The Prelude Editor

A prelude is an optional cinematic intro for your project: a short run of full-screen slides that plays once when a player starts a game, before they pick a character. Use it for a title sequence, an opening crawl, a tone-setting scene, or a stylish content note — anything you want every player to experience before the story begins.

You build it in Project Settings → Prelude. Click Build Prelude and a full-screen editor opens with a single Cover screen to start from. Once a prelude exists, the settings page shows it as a card with its screen count, plus buttons to edit or remove it. Removing it deletes all of its screens permanently.

When players see it

The prelude plays the moment a player enters a fresh game, before the lobby where they pick a Game Start and a character. It plays once per game: a refresh mid-lobby won't replay it, and after it finishes the lobby shows a small Replay prelude button for anyone who wants to watch again.

While it plays, the player gets a quiet progress bar, a Continue button, a volume control, and a close button on the first screen (Back on later ones), so anyone can skip straight to character select.

Building the flow

The editor is a canvas: each screen is a card showing a live preview of the slide, connected in play order. Screens play in sequence — drag cards to rearrange the layout, or drag out of a screen's connection dot to branch. Selecting a card surfaces Edit, Preview, and Delete actions, and double-clicking opens the screen's editing form.

• Add screen opens a gallery of screen types, grouped into Display (screens players read or watch) and Input (screens that collect a response).

• Tidy re-flows the canvas layout after heavy rearranging.

• Preview plays the whole flow start to finish in a device frame, exactly as a player will see it. Each screen also has its own single-screen preview.

• Done saves and closes. Saving from inside a screen's editor checkpoints your progress without leaving the editor.

Choice screens can branch: each option gets its own connection dot, so different answers can route to different screens. Paths can reconverge by pointing multiple branches at the same target, and a "connect all" handle wires every option to one screen in a single drag.

Screen types

Display screens carry the cinematic weight:

• Cover — a full-screen title over a background image, with an optional eyebrow line and subtitle. New preludes start with one.

• Statement — a heading and body copy.

• Reading — long-form prose in a scrollable reading column, for lore drops and opening crawls.

• Video — a full-screen video clip (up to 30 seconds) that advances when it ends.

Input screens ask the player something:

• Choice — a question with selectable options, laid out as a list, cards, a grid, or a dropdown. Options can allow multiple selections, carry images and info text, and be written by hand or added from real project files (handy for showcasing your cast).

• Short Text Answer, Long Text Answer, Number, and Rating — free-text, numeric, and 1–N scale answers.

• Point Allocation Stats — players spend a configurable point pool across stat scores, with editable score costs.

• Fixed Array Stats — players assign a fixed set of scores (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 by default) to stats.

• Rolled Stats — players roll dice for their scores. You control the dice count and sides, how many dice to keep (highest or lowest), rerolls, a flat modifier, and whether each stat rolls its own total or players assign one rolled set.

One caveat: a prelude is presentation, not a form. Answers given on input screens are discarded when the prelude ends — they invite participation, but nothing is saved to the game. The same screens also power character-creation flows elsewhere in Craft, which is where answers (and the AI instruction field on each input screen) actually drive generation.

Look and pacing

Every screen has a Background section — an image, a gradient, or a solid color, plus a vignette slider — and a Style section for text anchoring (lower-left or centered) and an accent color. Pacing lives in each screen's Advance section: wait for the player (Manual), auto-continue after a set number of seconds (Timer), or continue when the video ends. A per-screen transition sets how it enters: Slide, Fade, Zoom, Rise, or None.

Fonts and music

The header's Settings panel holds flow-wide defaults. Typography sets the heading font, body font, size, and weight from a curated font catalog, and any screen can override it individually. Background music is a single track that plays continuously across the whole prelude, with a loop toggle; each screen can also layer its own audio cue over the music while that screen is up. Tracks come from your Studio music library — music generated in Craft — rather than arbitrary uploads.

Preludes and Game Starts

Preludes and Game Starts split the opening of a game cleanly. The prelude is pre-game presentation: the same cinematic plays for every player, once, before they've chosen anything. A Game Start is the story's actual opening: the starting location, which characters are selectable, and how the GM begins the first scene. The full order is prelude, then the lobby (pick a Game Start and character), then the GM's opening turn. If you want something to happen in the fiction — a scripted first message, one-time setup — that belongs in a Game Start, not the prelude.

Coding agents can author preludes too: in a synced workspace the prelude lives in .craft/project.json under settings.preludeFlow, and craft check validates that it's a runnable flow before you push. See The Craft CLI.

See also

• Game Starts. The openings players pick in the lobby.

• Starting Your First Game. Launching a session from your own project.

• Playing a Published Project. What the whole flow looks like from the player's side.