How long does it actually take?

About ten minutes. Ninety seconds of talking, two minutes of reviewing, and the rest is reading the recaps before you send them.

What if I did not run the session in Yarnfold?

It still works. The debrief reads your ramble as well as the session log, so a session run entirely from paper debriefs fine — there is simply less in the log for it to draw on.

Can I do it from my phone?

Yes, and it is one of the few parts designed for it. Talking into a phone on the way home is a perfectly good way to debrief a session.

What if it proposes something wrong?

Reject it, or accept it and undo it — undo is available while you are still on the screen, so accepting something to see what it does costs nothing.

Does the player recap leak my secrets?

No. It is written separately from your own notes, and nothing marked DM-only is ever in it. Read it before you send it anyway — it is two paragraphs.

What if I forget and do it a week later?

It still works, and it is still worth doing. But the difference between what you remember on Saturday night and on the following Thursday is most of what makes it valuable — so do it the same evening if you can.

The debrief

Ten minutes after the session that keep your campaign true — and the part of Yarnfold worth staying for.

What it is for

Prep, run and debrief in a loop, with the codex underneath all three — Where the debrief sits — and why it feeds the next session

Every DM knows they should write up what happened, and almost nobody does. Not because it is hard, but because it is an hour of admin at the end of an evening that was supposed to be fun.

The debrief is that hour, done in about ten minutes, by talking instead of typing. It is the thing Yarnfold is really for — everything else supports it.

A real session, debriefed in real time · 6 minutes

Step 1 — Open the debrief

From the dashboard, or from the session itself. A numbered stepper along the top shows how far through you are, so it is obvious what is left.

The dashboard offering Debrief it on a played session — The dashboard offers it the moment a session is closed

Step 2 — Talk for a minute or two

Press the microphone and say what happened, the way you would tell a friend who missed it. Rambling is fine. Trailing off is fine.

A real ramble sounds like this

“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.”

Or type it, if you would rather. The transcription is only there to save you the typing.

The ramble box with the microphone active — No structure, no names spelled out, no effort

Step 3 — Let it work out what changed

It reads what you said alongside the session log — the notes you jotted at the table, the scenes you played, the fights that happened — and comes back with a list of changes.

NPCs whose disposition moved. Threads that advanced. Facts that became true. Items that changed hands.

The debrief working through the session — It reads the ramble and the session log together

Step 4 — Review by how sure each one is

The changes are grouped by how certain they are, and the groups matter:

Recorded — the app watched it happen. A scene you played, an item you handed over. No assistant involved at all.
You said this — taken almost word for word from your own ramble.
Inferred — dots joined from what you said. Worth a glance.
You wrote this — anything you added by hand.

Read the inferred ones. Skim the rest, or accept a whole group at once. That is the entire review and it is usually two minutes.

The changes grouped into four tiers with coloured markers — Four groups, each with a dot so you can tell them apart at a glance

Every change shows its evidence

This is the rule the feature is built on: nothing is proposed that cannot point at where it came from. A change with no quote is discarded before you ever see it, which turns “do not make things up” from an instruction into something mechanical.

A proposed change with the words it came from underneath — The quote is the whole trust model

What a change looks like

● You said this

Aldric Fenn — disposition: wary → cooperative

from “he admitted the manifest was short”

Step 5 — Add anything it missed

It will miss things. Add them: a note, a fact, a change of disposition, a thread moving, a faction clock turning, a new person who turned up unplanned.

Anything you add is marked as yours and treated as certain, because it is.

Adding a change by hand, with the codex vocabulary — Seven kinds of change, added by hand

Tip.Undo is available on anything you accept, while you are still on the screen. So accepting something to see what it actually does costs nothing — which is the fastest way to learn what the tiers mean.

Step 6 — Write the recaps

Two recaps. Yours keeps the machinery — what moved, what is now live, what you should be thinking about. Your players get a piece of prose in second person, past tense, with nothing marked DM-only anywhere in it.

Edit either. Then send the player one before anyone has left.

Two recaps side by side, one for the DM and one for players — Different documents, not the same one twice

Step 7 — Close it

Closing the debrief writes everything you accepted into the codex and sets up the next session with the right number.

What it gives you back

A campaign that is still true after thirty sessions. The codex knows Aldric died in session 30, so it can tell you when you are about to say otherwise. Your threads know how long they have been quiet. Your players get a recap while they still care about it.

And you get the evening back, which was the point.

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.