Core Concepts
Purple Cat has a handful of nouns. Learning them makes everything else obvious.
Getting around
The rail down the left edge is the navigation: Home, Play, Campaigns, Characters, Library, Systems. Under whichever is lit, its pages appear indented — a campaign's Overview / Maps / Characters / Edit, or Characters / Parties / Factions. The rail is wide with labels; collapse it to icons with the button at its foot, where Search (⌘/Ctrl+P), Settings and your profile also live. Your profile's menu has Notifications, and its picture shows how many are unread.
On a map (Play) the rail is always icons, and a bar runs across the top: buttons on the left for the left-hand panels (Me, System, Library, Map, Campaign), the map's name in the middle — click it to switch maps or see who is connected — and buttons on the right for the right-hand panels (Chat, Initiative, Combat Log, Transcript). The tool palette runs down the map's right edge, against the right-hand panel when one is open.
On a phone the rail becomes a Menu button on a bar along the bottom; on a map the bar has Map, Chat and More (the left sidebar), the tool palette is pinned to the map's upper right, and the token you play gets a bar of its own above it. See Playing on a Phone.
Campaign
The top-level container. A campaign owns its maps, characters, chat log, parties, factions, and settings, and has a set of members — the people who can see it. The person who created it is the owner, usually the GM.
Almost every URL in the app is scoped to a campaign.
Map
A play area: a grid, a background, and everything on it. A campaign can have many maps, and you switch between them freely. Maps can be hidden from players while you prepare them.
Maps carry layers, drawings, fog of war, vision-blocking geometry, and lighting.
→ Maps
Token
A piece on a map. A token has artwork, a position, a size, and a bag of properties (hit points, armour class, whatever your system uses). It may be linked to a character, in which case it reflects that character's sheet.
Tokens have owners — which player controls them — and permissions, which control who else may act on them.
→ Tokens
Character
A character sheet. Characters exist independently of maps: you make one, and then put a token for it onto whichever map you like. A character can belong to several campaigns.
What the sheet looks like — which sections, which fields, which rules — comes from the system.
System and Module
A system is a set of rules — System 8, System 5, D&D 5e. A module is the software package that teaches Purple Cat a system: how to lay out its sheet, what its dice do, what content it ships (spells, monsters, equipment).
Modules also provide non-rules features, like asset packs and AI tools.
Impersonation
Purple Cat distinguishes who you are acting as from what you have selected.
- Clicking a token impersonates it. You are now that token: its actions are in your action bar, its sheet opens with C, and its dice are the dice you roll.
- Shift-clicking selects. Selection is for moving, nudging, and deleting.
This trips up newcomers, and it is deliberate: in play you spend far more time acting as a token than rearranging tokens.
Action
A button on a token that does something: rolls an attack, applies damage, heals, changes artwork. Simple actions are configured in a form; complex ones are small JavaScript programs.
→ Actions · Action API
Party
A named group of characters, used for organising who is in the adventuring group and for bulk operations like adding everyone to a map.
Faction
A group that characters and parties belong to, with relationships to other factions. Useful for tracking allegiance and hostility.
Library
Your stash of reusable art: maps, tokens, objects, and textures. Anything you upload can be saved here and reused across campaigns.
→ The Library · Artwork
Trash
Deleting is reversible. Deleted campaigns, maps, characters, tokens, and drawings go to the trash and are recoverable for 30 days, after which they are permanently purged.