Running a fight, start to finish

New to the tracker and just want to get a fight on the table right now? Skip the full guide below and come back to it later — here's everything you need for round one.

1. Load or build your party. If you've got a saved roster, load it from the Rosters tab and you're done. Starting fresh? Add each PC with their name, health, focus, and Investiture pools — you can always fill in the finer stats mid-fight.
2. Pull adversaries from the library. Open the Adversary Library, search or browse for what you need, and add them to the encounter. Minions and full stat-block adversaries both drop in the same way.
3. Run the pre-combat check (optional, but worth it). If you want a gut-check on whether the fight is fair before anyone rolls initiative, this is where that lives. Skip it if you already know the fight's right.
4. Hit Start. The tracker sorts everyone into the round structure automatically: Fast PCs → Fast NPCs → Slow PCs → Slow NPCs. You don't have to track initiative order yourself — just follow the phases as they come up.
5. Play the round. Click into each combat card to log actions, deal damage, and apply conditions as they happen. Health hits zero on a PC and the tracker offers the injury roll for you.

That's the whole loop. Everything from here on — saved rosters, Focus and Investiture management, Deflect and damage types, Opportunity/ Complication cards, mid-fight edits — is detail you can pick up as you need it. The sections below cover all of it.

Everything starts on the Encounter tab. Before you add anything, it just shows three buttons — this is where a fresh session begins.

Click + Add PC for each player character. Health, Focus, and Investiture default to reasonable starting numbers, but overwrite them with whatever's on the actual character sheet — same for the three defenses. The sheet link is optional; drop in a Demiplane, D&D Beyond, or doc link so you can jump straight to a full character sheet mid-combat.

If your players build characters on Demiplane, you don't have to retype their stats. The Rosters tab has a permanent Send to Encounter Tracker bookmarklet button — a one-time drag-to-bookmarks-bar setup that turns any Demiplane character sheet into a ready-to-import roster member.

One-time setup: drag the gold Send to Encounter Tracker button up to your browser's bookmarks bar. Don't click it here — it only works from Demiplane.

Every time after that: open the character's sheet on app.demiplane.com, logged in, and let it fully load. Click the bookmark. The tracker opens (or refocuses, if it's already open in another tab) with that character's stats already dropped into the “Add member from Demiplane” box below, on whatever roster you currently have open — a fresh one, or one you're already mid-edit on, like this:

Give it a glance, then click Import from JSON. The member gets added above the box and the box clears, ready for the next paste — click the bookmark again on your next character's sheet and repeat until the whole party's in:

Once everyone's in, name the roster (if you haven't already) and click Save roster.

Switch to Adversary Library and search by name. Every adversary in the Cosmere RPG line is in here, tagged by tier, role, and source book.

Hit Add and they land on the Encounter tab immediately, numbered automatically if you added more than one (Axehound #1, Axehound #2, and so on). No need to leave the Library tab between adds — search for the next adversary and keep going.

Every row in the Adversary Library now has a Homebrew button next to Add — not just the Mistborn World Guide's index stubs. Click it to clone that adversary's full stat block into a new homebrew entry you can tweak, or start from a blank one with + Add homebrew at the top of the Homebrew adversaries card.

Below that, Features and Actions are repeatable lists (with a cost dropdown on each action), plus Tactics and Opportunity/Complication text — the same shape as a real stat block. Cloning from the library or the Mistborn index pulls all of this in automatically wherever the source item has it, features and actions included.

The book's own guidance that stacking more than two modules on one adversary is rare isn't enforced as a hard limit — it's the GM's call, same as everything else on this form.

Back on the Encounter tab, above the combatant list, the budget card gives you a read on how tough the fight is before anyone rolls a die.

Set Party Tier and Party Size once per session. The verdict — Easy, Average, Hard, or Above Hard — uses the same threat-value math as the Handbook's own encounter-building rules, so it's a real check, not a rough guess. Swap adversaries in or out and watch the number move before you commit.

Gave an adversary Adversary Modules (Allomancy, Feruchemy, an ancestry module, or a Hemalurgic spike — see the Mistborn adversary index and adversary-modules reference on the Library tab)? Toggle + Modules on their card and the budget check applies the World Guide's own rule automatically: their threat contribution goes up 50%, once, no matter how many modules they're carrying.

When the party's in and the budget looks right, hit Start encounter. A “Now acting” strip appears above the full roster, showing only the combatants in the current phase.

