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18.6 Player Visibility on Entities
18.0 Entities 18.6 Player Visibility on Entities

The Entity Codex can be a private reference for you, a field guide your players browse, or — most usefully — both at once, revealed a creature at a time.

The "Secret?" switch

Every entity has a Secret? switch on its form. Set to yes, only Game Masters can see it. Set to no, everyone in the campaign can.

New entities start secret. This is deliberate — nothing you write is exposed to your table until you decide it should be. It also means that if your players say the codex looks empty, this is almost certainly why.

In Card and Compact view, a secret entity is faded out. In Table view it carries a small eye icon beside its name instead. Either way, that is how you tell at a glance what your table can and cannot see. Players do not see those entries.

Revealing things as they are discovered

Turning Secret? off after the party first meets a creature turns the codex into a record of what they have actually learned. It reads like a bestiary filling up over a campaign.

To see everything still hidden, open Search and set Player Visibility to "Game Master only". That gives you the full list of what you have not revealed yet — a quick thing to run through after a session.
What players never see

Even on an entity that is fully visible to them:

  • Game Master Secrets — never shown, and the whole panel is absent.
  • Secret Tags — never shown, on the profile or in their tag filter.
  • Secret folders and folder groups — absent from their sidebar.

Description and Notes are shown. If something must not reach the table, it belongs in Game Master Secrets, not in Notes.

What players can do

Players can browse folders, switch views, search, and open any entity that is not secret. They cannot create, edit, duplicate or delete anything, and they have no editing buttons on the profile.

A note for Game Masters on folders. An entity's own Secret? switch is what decides whether a player can open it. Marking a folder secret hides the folder from their sidebar, but it is not a substitute for marking the entities inside it secret. If something must stay hidden, set it on the entity.
18.0 Entities