For dungeon masters running something of their own
Your campaign, in one place, remembering itself.
Write it, prep it, run it from the table, and let the ten minutes after a session keep everything true. Yarnfold is a DM’s whole workflow, not another wiki you have to keep tidy.
Already running a campaign? Drop in your Notion or Obsidian export, a Word file, or anything you can paste. Your people, places and past sessions come across and you check every one before a word is written.
What you said, after the session
“Right, so they finally cornered Aldric in the harbour office and he admitted the manifest was short. Kira took a page out of the ledger. Vell followed them back to the Salt and Whistle and I think he’s not actually on the take.”
- Aldric Fenn — wary → cooperativefrom “he admitted the manifest was short”
- Kira carries a page from the Guild ledgerfrom “Kira took a page out of the ledger”
- Thread: Is Vell paid off — seeded → activefrom “I think he’s not actually on the take”
Every line quotes the words it came from. You accept what is right and change what is not. Nothing goes in on its own.
Bring what you have
Start from a year of notes, not a blank page.
Drop in an export, a document, or a paste. Yarnfold reads it twice: once to work out who and what is in there, once to read what your notes say about them and shows you every person and place before anything is written.
Past sessions come across as history, so the codex arrives already lived in rather than freshly typed.
The codex
A world that stays consistent, without you policing it.
People, places, factions, items and threads, each knowing what is true about it and when that became true. Aldric was wary in session 12 and an ally by session 30, and both are still in there.
Draw the world as you go: territories, coastlines, roads, and the settlements inside them.
Prep
Lay out a session, then take it to the table on paper.
Scenes on a board rather than a linear plan, because a session is not a line. Arm them with encounters, give them read-aloud text, pick music for them.
Reduce prep time and create a great session that your table will talk about for months.
Print your Prep
Lay out a session, then take it to the table on paper.
If you run a table without a notebook or tablet and prefer to simply use paper don't worry.
Print a run sheet based on your scenes fo the session with the read-aloud, spotlight and every stat block on it so you can run the whole thing from paper if that is how you play.
At the table
Everything you need mid-session, and nothing you do not.
A dark, quiet screen built to be glanced at across a room. The scene, the initiative order you drag into place, hit points, conditions, dice, and the soundtrack.
Ask a rules question and get a decisive answer without leaving it. Improvise a scene the party walked into and have something to read aloud in seconds.
Afterwards
The ten minutes you never do.
Talk for ninety seconds about what happened. What changed comes back as a list you approve, each line quoting the words it came from. Your NPCs move, your threads advance, your facts get their end dates.
Then a recap for you and a different one for your players, ready to send before anyone has left.
The Forge
Thirteen specialists who have read your campaign.
An NPC smith, a scene writer, a faction planner, a treasure keeper and nine more. Each one can already see your world, so you never explain the setup.
Everything they write arrives as a draft. You accept, edit or bin it. Nothing they produce enters your campaign on its own.
Is this for you?
Probably yes
- You are twenty sessions into something homebrew and losing track of it.
- You have a Notion vault, an Obsidian folder or a document you keep meaning to tidy.
- You run more than one table and prep is becoming a second job.
- You have contradicted yourself in front of your players and it still bothers you.
Probably not
- You run published modules straight from the book and they work fine.
- You improvise everything and prep would spoil it.
- You are three sessions in — come back when you have lost track of something.
We would rather you knew now than found out in three weeks.
About the assistant
Plenty of DMs want nothing to do with AI in their creative work, and that is a perfectly reasonable position to hold. So here is exactly what it does.
It proposes and you approve. Nothing it writes goes into your campaign unless you put it there, and every suggestion shows you the line of your own notes it came from. It writes nothing on its own, it makes no decisions about your world, and we do not train anything on what you write.
And if you would rather it were not there at all, Hand Written has none of it: the codex, the world map, the prep board, the table view and the combat tracker, and not a word written by a machine.
Questions people ask
No. Drop in a Notion or Obsidian export, a Word file, or paste anything at all. Yarnfold reads the people, places, factions and past sessions out of it and shows you every one before a word is written. If it is all in your head instead, answer nine questions and it builds from that.
Try it on the campaign you are already running.
Thirty days, no card, and you keep everything you make whether you stay or not.