Click Mark acted as each combatant takes their turn, then Next phase → to move on. The tracker cycles Fast PCs → Fast NPCs → Slow PCs → Slow NPCs → back to Fast PCs for the next round, resetting everyone's acted status automatically.

Below that, the Full roster reorders itself for whatever phase you're in, so you're not scrolling past one side of the fight to reach the other mid-combat. Whichever side you need to mark right now — Adversaries while PCs are up, Party while NPCs are up — gets a gold Mark damage here flag and sits first. The side that's currently acting splits further: whoever's up this phase shows full-size, and anyone on that side who isn't — a Slow PC during a Fast PC phase, say — drops below a Not up this phase divider and collapses to a one-line summary until their phase comes around.

Any card — defeated, already acted, or just tucked out of the way like Dalinar above — can be reopened with the small ▾ toggle in its header, which also works the other way to manually collapse a card you don't need right now. Use the search box above the roster to jump straight to one combatant by name, or Jump to Party / Jump to Adversaries to scroll to a column without hunting for it. Before combat starts, the roster shows in the same fixed Party-then-Adversaries order with no flags — the reordering only kicks in once you hit Start encounter.

Every combatant — PC or adversary — gets the same card. Once you know where things live, running the fight is mostly clicking around this one layout.

±5 / ±1

Quick pool adjustments — spend Focus, take a graze, whatever's fastest.

Impact / Keen / Energy / Vital / Spirit / Other

Damage type on the Health row. The first three respect Deflect automatically; the rest bypass it.

Statblock

Adversaries only — opens the full stat block in a popup without leaving the Encounter tab.

+ Modules

Adversaries only — mark that this one is carrying bolted-on Allomancy/Feruchemy/Ancestry/Hemalurgic-spike modules (Mistborn World Guide, ch.8). Adds 50% to their threat contribution in the budget check above, once, however many modules they actually have.

Defeat / Revive

A manual override for either side — doesn't require health to hit 0 first.

Pick a damage type, type the amount, hit Apply dmg. Deflect is subtracted automatically for Impact, Keen, and Energy damage.

Minions are the one type the tracker handles for you completely: drop one to 0 health and it's marked defeated automatically, matching the rule that a Minion goes down the instant it takes any injury.

The moment a PC's health hits 0 — from a hit that drops them there, or a hit that lands while they're already at 0 — the tracker rolls the injury for you and shows the result immediately.

Prefer to roll it yourself at the table, the way the rules actually word it ("you must make an injury roll")? Every card also has a manual entry row — pick a Duration and an Effect, hit Add, and it's logged identically to an auto-rolled one, chip and all.

Leveled up? Reworked a defense? Click Edit on any PC's card to change anything set when they were first added — name, all three max pools, all three defenses, Deflect, and the sheet link.

The O/C button opens the same options at any time — during combat, a conversation, or an endeavor — because the standard four Opportunity and three Complication options always apply, with or without an adversary in the scene.

Whatever card comes up, it carries three separate prompts — read whichever matches the scene actually in progress: Combat, Conversation, or Endeavor.

All 14 status conditions, full text, one searchable list — Afflicted through Unconscious. Use it to look a condition up, then add it to a combatant right from their card's + condition dropdown.

• Nothing here auto-saves to the cloud. The tracker saves your encounter to this browser automatically as you play, so closing the tab or refreshing the page won't lose it. What it doesn't do on its own is follow you to another device — for that, use the Sync button to link a code across your devices (and, if you use Wayfinder or Ars Arcana, that same code links those too). Shipping a new build of the tracker does clear the active encounter one time as part of the update (Rosters and Homebrew are kept), so don't be surprised if a fresh deploy starts you with a blank Encounter tab.
• Rosters (the third tab) let you save a party once and quick-add it into any future encounter, instead of retyping everyone's stats every session.
• The theme toggle in the top-right (Auto) cycles light → dark → auto, if the parchment look isn't your thing at the table — and Palette, right next to it, swaps in one of ten Radiant-Order color themes instead of just light/dark.
• Short rest (all) and Long rest (all), above the roster, apply to every combatant at once — a long rest fully refreshes Health, Focus, and Investiture for the whole table in one click.
• This is a GM tool first — nothing stops a curious player from opening it too, but there's no separate "player view" that hides adversary stat blocks.