• Open your Grimoire.
• Drag the file onto it.
• Or press the Add a Keeper tile and pick the files.
• A PDF can go through the same door, or through Add a Tome in the PDF row.
• A folder of Markdown notes has its own door: press Import from Obsidian and pick the folder.
• Read the line it gives you back.

What it takes: .pdf books, .epub books, .docx and .xlsx out of a word processor or a spreadsheet, .csv and .tsv tables, .txt and .md notes, .json homebrew in the 5eTools shape, and .html, which covers an Adventure Keeper and any web page you saved.

Every note in that folder becomes a page and a card you can summon.

Limits, plainly. The old binary Word and Excel formats, .doc and .xls, are not read.

• The file is copied into this browser’s own storage, on this computer.
• Nothing is uploaded.
• Drop the same file again later and the book updates in place.
• Taking one out again depends on what it is. A Keeper: press the ✕ in the corner of its cover, then Take out, then Are you sure? Three presses, on purpose.
• A PDF: open it and press Remove in its own bar at the top, then press again.

Limits, plainly. Your Grimoire belongs to this browser on this machine.

• Press Space.
• Type any phrase you remember.
• Hits come back from titles and from the words inside your books, with a bit of the sentence around each one so you can tell which hit is yours.
• Press Enter on a hit.

A PDF’s words are read once, when it comes in, and stored page by page, so a phrase from page 200 finds page 200.

Limits, plainly. A scanned book is pictures of words and holds no text at all.

• Open a Tome.
• Turn to a page worth keeping.
• Set a page mark and give it a name you will know again at the table.
• Jump back to it later from the Tome’s own bar or from the Summon.

Limits, plainly. Up to 20 marks per book, and they are the marks you set.

• Press Space.
• Type book: and a piece of the title, like book:salt.
• Add anything else you want to pin down: kind:monster, cr:2, level:3, school:evocation, tag:undead.
• Or open the book and use the filter box at the top of its Contents, which only ever searches that book.

Limits, plainly. book: matches on the title, so two books with near-identical titles need a longer piece of the name to tell apart.

A Keeper carries its own cover art and the Grimoire shows it.

• Any PDF in your Grimoire can wear a cover of your own: press Add a cover on its tile and pick a picture, or drop the picture straight onto the tile.
• The Grimoire shrinks it to fit the tile and keeps it small, in this browser beside the PDF, so it costs you almost nothing and it never leaves your computer.
• Changed your mind? The same spot on the tile says Remove cover, and your PDF and its page marks are untouched.

Limits, plainly. A cover has to be a picture: PNG, JPEG or WebP, and one too heavy to shrink under the limit is refused in a line that says so rather than stored.

• Open the binder bar and press Export .keeper.
• Copy it across however you like: a USB stick, a drive, a cable.
• On the other computer, open the Grimoire and press Import .keeper.
• Copy your PDF files over separately, drop them in there, and add their covers again.
• Or skip the copying of the .keeper file: press Binder on a drive, pick a folder, and your books, notes and saves live in that folder. Your PDF files and their covers still go over on their own, by the step above.

Point that folder at a USB stick and run the Grimoire from the stick, and your books, notes, saves and tables travel with it.

Limits, plainly. A .keeper backup carries your books, notes, saves and tables. PDFs and their covers do not.

• A book locked with DRM.
• A scan.
• .doc and .xls. The old binary formats are not read. Save as .docx or .xlsx.
• Module files exported by other table apps are not read today.
• Tables inside PDFs. A wrong table looks exactly like a right one, so the app does not guess. Retype it into a .csv, a spreadsheet or a Markdown pipe table and it arrives rollable, with the die read off your own roll column.
• Very large PDFs.

One thing that surprises people: the Grimoire is not tied to one game. It is a container, so any system’s books, notes and tables are welcome. What is 5e specific is what it ships with, the free SRD 5.2.1 reference, and the War Table, which builds encounters and runs initiative off 5e style stat blocks.

