How to play Crescent Moon online (or any other tabletop RPG, really)
Gather round, children, for today I will teach you how to play Crescent Moon through the World Wide Web.
Why how etc.
Due to its use of physical items and memories, a digital setup for Crescent Moon isn’t as straightforward as it might be in other games. Some routes you might think of are:
- Dropping the physical card aspect.
- Creating a character keeper in google sheets.
- Have everyone print out their character sheet and items separately and use the internet for… the talking part only.
As Of Today, I Can Proudly Proclaim * that playing Crescent without physical tokens is hard. Not because of the items (which are half the charm anyway haven’t you seen how colorful they are) but because of the collaborative nature of some key materials like the worldbuilding tools, the link sheet, and the memories. When making choices that pertain to the whole group, it’s useful to have everyone on the same page, literally.
I’m convinced your solution is the best one please continue.
Of course. My go-to platform for playing RPGs that need ongoing collaboration over shared materials is Miro.
Miro is an online whiteboard app. Apparently a lot of business grown-ups use it. But it will serve us well.
Is it free?
Yes, we’ll get to that later.
How do you use it?
- The one of you who is the most tech-savvy will create an account first. Everyone will create an account later as they are invited to the “team”.
- The person who sets the account will go on to set up a team. The site will assume you’re a business person but you can let them know this is not the case by stating your true intentions.
3. After Miro finishes asking you about your business team, you’ll land here:
A. Boards
The most important part. With a free account, you gain access to 3 boards. In them you’ll be able to host all of your play materials to use during a session.
B. Team list and settings
If you like Miro and decide to keep using it over time with different games and groups, you’ll need to learn how to manage the team list. I’ll go over common pitfalls and tips.
C. Other boards
I will blow your mind and teach you how to set up a pyramidal scheme of multiple teams so Julia can do her Quiet Year oneshot without deleting one of your boards.
On today’s post, I’ll only be covering how to use the boards, as they are enough of a long topic as it is. Tips on points B and C will be shared. In the future.
> Okay, let’s go !
Boards — the basics.
Go ahead and make a new board (or use the default one). The first thing you will notice is an infinite canvas that stretches into the void. Take a few seconds to let its borderless horizons of possibility sink in.
The main thing you will want to do first is to add PDFs to the board. Miro has pretty powerful PDF capabilities, which will let you:
- Drag-and-drop a PDF directly and visualize it by turning pages.
(Careful though! Turning pages is not public, each person can flip the document individually)
- Directly extract individual pages from the PDF.
Annotating & Locking
To annotate, you will want to lock first the material you’re about to write over, so you don’t accidentally move it.
Using pencils
Besides being able to type, your secondary tool for our dicey purposes will be the pencil, which you can use to draw and highlight over a material.
Frames & Indexes.
Third and last as far as basics go: Use frames to group together several elements (read: a sheet) and move them around easily.
Frames will let you move a whole bunch of stuff without needing to group it all together first.
Indexes, on the other hand, let you jump to each of your frames by clicking on them. This will come in handy as your board grows bigger. Here is an example from a previous game:
Some minor quality-of-life considerations
- If you want to drag the mouse to select several elements at once, you’ll need to keep SHIFT pressed (Though as previously stated, it is easier to just move the frame).
- To move a frame, click and drag on the name displayed at the top. Otherwise you will just scroll through the board.
- If you find yourself accidentally moving an element over and over (like a text box, for example) consider locking it in by selecting the element and clicking on the lock icon (You can even block frames this way).
- To navigate the board without accidentally moving unlocked objects, keep SPACE pressed while dragging the mouse.
- Everything will usually look pixelated while you’re zoomed out. To visualize a graphic properly, zoom in, wait a couple of seconds, and the content will load just fine.
A.1. Okay, but how do you Crescent Moon, though?
EDIT: Ema from the future here. I’ve now discovered how to make templates in Miro. If you wish to access a ready-to-use board, simply buy the game on itch.io and download the file named ‘MIRO Play template’. If you own the game but don’t have it on itch, message me and I’ll forward you a link. The template looks real pretty.
Yes, right. The Crescent Moon.
- Organization-wise, I like to have the character sheets at the center, the shared sheets on the right side, and the session-notes & rules reference on the left.
- Try to keep things as horizontal and close to each other as possible; this will help people in smaller screens so they don’t have to do a ton of scrolling.
- By that logic, the more important something is, the closer it should be to the center of your board.
Cool but what about the item .
When it comes down to placing down items in your character sheet, you have two options:
- You either download the file listed as “Item & Condition Cards (web)” in Crescent Moon’s itch.io page.
- Or you use Miro’s note function to make them yourself.
My advice: For regular items and trinkets it will be way faster to make the items with a note. Like this:
Whereas with star shards and sparks, it’s worth to look for the object so you have the description available right away.
- ! That said, you unfortunately can’t make 2-slot items with a note. For that, I recommend you make a shape instead.
- To save yourself the cosmic horror that is having the other players frantically try to find their items over a google drive folder, I recommend you at least paste the star shards and sparks into the board prior to starting the game, so that it’s just a matter of copying and pasting inside the app. (You can also use the print template for regular items this way, if you prefer that!)
- Speaking of items, memories work the same way! Make a note for them and place them into the character sheet.
Advanced delving
I’m impressed by how far you’ve come. If you’ve been paying attention and following the steps with me, by now you should be able to do pretty much everything you’ll need for a game- having learned in a day what took me a couple of months and games to figure out.
Before letting you fly to your heart’s content, though, there is one last thing I would like to introduce you to: screen sharing.
If you click on your little picture person, you will see these two options pop up: “Bring everyone to me”, and “Bring to me …” . They will allow you to bring other people to see exactly what you’re seeing in the app, and will be one of your most useful tools as a facilitator.
So, when you’re looking over a particular mechanic, map, or piece of the game, you can either bring everyone else to it, or bring a specific person for whom the visual is relevant to or is having trouble navigating the board themselves. Each person that you bring to the screen will then be able to follow you along as you move through the app, or break out of your screen by scrolling away.
And that’s it for today ! Miro is a very complete tool, and what I have laid out so far is only the tip of the iceberg — that said, the best way to learn will be by using it. Hopefully, under such excellent guidance as mine, you’ll be able to jump off to a great start right away.
Tune in next time to learn how to manage the team and set up different accounts. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them below. (this thing has comments in it, right?)
until next time,
ema
