How to Stream Your Tabletop RPG on Mini Kraken (with OBS)

Watching a great actual-play show, it is easy to assume that streaming a roleplaying game must require a studio, a crew, and a wall of equipment. It does not. The honest truth is that most of what makes a stream look good is a handful of well-placed overlays and clean audio — and you can have both running in an afternoon.

This guide walks you through streaming your Mini Kraken campaign with OBS Studio, the free broadcasting software that the vast majority of streamers use. By the end you will have a layout that shows your live dice rolls in 3D, a readable chat feed, and character portraits that light up when each player speaks. No studio required.

What you will need

Before we start, here is the short shopping list. None of it is exotic.

• A Mini Kraken campaign — the table you actually want to broadcast, with your players and their sheets already in it.
• OBS Studio — free, open-source, available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. This is what captures everything and sends it to your streaming platform.
• An account on a streaming platform — Twitch, YouTube, or whatever your community lives on. OBS sends your video there.
• Decent audio — the single most important investment. A modest USB microphone beats a great camera every time. More on this below.
• Optional: Discord — if your group already plays in a Discord voice channel, you can unlock the reactive voice overlay, which is one of the nicest touches you can add.

That is it. You do not need a green screen, a capture card, or fancy lighting to start. Those are upgrades for later, not requirements for today.

The core idea: browser-source overlays

Here is the concept that makes everything click. OBS can display a web page as a layer in your scene — it calls this a Browser Source. Mini Kraken gives you special public URLs that render only the live pieces of your table on a transparent background: the dice, the chat, the speaking portraits. You paste those URLs into OBS as Browser Sources, and they float on top of your stream, updating in real time as you play.

Because these overlay pages are transparent, they layer cleanly over a map, a webcam, or a custom background. And because they are driven live by your real campaign, you never have to touch them mid-session. You roll a die in Mini Kraken, and it tumbles across your stream a half-second later, in the dice skin of whoever rolled it.

You will find all of these URLs in one place: open your campaign, go to its overview, and look for the Overlays OBS section. Each overlay has a few simple toggles and a copy button. Configure it the way you like, copy the link, and you are ready to drop it into OBS.

Step 1: Set up your campaign

Get your table ready before you go live, the same way you would for any session. Make sure every player has joined the campaign and has their character sheet set up — the overlays pull names, portraits, and dice skins from the real campaign data, so the more complete your table is, the better everything looks on stream.

If you want the reactive voice overlay (portraits that glow when someone talks), have your group gather in a Discord voice channel and make sure someone at the table opens the Mini Kraken Activity inside that channel. That connection is what tells the overlay who is speaking. If you are not using Discord voice, you can simply skip this overlay and use the dice and chat ones — they work on their own.

Step 2: Grab your overlay URLs

In your campaign overview, open the Overlays OBS panel. You will see three overlays, each with its own settings:

• 3D table dice — a transparent screen that animates every roll in the campaign in real 3D, using the dice skin of whoever rolled. You can optionally stamp the total on screen when the dice settle (a centered "Baldur's Gate style" number, or a smaller one at the bottom).
• Campaign chat — a clean, read-only feed of the table's messages. You can choose which corner it sits in, a dark or light theme, how many messages to show, whether to include rolls and image attachments, and whether old messages fade away after a few seconds.
• Table voice — the reactive portraits. Each player's character portrait appears, and the one who is speaking lights up and bounces. You can lay them out in a row or column, change their size, toggle names, and set how much the quiet players dim.

Tweak each one to taste, then hit copy. Keep these links handy — and treat them as semi-private, since anyone with the link can view that overlay. You will paste each into its own Browser Source in OBS next.

Step 3: Build your OBS scene

Open OBS and create a new Scene (the bottom-left panel) — call it something like "RPG Live." A scene is just a named collection of layers. Now you will add your overlays as sources, from back to front.

1. Add your background or map. This could be an OBS "Window Capture" of your Mini Kraken map, a static image, or a video. This sits at the bottom of the stack.
2. Add the dice overlay. Click the + under Sources, choose Browser, give it a name like "Dice," and paste the dice overlay URL. Set the width and height to match your canvas (1920×1080 is standard). Because the page is transparent, only the dice will show.
3. Add the chat overlay the same way, as another Browser Source. Position and resize it into the corner you chose in its settings.
4. Add the voice overlay as a third Browser Source, and place the portraits wherever they look good — often along the bottom edge.
5. Add your microphone as an Audio Input Capture, and your webcam (if you use one) as a Video Capture Device.

You can drag and resize each source right on the OBS canvas until the composition feels right. Sources higher in the list render on top, so keep your dice and portraits above the background.

Step 4: A quick test roll

Before you go live, do a dry run. In Mini Kraken, roll some dice and send a chat message. You should see the dice tumble across your OBS preview and the message appear in your chat overlay. If you have the voice overlay set up, talk in the Discord channel and watch your portrait light up.

If something does not appear, the usual culprits are simple: double-check you pasted the right URL, make sure the Browser Source is sized large enough to contain the overlay, and confirm the overlay's own toggles are on (for example, that "show rolls" is enabled in the chat settings). For the voice overlay specifically, remember it needs the Mini Kraken Activity open in your Discord voice channel — without that link, the portraits have no way to know who is speaking.

Step 5: Go live (and keep it about the game)

When the test looks good, hit Start Streaming in OBS and run your session as you normally would. Here is the part worth repeating: once you are set up, you should be able to forget the tech and just play. That is the goal. The overlays update themselves; your only job is to tell a good story with your friends.

A few gentle production notes that matter more than any gear:

• Get consent first. Everyone at the table should agree to be broadcast and know where it is going. This keeps the table comfortable and is simply the right thing to do.
• Prioritize audio. Viewers forgive shaky visuals; they will not forgive harsh, echoey, or quiet sound. A single decent microphone does more for your stream than any overlay.
• Start simple. You do not need all three overlays on day one. Dice and chat alone already look great. Add the reactive voice when you are comfortable.
• Let it be a little messy. Rules lookups, fumbled voices, and laughter are not flaws — they are the texture that makes a real table watchable. You are not auditioning.

You are closer than you think

The gap between "I wish I could stream like that" and "I am streaming" is mostly just this setup, done once. Mini Kraken handles the hard part — turning your live table into clean, transparent overlays — and OBS handles sending it to the world. Everything in between is you and your friends doing the thing you already love.

So pick a session, set up your scene, and press record. Your first broadcast does not need to be perfect. It just needs to capture the simple, magical thing at the center of every great actual-play show: a group of people finding out together what the dice decide.