✕ Your character

Your drawing sits on whichever rock you pick. Click another rock to move — the one you leave goes back to normal.

✕ The rest of the fire

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✕

The Character Sheet

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Everyone's OC, sitting around the same fire. Draw each other's characters — that's the whole point.

Submissions are live: when anyone drops in their OC, it appears at the fire and on this sheet for everyone with the page open. Characters marked demo are placeholder wanderers filling the empty logs — they step aside as real people sit down. Anyone who hasn't drawn an OC yet travels as the hooded wanderer.

✕ The Chat Record

Every word said at this fire is kept with the page — leaving doesn't lose it. This is just a copy for your own folder.

✕ Tonight's call link

Paste the meeting link for this session and everyone's “open the call” button points at it. Leave it empty for a night with no call — the fire works on its own.

✕ Recording

Recording here captures the window you pick plus the fire, music and voices, and saves a video file when you stop. Everyone sees the red badge either way.

Background music link

Upload an mp3 from your computer, or paste a direct link to one, and it plays instead of the lofi piano. Streaming pages — YouTube, Spotify, your Epidemic library — are web pages rather than audio files, so use exported mp3s. An uploaded track plays on your device only.

✕

How this actually runs

The fire is a web page. Zoom is a separate window. That split is not a compromise — it's the only way this works today, and it works fine.

What you could run this Saturday

• People open your Zoom link from the door here, camera off, audio on, and shrink the window.
• They come back to the fire and sit down. Zoom keeps talking in the background.
• All the presence — seats, chat bubbles, emoji, who's talking, the lofi — lives on this page.
• You keep your recording, your waiting room, your habits. Nothing to build but this page.

Who can actually submit

OC submissions are stored with the page, so everyone who opens it sees everyone's characters — live, no refresh. Two limits come with that:

• The page can no longer be shared by a fully public link. Viewers have to be signed in to Claude and inside your organisation.
• People need "Can interact" or higher in the Share menu. Set to view-only, they'll see the fire but can't post an OC — the page tells them so instead of failing silently.

For your actual student community that's the ceiling of this prototype. A real build on your own domain has no such limit — same design, your own login.

The one thing that can't be done

Zoom cannot be put inside this page as a window. Zoom blocks being embedded in another site on purpose, so the video can't be piped into the smoke while it's Zoom. That specific magic needs a different call provider — everything else survives.

When you want faces in the smoke

Swap Zoom for Daily.co or LiveKit. Both hand you the raw audio and video, so the whole thing becomes one page: voices around the fire, faces drifting in the smoke, one join, one bill, recording included. A two-hour workshop with fifteen people costs about a coffee. This is the upgrade, not the starting point.

The music

The lofi you're hearing is generated live in the browser — no file, no license, it just plays forever and never repeats. In the real build on your own domain you'd drop your Epidemic Sound tracks in instead. Worth checking your plan first: Epidemic covers music in content you publish, and continuous streaming inside a members' platform is a different question. The generated bed sidesteps that entirely if the answer is awkward.

What's real in this demo

• The fire, smoke and embers are live canvas. The fire really grows when someone adds a log.
• Your mic is real — turn it on and your seat pulses to your actual voice. Hold space for push-to-talk.
• The crackle and the lofi are both synthesised in the browser, not audio files.
• The Zoom button opens your real meeting.

What's faked

• The other artists are scripted. In the real thing they'd be a websocket room.
• The faces in the smoke are gradients standing in for video.
• The REC clock counts but records nothing.

Before you send the link anywhere

A page with a live Zoom link in it is a Zoom-bombing invitation if it ever leaks. Put a waiting room on the meeting, or gate this page behind your membership login, or generate a fresh link per session. Pick one before it goes out.

How to record all of this in Zoom

Zoom only records what's inside Zoom — the voices and anything shared on screen. It has no idea this page exists. So to capture the fire, the chat and the ambience, you share the page into the call:

• Open this page in its own browser tab.
• In Zoom: Share Screen → that browser tab, and tick Share sound so the crackle, wind and music come through. Tick Optimize for video clip too — the fire is animation and goes choppy without it.
• Hit Record. Cloud recording needs a paid Zoom plan; local recording works on any plan and saves to your computer.
• Leave Zoom's recording announcement on, then tap the REC badge up top so the page matches reality — everyone with it open sees it turn red.

What you end up with is a video of the campfire with everyone's voices over it and nobody's face in it. That's the replay worth posting.

Two watch-outs. Sharing a tab with live animation is CPU-hungry — if your machine struggles, drop the ambience volume and close other tabs. And once music is recorded into a video you publish, that's squarely "content use" for licensing, which your Epidemic plan covers; streaming it live to members was the greyer case.

The part worth protecting

The reason to build this instead of sending another Zoom link is the default: cameras off, presence on. Your students are visibly there, sitting with people, without owing anyone their face. Everything else is decoration on that one idea.