Game Master FAQ

The questions we get asked most often, answered plainly. If yours isn't here, Contact us in the avatar menu reaches a real person.

What does Sled Dog cost?

Running one party as GM is free, forever, and playing is always free. Beyond that: what the supporter tier adds, how the annual and Founding tiers differ, and how to cancel.

Is Sled Dog official?

No. Sled Dog is an independent, fan-made tool created by Pup Pup Games. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or officially connected to Lampblack & Brimstone or Jeremy Strandberg, the creators of Stonetop.

It's a companion to the game, not a licensed edition of it and not a replacement for it — which is also the reason the artwork and the rules text aren't in the box. That's the next question.

Why don't you include the game system's artwork and content?

Because we don't have the licence for it. Stonetop and Blades in the Dark are copyrighted works — their illustrations, their move text, their adventures, their setting material — owned by their creators. Shipping any of it inside a commercial app would need a rights agreement we don't hold, and we'd rather build something we can honestly stand behind than quietly reprint someone else's book.

So Sled Dog ships our own content and placeholder art to get you started: enough to build a character, stock a steading, and run a session on day one, written by us or drawn from what the publishers have released for community use. Everything else is a slot waiting for your copy of the book.

That means two things in practice:

You still need the rulebook. Sled Dog is a companion, not a replacement — it does the bookkeeping, you bring the game.

Everything we ship is replaceable. No image and no text entry is baked in:

If you own the book, drop the real art and the real wording in, and your table sees the real thing.

Why do you use AI art?

It's an economic decision, not an artistic one. We're a small studio and we can't afford to commission original illustrations for every class, season, and steading in the app — and the alternative wasn't "hire an artist", it was "ship grey boxes".

We'd rather be upfront about that than pretend otherwise. It's also exactly why every image is replaceable: the art we ship is scaffolding for your table's art, whether that's the licensed originals from the book, something you commissioned, or a photo of the map you drew on a napkin.

Can I stop players editing characters that aren't theirs?

Yes — and that's the default. Party → Settings → Player permissions → Let players edit each other's characters. It ships off, meaning each player can edit only their own character. You, as GM, can always edit everyone's sheet — with one exception, below.

Turn it on and any member of the party can edit any character in it. That's useful for a table that shares bookkeeping, or when someone's playing two characters, but it's opt-in for a reason.

The same panel has a second toggle, Let players delete world, notes, and steading-asset entries, also off by default: players can add and edit shared world content but not delete it.

Both are enforced server-side by database policies, not just hidden in the interface — turning a toggle off genuinely prevents the write.

Is there anything on a character sheet I can't see?

Yes — a player's own notebook, on their Notes tab. It's the one part of the sheet that's theirs alone: as the notebook itself puts it, "Only you can read these — not your GM, not the rest of your party" — and that's literal on all three verbs. You can't read it, edit it, or delete it. Everything else on the sheet — including that same character's bonds, which live on the same tab — you can read and edit as normal.

It's a deliberate exception, not a bug: a notebook the GM can read is a notebook players write differently.

Can players upload their own character portraits?

Only if you let them. Party → Settings → the avatar block has a toggle for it. When it's off, players fall back to the class portrait and you control the art for the whole table.

How do I report a bug?

Avatar menu → Report a bug. That opens our support desk with a form. If you can, include what you were doing and the version number from the bottom of any page — it tells us the exact build you hit.

How do I request a new feature?

Avatar menu → Request a feature. Check the roadmap first (it's the menu item just above) — the thing you want may already be queued, and adding your voice to an existing card helps more than a duplicate.

Where can I see the product roadmap?

Avatar menu → Roadmap. It's a public board showing what's in progress, what's next, and what we've shipped. No account needed.

How do I submit community content?

Community content lives in a public repository, and anything merged there becomes available to every table that switches on third-party content. Each game has its own set of kinds — arcana, items, steading improvements, NPCs, groups, locations, followers, and expeditions for Stonetop; scores, factions, NPCs, districts, and items for Forged in the Dark. Any kind can ship art alongside it: drop the images in an art/ folder next to the content file and list them in the frontmatter, and they arrive as a folder of cards on the installing party's image gallery.

To submit: fork Pup-Pup-Games/SledDog-Community-Content, copy the template for the kind of thing you're making, fill it in, and open a pull request. A GitHub Action validates it against the schema and tells you what to fix. The repo's CONTRIBUTING.md walks through it step by step.

Your work is credited to you with a link back, wherever it appears in the app.

Can I sell my own content on Sled Dog?

Not at the moment. Community content is contributed freely and shown with attribution — there's no storefront for third-party creators yet.

If you're making something substantial and want to talk about a paid pack, use Contact us in the avatar menu. We'd genuinely like to hear from you; we just don't want to promise a revenue-share pipeline that doesn't exist yet.

How do I turn community content on for my table?

Party → Settings → third-party content. Pick which modules your table installs; only content built for your party's game system is offered, and each entry keeps its author credit in the picker.

Sled Dog is a tracker, not a rules engine. It holds the fiction and does the bookkeeping — the rulings stay yours.