Cold Open Design
How a cold open is written — the six lines, the boxed text, and what a roll can do inside a memory that already happened
At a Glance
- What this is
- The standing spec for writing a cold open. Read it before writing one; clone the template to start.
- What a cold open is
- Lives on Cold Opens — what they are, the shared-memory frame, and the queue. This page is how to write one.
- The core rule
- A roll never decides what happened. It decides what gets carried out.
- Boxed text
- At least two read-alouds, numbered, in clock order. No ceiling.
- Rolls
- At least one, preferably a few. Most of them are texture.
- Opening line
You’re [verb]ing.
Then the character rolls the skill the verb names.- Carries over
- Any roll can, at the DM’s call: a Dream Inspiration die on a success, 1d4 damage and a lasting mark on a failure.
- Inherits
- The read-aloud prose rules from Module Design. Nothing else from it — no budget, no routing, no endings.
Why this exists
Cold Opens gave the form a five-line shape and one sentence of prose rule: the opening is three to five sentences, second person, present tense, no mechanics. That is one box of read-aloud at the top and no further instruction for the eight minutes after it — so a cold open could be written to spec and still be a DM paraphrasing quietly from notes. It also said nothing at all about rolling dice, which meant the players sat through their own backstory without touching it.
Two additions, and they are the whole reason this page exists: more boxed text, spread through the scene, and every cold open puts dice in a player's hand.
The shape — six lines
Five were the shape before; What's rolled is the sixth. Anything a cold open needs that is not one of these belongs in the scene itself — this list does not grow again without a reason as good as this one.
| Line | Holds | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Who's in it | Which players are playing their past selves, and who is watching. | If nobody is playing a past self, say who rolls and why. That is the case that most often produces a cold open with no dice in it. |
| 2 · When | Where it sits in time, and anything that has to be true first. | Their age is flavour, not maths — the player still rolls the current sheet. |
| 3 · The opening | The opening line, then Read-aloud 1. One line, You’re [verb]ing, to the character the cold open is about. They roll the skill the verb names, then you read the box that puts them in the scene. |
The opening line is its own unnumbered box. Box 1 is the first of at least two numbered ones. Exceptions are decided per cold open, and the page says why. |
| 4 · What happens | The beats in clock order, sized to five or ten minutes, with the remaining boxes numbered down the page and the rolls sitting in the beats that fire them. | If box 4 sits above box 3, a beat is in the wrong place. Cheapest check on the layout there is. |
| 5 · What's rolled (new) | Every check: who rolls · what skill · the DC · what success carries · what failure carries. One line each. | The failure line is not optional. See below for why. |
| 6 · What it reveals | The thing the table did not know before. | Always last. If a roll can change this, it is the exception, not the shape. |
Boxed text
At least two read-alouds. No ceiling, and no required count beyond the floor — a scene that wants five gets five. What is not allowed is one box at the top and prose paraphrase for the rest of the scene, which is what the old shape permitted.
- Number them, and put them down the page in the order they are read. Same rule the modules use.
- Box the moments, not the connective tissue. The arrival, the turn, the thing that goes wrong, the last image. What happens between them is played, not read.
- Split the box around a roll. Nobody absorbs atmosphere while looking for a d20 — set the image, call for the check, then read the box that answers it.
- Layer with conditions instead of writing one wall:
If Trill is in this scene, add:
— useful here in particular, since a cold open can be played by one player and watched by three.
The standard — from the module spec
The ship is silent the way a held breath is silent. As the boat knocks against her strakes, the gulls overhead cry once, all together, and go somewhere else.
Sensory, no mechanics, ends on something wrong. That is the bar for every box in a cold open, not just the first.
What gets rolled
At least one check, preferably a few. And the hard rule that makes them possible at all:
The rule
A roll never decides what happened. It decides what gets carried out of it. The memory is fixed — Marellius made the dish, the ship went down, the boy was found. A failed check cannot un-happen any of that, so a check that gates the outcome is a check with nowhere to fail to.
Every check writes its failure line. There is no room to improvise a consequence in a scene whose ending is already on the page; an unwritten failure becomes nothing happens,
and a table learns fast that the dice were decoration.
Four things a check is allowed to carry. The first is the default and most rolls in most cold opens should be it — the others are the occasional reach, not the standing ambition.
| Carries | How often | Success / failure |
|---|---|---|
| Texture | The default. Most rolls. | How the memory plays — the detail that lands, the flourish that comes off, whether the moment is remembered warmly or awkwardly. Failure costs nothing but the good version, unless it carries over. |
| A fact carried to the present | Occasional | They noticed something then and still hold it now — a name, a face, a detail that pays later. Failure means the detail was there and went unremarked. |
| A present-day consequence | Occasional — the sharpest, so the rarest | The memory is carried wrong. Since Serrin has read every one of these, he holds the accurate version the player does not — which is a hook, not a punishment. |
| Establishing a capability | Occasional | The scene is where they find out what they are good at. Success writes it into who they became; failure means it came harder, or later, or from someone else. |
The ratio is the point. If every roll in a cold open changes the present, the cold open has stopped being five to ten minutes of somebody's past and become a module. Reach past texture once in a scene, twice at the outside.
Roll the current sheet. The player uses the character they have — same modifiers, same proficiencies — however young the past self is. Nobody rebuilds a nine-year-old at the top of a session, and the point of the scene is the memory, not an audit of what the character could do at the time. Set DCs the way you would in any other scene.
Write the DC. Modules only write a DC when failure has a consequence you would otherwise invent under pressure; in a cold open every check has a written failure by rule, so every check gets a number.
The opening check. Right after the opening line, the character the cold open is about rolls the skill the verb names: running is Athletics, hiding is Stealth, pontificating is Persuasion or Performance. DC 10 unless the scene says otherwise. It is texture. It decides how well they do it, never whether.
A dream can leave a mark
Any check can carry into the present. The DM decides at the table, by what the lore allows, how easily it moves into the real world, and whether it is fun. Most will not. Each cold open writes the carry for its opening check; the rest are decided in the moment.
- A success carries a Dream Inspiration die. A d6 that works like Bardic Inspiration: add it to one ability check, attack roll or saving throw, deciding after the d20 is rolled and before the DM says whether it worked. It lasts until the session ends. Each carried success gives its own die.
- A failure carries 1d4 damage and a mark. Say the damage out loud on waking, not where it came from. The mark (a scrape, a burn, a scar) never goes away, and is described only if the player looks.
Prose rules
Inherited whole from Module Design, and they apply to every box, not only the opening:
- Second person, present tense, 3–5 sentences, senses first.
- The opening line is the exception: one sentence,
You’re [verb]ing.
, and nothing else in its box. - No mechanics — no DCs, no HP, nothing the character could not perceive. The numbers live in line 5.
- End on something that moves, or something wrong.
- If the box is describing geometry, you need a sketch instead.
Present tense, even though it is a memory. The dreamer is not remembering the scene, they are in it — you are
, never you were.
The tense is what separates a cold open from a recap.
What we don't do
- No module apparatus. No encounter budget, no information routing, no endings, no alert state. A cold open is five to ten minutes and answers to none of it.
- No roll that stops the scene. There is no failure state where the cold open does not happen. If a check could produce one, it is written wrong.
- No slot seven. The shape went from five lines to six because boxed text and dice were both missing. It does not grow because a scene is complicated — that goes in the scene.
- No combat by default. Not forbidden, but a fight eats the whole ten minutes and a memory of a fight the character survived has no tension. If one belongs, it is a beat, not the scene.