How much should I actually prepare?

Less than you think. Prepare the opening properly, sketch two places the party might go, and trust the table view to handle the third. A board with fifteen scenes on it is a board most of which never gets used.

Do I have to use the board? I write linear prep.

You can lay scenes out in a line and it works fine. The board exists because a session is rarely linear, but nothing forces you to branch.

Can I reuse an encounter across sessions?

Yes. Encounters live in the codex, not inside a session, and can be linked to scenes in as many sessions as you like. Homebrew creatures work the same way.

Can I prepare a session without any AI?

Entirely. The board, scenes, encounters and the run sheet are all manual tools. The Forge is there if you want it and ignorable if you do not — and on the Hand Written plan it is not there at all.

Preparing a session

Q: What prints, exactly?

Only the run sheet. Every scene in order, the read-aloud text, the spotlight, and every stat block with hit points, armour class and tactics. The rails, the board and the app itself are left out, and no scene splits across a page turn.

A board, not a list

A session is not a line, so prep is not a list. Scenes sit on a board and connect to each other, which means you can lay out the three places the party might go without deciding which one they will pick.

An empty session to a printed run sheet · 7 minutes

Step 1 — Start a session

From Sessions, or from the button on your dashboard when the last one is debriefed. Numbering is handled for you, including after an import that brought history across.

The sessions list with a new session being created — It takes the next number automatically

Step 2 — Lay out the scenes

Add the scenes you are fairly sure of:

The opening — where they are when the session starts.
The obvious destination, and one alternative.
The thing that happens if they do nothing.

Drag to connect them. A connection is not a railroad — it is a note to yourself that one place leads to another.

The prep board with several scenes connected by lines — Scenes, and the ways between them

Tip.Three or four scenes is usually right. The board is for the shape of the evening, not for every eventuality — and the table view can improvise anything you did not put on it.

Step 3 — Fill in a scene

Open a scene and it can hold:

Read-aloud text. Two or three sentences. Concrete and sensory, and never telling the players what their characters feel.
A spotlight character. Which player this scene is for. The dashboard tracks who has not had one lately.
Private notes. What is really going on, for your eyes.
Music. Up to three tracks, playable from the table view.

A scene open, with read-aloud text, spotlight and notes — Everything a scene can carry

Step 4 — Attach the fights

Build an encounter, or pull one from the SRD or your own homebrew creatures, and link it to the scene it happens in.

Add creatures and counts. Difficulty updates against your actual party.
Write the tactics — how they open, what they do when it goes badly.
Note the terrain and a morale trigger.
Link it to a scene.

A linked fight can be started from the table view in one press, with everybody already in the initiative list.

The encounter builder, with creatures, difficulty and tactics — Difficulty is worked out from your party as you add creatures

Step 5 — Let the Forge draft the rest

Thirteen specialists — an NPC smith, a scene writer, a faction planner, a treasure keeper and nine more. Each has already read your campaign, so you never explain the setup.

Everything they produce lands on the bench as a draft. Accept it onto the board, edit it first, or bin it. Nothing they write enters your campaign on its own.

A Forge conversation producing a draft that lands on the bench — Drafts wait on the bench until you accept them

Step 6 — Check what is missing

The readiness list names the things you would otherwise notice at the table: a scene with no way into it, a fight with no creatures, a session with no opening.

It is advice rather than a gate. You can run a session it is unhappy about.

The readiness checklist showing unfinished items — What is still unfinished, before Saturday

Step 7 — Print the run sheet

Press Print run sheet and the session becomes a document: every scene in order, read-aloud text in a serif you can genuinely read from, the spotlight, and every stat block with hit points, armour class and tactics beside it.

A printed run sheet with scenes, read-aloud text and stat blocks — The session, on paper

Note.This matters more than it sounds. Plenty of DMs prep on a computer and run from paper, and a prep tool that assumes a laptop at the table is useless to them for half of what it does. The run sheet is a first-class way to play, not a fallback.

How much to prepare

Less than you think. The parts of Yarnfold that earn their keep are the codex underneath and the debrief afterwards. Prep is the bit you were doing anyway — just somewhere it will be remembered.

Questions

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.