Playing Loreweaver — a five-minute start

For players. If you are the one hosting, read this first anyway — you play too — then Running a table.

You do not need to learn a command language to play. Type what your character does, in ordinary words, and the Keeper takes it from there. Everything below is what makes the table readable: how to roll when you want to, how to tell whether you succeeded, and what all those numbers in the corner mean.

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1. Get in

Install a client (see the README): Loreweaver Studio, the desktop app, is the recommended one — the graphical play surface with live panels and the keeper screens; the terminal client is one line to install and runs anywhere with a terminal. Open Studio, or run loreweaver, and paste the two things your Keeper sent you:

• a ticket — the server's peer-to-peer address, a long string starting with endpoint;
• an invite key — yours alone, and it is also your identity: there are no accounts and no passwords.

Pick a nickname, press Enter. If the connection drops it reconnects on its own and picks up where it left off, so a flaky café Wi-Fi costs you a few seconds, not the session.

If the screen looks broken on Windows — mangled borders, wrong colours, no mouse — you are in the legacy console host. Run loreweaver inside Windows Terminal or WezTerm instead.

2. Make a character

The character screen offers four routes, and they all end in the same place: the rules validate the sheet, and an invalid one does not get saved no matter where it came from.

If the Keeper has imported a module with a pre-generated cast, there is a fifth route: claim one.

.pc                    list the module's cast and who has claimed whom
.pc claim 顾晚棠        take that character as yours
.pc release            give it back (the sheet resets to pristine)

3. Six things worth knowing

Roll your own dice. .r (or /roll) takes any dice expression:

.r 3d6+2
Roll: 3d6+2 = [4, 4, 1]+2 = 11

4d6kh3 keeps the highest three; 2d20kl1 keeps the lowest; 5d6! explodes; 7d10>=8 counts successes. .rh rolls the same way but the result comes back only to you.

Make a check. .ra (/check) rolls against a skill on your sheet, resolved by the rule system your table is running:

.ra spot hidden
Check Spot Hidden: target 25 (effective 25), roll 13 -> Success

A difficulty word in front raises the bar — the target you must beat shrinks, and the line tells you so:

.ra hard spot hidden
Check Spot Hidden: target 70 (effective 35), roll 13 -> Extreme Success

Skill names accept aliases in both languages: spot hidden, spot, notice, perception, 侦查, 侦察, 发现 all reach the same skill.

Read the result, not the number. Success tiers come from the rule system's own ladder, not from a hardcoded table. Under CoC 7e a d100 check grades like this:

Higher tiers are not just "more successful" — a module can gate a clue behind a hard success specifically. That is why the line prints the tier and not only pass/fail. A different rule system prints a different set of tiers, with its own names for them, because that table is data shipped with the system.

A failed check should move the story, not stop it. If you are stuck after a failure, say what you try instead. Being pushed onto a worse plan is the game working, not the game breaking.

Your sheet. .st shows it; .st <skill>=<value> edits it, if your Keeper allows edits:

.st 力量=60             = assigns exactly that number
.st HP-=4              -= subtracts, += adds
.st mod=-3             = is the only way to write a negative value
.st STR60              the older glued form still works
.st spot hidden 70     so do spelled-out skill aliases
.st 侦查70              and canonical names

In the older form a leading +/- on the number means relative (HP-4 takes four off), which is why an absolute negative needs the = form. One .st uses one form — don't mix = assignments and glued ones in the same command.

Everything you write is validated against the rule system — the engine will refuse a number the system does not permit, whoever asked for it.

Catch up on the story. .recap prints the campaign so far, spoiler-free:

.recap

The recap is a real document the Keeper can edit, and its player view is produced by the same projection that keeps every other secret out of your client — keeper annotations about what you missed are not in there at all. Just joined a campaign in progress? Start here.

4. The screen

┌─ ◷ 03:12 · scene · round 2 ────────── ● online · ctx 34% · cache 71% ─┐
│                                                    │ sidebar          │
│  the story log — narration, NPC                    │ party roster     │
│  lines, dice results, handouts                     │ your resources   │
│                                                    │ module panels    │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────┘
  > type here

• The top bar carries the in-game clock and scene, the combat round, a connection light, and the table's token spend. ctx is how full the Keeper's context window is right now — when it climbs, the engine folds old history into a summary on its own, so you do not have to care. cache is the share of the prompt that was served from the provider's prompt cache; higher is cheaper.
• The sidebar shows who is at the table (AI companions included), your own vitals as live meters, and any panels the module ships — a festival calendar, a tide gauge, a case board. Panels are drawn from the same data the server sent you, so nothing appears there that you were not meant to see.
• Media — handouts, portraits, maps — arrive inline. Select one and press o to open it in your system viewer. Some modules hide real clues in pictures; that is intended.

5. Keys

6. Commands you might actually want

.help lists every command your table has. These are the ones players reach for:

Both dialects work at once: the Chinese SealDice style (.ra 侦查, .st 力量50, .sc 1/1d6) and the English Avrae style (/roll 4d6kh3, /check). Use whichever your fingers know. The complete reference, including everything the Keeper can do, is the player command manual.

7. What the AI can and cannot do to you

Worth knowing, because it changes how you play:

• It cannot fake a roll. Every check goes through the dice engine. The Keeper narrates the result; it does not choose it.
• It cannot quietly change your sheet. Every write is validated against the rule system, whoever requested it — you, the Keeper, or the model.
• NPCs do not have X-ray vision. An NPC or AI companion is built from its own record and sheet and nothing else, so it cannot know a secret it was never given. The Keeper itself is shown the module's secrets — it has to be, to run a mystery — and is instructed not to repeat them. That last part is a behavioural constraint, measured by a nightly evaluation, not a structural guarantee. If a Keeper ever hands you something it obviously should not have, that is a bug worth reporting.
• The dice do not care about the plot. You can lose, and a lot of the tension comes from that.

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Next: running a table · authoring a module · the full command manual