The Demo Campaign and the Tutorial

Far Table ships with a small adventure already built: maps, encounters, clues, and artwork. It exists so your first hour is spent learning the app instead of authoring content you do not care about yet. This chapter is for the DM. Players never see any of it.

Trying the demo

On the campaign list, tap Try the demo campaign.

• On a fresh install, with no campaigns yet, the offer sits under the empty-state text as a button.
• Once you have campaigns of your own, it stays as a standing row in the list until you import it.

There is no confirmation step. Tapping the offer is the intent. A spinner runs while the adventure loads, and then it is a campaign in your list like any other.

The demo can never overwrite anything you have made. Every install mints its own fresh copy, with its own internal identifiers, so it cannot collide with your campaigns or with anyone else's copy of the demo. If you tap the offer again after importing it, nothing is duplicated: a short message tells you it is already on this device, and you land in the copy you already have.

That matters for one thing in particular. Only a genuinely new import restarts the tutorial at step 1. If you want to run the whole guided track again from the beginning, delete the demo campaign first (chapter 6, Campaigns, covers deleting), then tap the offer again.

The guided tutorial track

Once the demo is imported, the app teaches through amber boxes that appear next to the control you are being asked to use. A box on the Encounters tab asks you to open an encounter. A box on the staging screen asks you to set the scale. Each box shows:

• An eyebrow line reading TUTORIAL, the rung number, and the step number within that rung.
• The instruction itself, in a sentence or two.
• A live checklist. Each requirement ticks itself off the moment the app sees you do it, so you can always see what is still open.
• Sometimes a Take me there button that jumps you to the right screen.
• A Skip tutorial button.

Tap anywhere on the eyebrow row to roll a box up to just its header. The step number and the checklist tally stay visible while it is rolled up, so nothing goes quiet. Tap the header again to open it.

The track runs in three rungs, each one a complete piece of prep:

1. The bridge of the Mossy Maw. Open the encounter, stage it on its map, set the map scale, place both trolls, and save.
2. The Highwood Road Block. Study the bundled painting full-screen, then build the ambush it shows: orcs and goblins added to the encounter, a portrait given to the non-player character Cormac, the scene staged, lights on the burning barricade, then out to the exploration map to place your first pins.
3. The Thrall Barracks. You create the encounters yourself this time, once from a photographed hand-drawn map and once from painted art, learning both ways of telling the app where the walls are, plus doors, lights, a secret door, and a walk down a dark corridor with darkvision turned on.

When you finish a rung, a box congratulates you and points at the next one. Tap Dismiss to clear it.

Every rung runs entirely offline. No session, no players, no network. Rung 1 ends with the fight staged and saved, ready to run later. Running a fight needs live players, and chapter 4, Host Your First Session, walks you through that.

What the boxes will and will not do

• Boxes are guidance, never gates. Nothing is disabled, nothing is blocked, and you can ignore a box entirely and go do something else. If you run ahead and do a later step first, the app records it.
• Skip tutorial turns off the whole track, not just the box in front of you. There is no per-step skip.
• The track only ever appears on the demo campaign. Your own campaigns never show tutorial boxes.
• If you wander off, the Atlas shows a one-line amber reminder naming the rung, the step, and where to go to pick it back up.

Tutorial boxes versus everyday tips

These are two different voices. The everyday tips are purple one-time notes that appear the first time you reach a given screen, all through the app. The tutorial speaks in amber boxes with a step number.

While the tutorial track is running, the everyday tips are silenced, so only one thing is teaching you at a time. Your own Show onboarding tips setting on the Session tab is left exactly as you set it underneath (chapter 2, Getting Started, covers that checkbox). Finish or skip the track and the tips come back on their own.