• Go to longislanddungeonmaster.com/grimoire and scroll to the free packs.
• Download one.
• Drop it in like any other book.
• Every monster, spell and item in it is in your Summon from the next keypress.

These are whole openly licensed rulebooks built as Keepers, and they cost nothing. The SRD 5.2.1 is already in the box: the monsters, the spells, the items and the rules, free under CC-BY-4.0.

• Press Everything on the bar and choose Theater.
• Type a name for this table in the top box, and pick the party that sits at it.
• Press Open the table by code.
• Read the code aloud. Each player opens Gnasher’s Satchel, taps the wax seal at the top left, types the code and taps Join.
• Or hold your screen up.

The code belongs to the table, not to the night.

Limits, plainly. Only Change the code makes everybody retype, so reach for it when a code has leaked and not otherwise.

Guest Wi-Fi in a hall or a cafe often stops two devices talking to each other.

• Press The router won't let us talk in the Theater panel.
• A code appears on your screen and keeps turning over.
• Each player opens their Satchel, taps the pairing ring, presses Read the invite with the camera and points their phone at your screen.
• A reply comes back on their screen. They press Show my reply as a code, and you read their phone with Open the camera.
• The link opens and they are seated with a name and a seat number, exactly like a code join.

Nothing leaves the room on this road, so there is nothing for the network to block.

Limits, plainly. This road hands things across by camera, so it carries sheets, rosters and notes and not maps, art or a whole Keeper.

Every word on a seat is telling you something specific.

• Waiting for the next player.
• PAIRED: linked, awake, and getting everything you push.
• resting: their phone dozed off.
• waiting: a paste invite that has been made and not yet answered.
• seat 1, seat 2: the number that device keeps.
• older Satchel: that phone is running an older free copy, so newer table things like the turned grid and the condition dots do not reach it.
• grid not turned, or board out of sync: their fog and tokens are sitting off the map, or some board updates never landed. Push the board again, or have them rejoin.

Limits, plainly. The line under an open code tells you how many invites are out at once, because that depends on the code service and not on you.

• Open the Theater panel before your players get there.
• Press Table-night check.
• Read every row: the code service, a relay for a network that blocks devices, the join link on the code’s picture, the second screen, and whether the light of day travels.
• It answers GO, or NO GO on however many failed, with the reason on every row. A row marked NOTE is a thing to know, never a failure.

Write down what it says before your first player joins.

Limits, plainly. A row that could not be read from this machine is a no go and says so, because a check that passes when it could not look is worse than no check.

The honest answer is that there is nothing for you to do.

• Their Satchel shows one line at the bottom of their screen, Reconnecting, and nothing else.
• It comes back on its own, as the same player, in the same chair, with the same number.
• After two minutes it stops spinning and says so plainly: nothing is wrong with their Satchel, the table just is not reachable from there yet.
• After ten minutes it stops, says that too, and offers one button: Join by camera instead.
• It never asks anybody to sit down again as somebody new.

Limits, plainly. A sick code service no longer closes your table on one bad answer: it is retried, and the code closes only after two minutes of silence, with the line saying which and counting down.

• Handouts: a title, then text or a picture, then Push text or Push image. Pick a name in the To row first and it goes to that chair alone.
• The quiet word: a whisper thread with one player.
• Packets: a dossier you hand somebody. The top half is what they get; the box underneath is yours only and never sent. Press Send it and only the face travels.
• Table rolls: every roll a player makes lands in the Theater log and in your session dice log, under the name of the seat that rolled it.

Limits, plainly. A packet’s private box is never sent, and it is left out of the handout faces shown on the second screen too.

• Press Everything on the bar and choose Second screen.
• Drag the window it opens onto the television.
• Press Full screen on that window.
• Open the War Board and run the fight on it, with minis on the table if you like.

It shows the board your players may see and nothing of yours, it needs no network at all, and it works whether or not a single phone is paired.

Limits, plainly. Private drawings and hidden tokens you do not own are left out.

