and all, with a warning to its Ref first. Being straight with you: that sweep is not built yet, so right now nothing is deleted automatically and old campaigns simply sit there. It is on the list.

If you want one gone before then, ask and it goes.

Backups

Anything deleted hangs about in the backups: a fortnight on the server itself, and up to a year in the encrypted copies kept off it. Then it is gone from those too.

One more thing

This is a free hobby project in early alpha, run off one small server by one person. Do not put anything in it you would be genuinely gutted to lose.