How it works

Two halves, days apart. Everything that needs a keyboard happens before the night. What is left at the table is a screen you can read in the dark and drive with one thumb.

Start hosting

Before the night: prep

  1. Create the game

    Give the story a title, a premise, and the number of players you expect. That starting cast size is what the restack arithmetic is built on, which is why it is asked for first.

  2. Lay out the scenes

    Add the scenes you expect the evening to move through, in order. Each one holds your own notes: what is meant to happen, what the players are meant to feel, and what you will do when they go somewhere else entirely. These notes are yours — nothing ever shows them to a player.

  3. Write a questionnaire per character

    This is the heart of prep. Every character gets their own page of questions, written for them, whose answers become who they are. The builder keeps the questions in the order you want them read and tells you when a questionnaire is drifting long enough to lose the player filling it in.

  4. Print the paper

    Two exports. Player questionnaires, one page per character, to hand out at the start of the night. And a host reference sheet with your scenes and the restack numbers already worked out — so that if the battery dies, the evening does not.

At the table: session mode

One screen. It loads once and then runs entirely in the browser, so a basement with no signal is still a basement with a working app. It shows three things and nothing else.

  1. Where you are

    The current scene and your notes for it. One tap advances, one tap skips.

  2. Who is still standing

    Every character, and whether they are still in the story. One tap marks a removal.

  3. What happens when the tower falls

    The tool's one piece of real arithmetic, worked out in advance and waiting.

The arithmetic, and why it earns a screen

When the tower falls in Dread it is restacked, and the pulls that were owed get redistributed among the players still in the story. Working that out in a dark room, seconds after a character has died and while everyone is watching, is the most awkward thirty seconds of hosting.

So the tool does it instead. It shows how many pulls each remaining player owes, names who takes the remainder when the split is uneven, and refuses to show a raw number in the degenerate case near the end of a game where the arithmetic stops meaning anything. The same figures are printed on the host sheet, because the phone is the backup and the paper is the backup to the backup.

What it never does is decide anything. It does not simulate a pull, judge a success or a failure, or draw a tower. The tension in this game is physical — an unsteady hand, a held breath, a table of people watching a Jenga tower that has started to lean. A screen cannot reproduce that, and a tool that tried would be replacing the game instead of helping somebody run it.

Built for the room

  • Dark by default, with the first paint already black — no white flash across a candlelit table.
  • Everything at the table is one tap. If an action would open a keyboard, it belongs in prep instead.
  • Installs to a home screen and holds a screen wake lock, so the phone does not sleep every thirty seconds through a long stretch of pure roleplay.
  • The session screen keeps working offline. Tonight's state is saved on the device and synced back when there is a network to sync over.

Getting started

Make an account, create a game, and give yourself an unhurried hour with the questionnaires. That hour is the whole tool: the questions you write are what the evening turns out to be made of.

Credits

Dread was created by Epidiah Ravachol and woodelf, written by Epidiah Ravachol, and developed, edited and published by The Impossible Dream. Every good idea in the game is theirs. This tool only carries the paperwork.

Original concept
Epidiah Ravachol and woodelf
Writing
Epidiah Ravachol
Development, editing and additional writing
The Impossible Dream
Copy editing
Jere Foley
Layout and cover design
woodelf
Illustrations
Christy Schaefer, Taylor Winder and Jill Krynicki

The Impossible Dream is Nat "woodelf" Barmore, Akira Barnes, Dan Bongert, Rebecca Kinraide and Epidiah Ravachol.

Dread text copyright 2005 The Impossible Dream, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5.

Dread Host is an unofficial tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to The Impossible Dream, and it contains none of the book's text. If you are going to run this game, buy it from the people who made it.