Discord — Tusk's Vault

Most campaign questions don't arrive at the table. They arrive on a Wednesday, in a channel, three days after the thing happened — and they arrive addressed to whoever runs the game. Putting Tusk's Vault in that channel means the answer comes back cited, in front of everyone, so the same question doesn't get asked another three times that week.

What you'll need

Tusk's Vault installed and running. If it isn't yet, start at Setup and come back.
A Discord account with permission to add a bot to the server you have in mind. On your own server that's automatic; on somebody else's you'll need Manage Server.
About five minutes. Four of the steps are in Discord's developer portal, one is pasting the result into Vault, and the last is authorising the bot into your server.

The dashboard needs exactly one thing from you: the bot token. Everything that can be derived from it is derived. The Application ID lives inside the token's first segment, so there is nothing else to copy across, and no second field to get wrong.

Setting it up

Discord has no API for creating an application, so the first four steps happen in their portal. There is no way around that — for anyone, not just for this project, so treat anything claiming to automate them as driving a browser session with your password. The rest is Vault's job.

Open the Discord Developer Portal and sign in.
New Application. Name it whatever you want — this is the name your players will see in the server, so it's worth a moment's thought. "Tusk", the name of your setting's librarian, or something your table will find funny.
Bot in the sidebar → Reset Token → copy it. Discord shows a bot token once. If you lose it, reset it again and use the new one; nothing breaks.
Still on that page, scroll to Privileged Gateway Intents and enable Message Content Intent, then Save. Without this the bot connects successfully, sees every message as empty, and answers nothing — which is a confusing failure, so it is worth double-checking now.
Back in Vault: Bot Status card → paste the token. Four checks run as you paste, before anything touches disk:
- Valid? Checked against Discord immediately, so a wrong string is caught here rather than surfacing later as an unexplained login failure.
- Which bot? Vault names the bot the token belongs to, so you can confirm it is the one you meant.
- A user account? Refused outright — automating a user account is against Discord's terms and gets the account banned.
- Invite URL. On success Vault reads the Application ID out of the token and builds one with the right permissions already selected.
Click that invite URL, choose your campaign server, and Authorize.

The bot connects on save. There is no server restart, and re-pointing an existing bot at a new token is the same single paste.

Asking it something

Mention the bot in any channel it can see:

@Tusk who was the merchant we met in Dunmar?

A direct message works too — the bot treats a DM as an invitation to answer, with no mention needed.

The answer comes back in the channel with its citations attached — the file each claim came from, so anyone can check rather than take it on trust. Tags like [chronicle.md] and [clarification: cl-42] land after each claim.

That is on by default and is a display choice, not a grounding one. Turning Settings → Voice & retrieval → Show Source References off strips the tags before the reply reaches Discord; the model is still required to find a source to answer at all.

Answers longer than Discord's 2000-character limit are split across several replies rather than truncated.

If your notes don't cover the question, you get a refusal instead of an invention, and the question is logged under Home → Campaign Management → Gaps. Answer it once there and that answer is reused from then on, however differently the next person phrases the question.

What the bot can and can't see

It acts on messages that mention it, and on direct messages sent to it. Everything else in a channel is discarded the moment it arrives — nothing is stored, and there is no transcript of your server being kept.
If you attach a file to a message that mentions it, that file is downloaded and read so it can answer about it — images, PDFs, DOCX and plain text. Those bytes go to whichever model is answering, like the question itself.
It answers from your lore and nothing else — the Tusks-Lore/ folder, or your Obsidian vault if you have pointed it there instead. It has no memory of previous conversations beyond the rulings you record deliberately.
It never sees the rest of your Discord — no other servers, no DMs it is not part of, no member list beyond what answering a mention requires.

Vault itself only ever reads the count of servers the bot is in, for the status display. It does not read, log or store server names.

Permissions, and why these ones

The generated invite URL asks for the bot scope and five permissions, and nothing beyond that:

Permission	Why
Send Messages	To answer at all
Read Message History	The bot answers as a reply to the message that asked, which Discord treats as reaching back into history
Embed Links	So a link the bot posts unfurls instead of arriving as bare text
Attach Files	Headroom. Long answers are split across replies today, not attached
Add Reactions	Headroom. While it is working you get Discord's typing indicator instead

The last two are in the invite but unused by the current code. Granting them costs nothing today and saves a re-authorise if that ever changes; if you would rather grant fewer, dropping them changes nothing you can observe. Answers are plain text — the bot sends no rich embeds — so Embed Links only matters for link previews.

It does not ask for Administrator, Manage Server, Manage Messages, or anything that could alter your server.

If something isn't working

The bot is offline in the member list. The token is wrong or has been reset since you pasted it. Reset it once more and paste the new one.

It's online but ignores every mention. Three causes produce identical silence — no reply, no typing indicator, no LLM call — and the bot stays connected through all of them:

Message Content Intent is off (step 4). By far the most common, because a bot in this state looks completely healthy from the outside.
The Pause switch on the Home tab reads "Bot is PAUSED".
The Discord row of the Home tab's Surfaces card is switched off.

The last two are deliberate, and flipping either back is instant.

It answers the first question then ignores a rapid follow-up. There is a three-second gap enforced per person, so one player holding down Enter cannot occupy the queue. Ask again a moment later.

It answers, but says it doesn't know anything. Your lore folder is empty or Vault is pointed at the wrong one. The dashboard's Lore tab shows what it has actually indexed, and which folder or vault that came from.