How Does Scabard Help Game Masters Keep Secrets from Players?

Scabard keeps GM-only material out of player view by treating secrecy as a property of the content itself, not a separate document. You write hidden pages, secret notes, and spoiler-free connections inside the same campaign world your players see, and Scabard controls what each audience can access. This works if you are running a campaign with mysteries, unrevealed NPC motives, or behind-the-scenes history you want to develop before the table learns it.

The core mechanism: visibility is attached to the page

Scabard's model is that your campaign is a connected web of people, places, factions, events, secrets, maps, and history — not a pile of pages. Because each element is a page with its own visibility, you decide per item whether it is GM-only or player-facing. A faction page can exist, be linked from other pages, and still stay hidden until you reveal it.

This differs from keeping a separate "GM notes" file. In a separate file, the secret is invisible to players but also disconnected from the world it belongs to. In Scabard, the secret lives in the same structure, so when you finally reveal it, the connections are already in place.

What the secrecy tools do

Scabard's campaign-growth section names four situations that map directly to keeping secrets:

• Hidden pages — pages only you can see until you choose to reveal them.
• Secret notes — notes attached to the campaign that stay out of player view.
• Spoiler-free connections — links between pages that do not expose the hidden content behind them. A player can see that two things are related without seeing why.
• Selective sharing with collaborators — you can share your world with trusted co-GMs or collaborators without accidentally spoiling it for your players.

The practical effect: you can build a mystery in public-facing structure while the answer sits in a hidden page, and the two stay linked for your own reference.

Keeping secrets while sharing with collaborators

The risk with co-GMs and collaborators is not players reading your notes — it is a collaborator seeing something they should not, or a player-facing share accidentally including GM material. Scabard addresses this by letting you share your world with trusted collaborators separately from what players see. The same visibility control that hides a page from players also governs what a collaborator can reach, so you do not have to maintain two versions of the campaign.

Revealing information at the right time

Because hidden content is already connected to the visible world, revealing it is a visibility change rather than a copy-and-paste job. When the moment arrives, you make the page or note visible and the connections you built earlier are already there. This is the payoff of the connected-web approach: you prepare the reveal while it is still secret, and the world does not need to be restructured when the secret comes out.

What to check before relying on it

• Confirm which visibility settings apply to pages versus notes, since the two are described separately.
• If you share with collaborators, verify what a collaborator account can actually see before inviting someone who is also a player.
• Scabard offers a free sign-up and a separate pricing page, so check current plan limits on sharing and collaborators before committing a large campaign.