If you run a tabletop campaign, you already know the problem. Your notes live in five places. Your last session's recap is half in Discord, half in a notes app you stopped opening at session 12. The session you ran two months ago is a vague memory and a few combat tally marks on a napkin. Game night is Saturday. You sit down to prep on Wednesday and spend the first hour just trying to remember what happened.
That hour is what Tavern Scribe is built to give back.
What is Tavern Scribe?
Tavern Scribe is a campaign workspace for tabletop RPG groups. It's a single place to record sessions, track NPCs and locations, manage initiative and the virtual tabletop, and keep your campaign's history searchable. It's system-agnostic: it works for Dungeons & Dragons 5e, Pathfinder 2e, Call of Cthulhu, OSR-style games, and homebrew systems alike. The mechanics live in the rulebook; we focus on everything around the table that the rulebook doesn't cover.
If you've been juggling Roll20 for the map, Discord for the chat, OneNote for the lore, a Google Doc for the recap, and your DM screen for everything else, Tavern Scribe replaces the four-tool stack with one.
Why we built it
We're TTRPG players first. We started Tavern Scribe after the same conversation kept happening at our tables: "Wait, did we already meet that NPC?" "When did the rogue lose her dagger again?" "What was the name of that village?" The campaign existed in everyone's heads, and the longer it ran, the harder it got to keep straight.
The tools that exist today solve pieces of this. Roll20 and Foundry are excellent virtual tabletops, focused on running combats and rolling dice. Notion and OneNote are general-purpose notebooks that you have to manually organize. Discord is where everything actually gets said, and almost nothing gets kept.
What we wanted was something built around the campaign as a living object (characters, locations, quests, sessions) that updates as you play, not after you remember to write it down. The kind of tool that means your next session prep starts with "here's what's happened and what's open" instead of forty-five minutes of digital archaeology.
That's what we built.
What you can do with Tavern Scribe
We won't list every feature here (that's what the features page is for), but the core loop looks like this:
- Capture your session. Upload audio after game night, or use live transcription during. The AI builds a structured timeline: every combat encounter, every roleplay moment, every lore drop, every joke that accidentally became a plot hook.
- Manage the campaign. Characters, NPCs, locations, factions, items, and quests live in a connected workspace. When the rogue talks to a merchant in session 14, the merchant gets a page. When she returns in session 28, the page is still there with everything you remember about him.
- Run the table. A built-in virtual tabletop handles maps, tokens, fog of war, initiative, and dice. Your players join the same shared session live. No second tool, no juggling browser tabs.
- Keep the history. Every session leaves a searchable record. Looking for the time the bard insulted the duke? It's a search away, with the full context.
- Prep faster. Open the dashboard before next week's session. Active quests, recent character beats, expiring plot timers. Already there. Spend prep time creating, not remembering.
There's more (audio newspaper recaps, AI-assisted NPC dialogue, character art, story summaries) but the loop above is the heart of it.
Who it's for
Tavern Scribe is built for the people who keep a campaign alive across months and years:
- Dungeon Masters running long-form D&D 5e games who are tired of losing track of NPCs and side quests around session 20.
- Pathfinder GMs managing dense campaigns where the rules-density already eats prep time, and the campaign-tracking shouldn't add to that load.
- Call of Cthulhu Keepers running investigation-heavy scenarios where every clue, every NPC name, and every location matters and needs to be recoverable months later.
- Players who want to remember what their character actually did three months ago without skimming a Discord history.
- Long-running tables where the cast or DM rotates and the campaign needs an authoritative record that doesn't live in one person's brain.
If you're running a one-shot, you don't need us. If you're running a campaign that's lasted past session 5, you probably do.
How it's different from what you're using
A few of the most common comparisons:
| You currently use | What Tavern Scribe replaces or adds |
|---|---|
| Roll20 / Foundry VTT | Same tactical map + dice + tokens. Plus the campaign workspace those tools intentionally don't provide. |
| Notion / OneNote | Structured campaign data instead of free-form notes. Sessions auto-fill instead of manual write-up. |
| Discord scrollback | Searchable session timelines. Nothing important lives in chat history anymore. |
| A Google Doc per character | Connected character + NPC + location pages that update as you play. |
We're not trying to be every tool. We're trying to be the one your group opens before, during, and after each session: the home base for the campaign itself.
Getting started
Tavern Scribe is free to try. Sign up, create your first campaign, and that campaign starts with 100 free silver. Invite your players, and import or write your first session. No credit card. The full feature set runs on silver for groups who want to use AI long-term, but you can get a real feel for it on the free tier first.
If you're a DM or GM, the DM page walks through the prep workflow in more detail. Players, see the player page for what to expect from your side of the table. For pricing, silver, uploads, and account questions, see the FAQ page.
We built Tavern Scribe because we were tired of doing archaeology before every session. If that sounds familiar, give it a try and let us know what you think. We read every piece of feedback that comes in.
For DMs starting a new campaign, our next post, The Most Exhausting Part of Session Prep Isn't the Prep, gets into the prep workflow specifically. Good place to go from here.
Welcome to the table.
Tags: Ttrpg Tools, Campaign Management, Dungeons And Dragons, Pathfinder, Call Of Cthulhu, Session Prep
