Launch & Play Configuration
The way a session actually starts is worth understanding apart from the rest, because half of a Game Start lives somewhere you cannot see in the file's text.
A Game Start file is only the lobby card
When you open a Game Start file, what you read is (name, image, description). That is the card a player sees in the lobby while choosing how to begin — the pitch, the cover art, the one-sentence promise. For Tavern Start that promise is: Begin at a warm tavern with a few ready characters and an immediate reason to act.
The card is content. It belongs in the file the way everything else does.
The play configuration is metadata, not content
But a launch also needs to know where the party begins, who they play, and what the opening beat is — a starting Location, the starting Characters, an opening message. That play configuration is not stored in the file's text. It is loaded as designation metadata alongside the file, and it cannot be written with the ordinary update tools.
So when you build a Game Start, do it in two deliberate halves:
- Write the card — name, image, description. Make the description a genuine pitch: the fantasy, the immediate reason to act, the genre it launches.
- Set the play configuration — the starting Location, the starting Character(s), and the opening. Use the game-start command, and read the game-start platform guide first — this is the one place where "point the field at the thing" is done through a command, not by editing prose.
What makes the two halves agree
The card promises a starting point; the configuration must deliver it. Tavern Start's card says warm tavern, and its configuration points at the Crosswater Wayhouse. When you build a launch:
- The starting Location must exist as a real Location file. Pointing at a name with no file behind it leaves the party in nothing.
- The starting Character(s) must exist as real Character files. A reference to a nonexistent character is the classic silent breakage — the card loads, the party has no one to play, and nothing in the file's text tells you why.
- The opening message should hand the party the floor. An opening that ends in a question, a tension, or a decision ("…What do you do first?") is a launch. An opening that ends in a narrated summary is a trap.
The one hard rule
Order of operations matters here more than anywhere: create the files you point at before you configure them. Only point a Game Start at a Location or Character after that file exists. Doing it the other way — configuring first, hoping to fill the target later — leaves the launch pointing at a hole you may forget to plug. The card is content you write; the configuration is a promise you keep.