--- title: "How to share lore with players without spoiling it" description: "The three-layer split — what the world believes, what the party has earned, and the one line that stays yours — plus the defaults that keep a secret from leaking at 11pm." last_updated: 2026-08-03 --- # How to share lore with players without spoiling it Plain-text Markdown mirror of [https://storywright.io/guides/spoiler-safe-lore](https://storywright.io/guides/spoiler-safe-lore). A world nobody can read is not a world, it is a folder. Here is how to give players real lore to dig into while the twists stay yours. ## The short answer Split every entry into what the world says and what is true. Players get the first freely — rumours, reputations, the official history, what a scholar in the capital would tell them. The second is yours until play earns it. Almost every GM does the opposite: they keep the whole entry private because part of it is secret, and the players end up knowing nothing about a world you spent months building. ## Three layers, not two - **Public.** What any reasonably informed person in the setting knows. The duke is generous, the mine closed in the plague year, the north road is unsafe after dark. This layer should be generous to the point of feeling almost indiscreet — it is the layer that makes the world feel inhabited. - **Earned.** True things the party has actually learned in play. This is the layer GMs forget to maintain, and it is the one that makes players feel their investigation mattered. Move a fact here the session it is discovered, not "later". - **Yours.** The twist, the real motive, the thing under the mine. Small — much smaller than most GMs assume. If a third of your world is in this layer you are not protecting a secret, you are withholding the setting. ## Write the public layer as a lie people believe The best public lore is not a redacted version of the truth — it is what the world sincerely believes, including where that is wrong. "The mine closed in the plague year" is far better than "the mine closed [REDACTED]", because the first is playable: it gives players something to act on, and it can be discovered to be false. Redaction advertises a secret and gives nothing to grip. A believed falsehood is both cover and hook. ## The rules that keep it safe 1. **Default to private, publish deliberately.** A new entry starts GM-only. Deciding to publish is a small, conscious act. The reverse default — public until you remember to hide it — leaks exactly once, and once is enough. 2. **Never un-publish as a fix.** Players have already read it, and retracting confirms it mattered. If something goes out early, absorb it: make it true, or make it the lie the party now half-believes. A world that never corrects itself in public is one players stop trusting. 3. **Keep the secret in a different place from the public text.** Not italics, not a "GM only" heading inside the same document. A boundary you have to remember to respect is a boundary you will eventually forget at 11pm while sharing your screen. 4. **Promote on discovery, in the moment.** The instant the party learns something, move it to the earned layer. Do it at the table or in the wind-down; a backlog of un-promoted discoveries is how players end up re-asking questions they already answered. ## A worked example The Greywater mine. Public: it closed in the plague year, the Vance family still owns the rights, and locals say the water tastes wrong downstream. All three are true, all three are printable, and any of them can start a session. Earned, after the party talked to the old foreman: the closure order was signed three weeks before the first plague death. Yours: the Vances closed it because they found something and it is still down there. Notice the shape — the public layer is the largest, it is entirely true, and it already implies a question. The secret is one sentence. > A useful test: if a new player read only your public lore, would they have opinions? Not questions — opinions. A world you can have an opinion about is one worth playing in. ## Questions GMs ask **How do I share campaign lore without spoiling the plot?** Separate what the world believes from what is true. Publish the first generously — rumours, official history, reputations — and keep only the twist itself private. Most GMs over-classify: they hide a whole entry because one line in it is secret, and the players end up with no setting to engage with at all. **What should players be able to read about my world?** Anything a reasonably informed person in the setting would know, plus everything the party has actually discovered in play. That is usually eighty or ninety percent of what you have written. The genuinely secret layer — the real motive, the thing behind the door — is much smaller than it feels while you are writing it. **What do I do if I accidentally reveal a secret to my players?** Do not retract it — they have read it, and pulling it back confirms it was important. Absorb it instead: treat it as true and move the surprise somewhere else, or recast it as something the party now half-believes and can be wrong about. Structurally, prevent the repeat by keeping GM-only material in a different field from player-facing text rather than in the same document. ## Where Storywright fits Every entity in Storywright has a player-facing side and GM-only notes, in separate fields rather than separate paragraphs, so the boundary is structural instead of a habit you have to keep. Entries are private by default and revealed deliberately; what the party has learned is theirs to browse whenever they like, and the rest simply is not sent to their browsers. Free to start, and free for your players forever. ## Related - [NPC notes](/guides/npc-notes.md) - [Session recaps](/guides/session-recaps.md) - [Manual](/manual.md) - [Full site index](/sitemap.md)