World Building
Quests
A quest tracks one of the party's goals from the moment it's proposed to however it ends, with a step-by-step timeline of everything that happens along the way.
Quests live in the Compendium alongside entities and notes. Each one is built from three parts: a hook, a goal, and an optional reward.
Hook
How the quest began: what drew the party in.
Goal
A short title for what must be done, plus a description of how the party will know it's met.
Reward
What is promised for completing the quest, and the details of that promise. Optional — plenty of quests are undertaken for reasons other than payment.
Everything that happens over the course of a quest is recorded as a step: a type paired with a note describing what happened. Steps are added in order and shown as a timeline on the quest's document.
Progress steps
Discovery, milestone, complication, clock tick, encounter, atmosphere, and decision. These move a quest forward without ending it.
Ending steps
Completed, failed, and abandoned. A quest can have at most one ending step, and it has to be the last one on the timeline.
Editing the timeline
Any step can be edited or deleted after the fact. Deleting the ending step reopens the quest, which is the intended way to undo a premature ending.
A quest's status is never set directly. It's derived from the timeline every time the quest is read, so it's always consistent with what actually happened.
Proposed
The quest has no steps yet. It has been created but nothing has happened.
Active
The quest has at least one step and no ending step.
Completed, Failed, or Abandoned
The quest's most recent ending step decides which of these it lands on.
The Quests list in the Compendium groups quests into Proposed, Active, and Ended sections using this same derived status.
You don't have to log every quest by hand. As each scene of a recorded session is saved, Realms of Shod reads it for the threads your table is following. A new hook in play becomes a quest, and an existing quest gets a new step, or an ending, when the scene moves it forward.
New quests
A quest that was only offered or mentioned starts out Proposed, with no steps. If the party is already working toward it in the scene where it came up, it starts Active with its first step.
Who and what is in the scene
Only quests tied to characters, places, or other entities present in the scene are considered. A player's character counts as present only when that player attended the session.
Tags
Mechanic, motive, and source are filled in once, when the quest is created. A tag someone chose by hand is never overwritten.
Cost
Quest extraction is a Coin feature charged to the session, like entity extraction and scene recaps. Quests you make by hand are free.
Only scenes saved after quest extraction launched are processed. Older sessions aren't backfilled.
Quests share the same access model as entities. Each quest is either shared with the whole realm or with specific members, chosen in the quest form.
Public to Realm
Every current and future realm member can see the quest. On a public realm, this also reaches signed-in guests and your audience.
Specific members
Turn Public to Realm off and choose exactly which members can view the quest. The quest's creator always keeps their own access.
Reveal Quest
From a quest's menu, turns Public to Realm on for that quest in one action, the same way an entity is revealed.
A quest found by automatic extraction is shared with the players who attended the session that created it, plus the realm creator. If every member of the realm attended that session, it's Public to Realm instead.
After that, visibility only changes when someone edits it. Automatic progress and endings never reveal a quest to anyone new.
A quest can link any number of entities involved in it: the merchant who hired the party, the location they need to reach, the item they're after. Linked entities are shown grouped by type alongside the quest and give you a quick path back to each one's own record.
Creating a quest, whether by hand, through the API, or via an import, adds a marker to the realm's gamestream so the party sees when a new quest enters play.
Quests are included in Compendium exports using the V4 format, each one carrying its hook, goal, reward, tags, linked entities, and full step timeline. Re-importing the same file updates existing quests and steps in place rather than duplicating them.
See Import / Export for the full schema reference.
Quests are fully accessible via the REST API and the MCP server.
Quests API — list, get, create, update, and delete quests, and add, update, or delete individual steps, with Bearer token authentication.
MCP tools — list_quests, get_quest, save_quest, delete_quest, and quest_step are available to any connected AI assistant.