• Press Everything on the bar and choose Combat.
• Press + Add in the turn bar and pick your party and whatever monsters you own.
• Every mustered monster arrives with its armour class, its hit points and its attacks already read out of its own block.
• Next turn walks the order forward; the small arrow beside it walks back.

Limits, plainly. A monster you muster twice is numbered, so the second wolf is its own row with its own hit points.

• Press Roll initiative in the turn bar.
• Every monster rolls a d20 and adds the bonus written on its own block: the Initiative line first, its DEX second, and when the block has neither, a flat d20 with a line saying that it is flat.
• A player who already rolled on their Satchel keeps the number they rolled, under their own name; a player whose roll never arrived is rolled for, and the log says so.
• Re-roll one combatant from its own row, or type a number straight in, for when somebody just tells you theirs.
• Undo order puts the previous order back exactly as it was, with the same round and the same turn active.

Limits, plainly. Ties break on the initiative bonus and then on the name, so the same fight sorts the same way twice.

• Press an attack on a block and you get both halves at once: the d20 with the block’s own bonus on it, and the damage behind it.
• The small hit and dmg controls beside an attack roll each half alone, for when the table has already agreed the blow landed.
• Straight in the turn bar becomes Advantage, then Disadvantage, and rolls two dice for you until you turn it back.
• A natural 20 is called out and rolls double the damage dice, never double the modifier.

Limits, plainly. An attack with no to-hit bonus written on its block says so and rolls no d20, rather than quietly rolling a plus nothing.

• Put a condition on a row from its own list: seventeen names, Blinded through to Dead, with Concentrating, Dodging and Hidden among them.
• Give it a count of rounds when it has one.
• Press the eye beside a condition to decide whether your players see it.
• On the board, a token wears its conditions as small dots, so one glance tells you who is in trouble.

Limits, plainly. An older free copy of the Satchel does not get the condition dots or a turned grid, and the seat says so beside that player’s name.

• Press the mask on a monster’s row and its name is hidden from your players; their token shows its number instead.
• Press the mask in the panel’s own bar to do that to every monster at once, and again to put the names back.
• Nothing changes on your side: you keep reading the name while they read a number.

Limits, plainly. This hides the name plate, not the monster.

• The chip under the turn bar reads No blows traded yet. until somebody swings. Press it to open the fight so far, blow by blow, in the order it happened.
• Clear empties that log when you want a clean sheet.
• Open the War Board on the map you want.
• In the Tokens section, press Place mustered, and every mustered combatant lands on that map as a token.

Limits, plainly. There is one undo and it is for the order.

• Press Everything on the bar and choose War Board.
• Press Maps folder and pick the folder of map images on your computer.
• Search the tray by name and press a map to open it on the board. The Tray control folds that tray away and brings it back.
• Press Tokens folder and do the same for your token pictures.
• Press + Scene to save what is on the board right now, fog and tokens and all, and Copy to make a second version of it.

Limits, plainly. Nothing here is uploaded, because there is no account and no server to upload it to.

• Press Grid to open the aligning bar.
• Match: drag a box across a few of the map’s own printed squares and the grid matches what it finds.
• Drop: type a square size in pixels and the grid drops straight on.
• Turn: give it an angle in degrees for a map that was scanned at a slant.
• Gridless for a picture with no squares in it at all, and Undo for the attempt you did not like.

Limits, plainly. A turned grid is newer than some copies of the Satchel.

• Reveal paints the squares the party can see, with a brush.
• Room reveals a rectangle in one drag.
• Hide puts squares back into the dark.
• All and None do the whole map at once, which is how most nights start.

Limits, plainly. Fog belongs to the map and it is remembered, so a corridor you opened last week is still open.

• Choose Tokens to select and move them.
• Give one a label, a colour, and a size of one, two or three squares, or a free size in between.
• Set an owner: dm, or the name of a seat at your table, and that player may move their own.
• Give it sight in feet, and Darkvision when it has it.
• Player’s art puts the picture from that player’s own sheet on their token, and Make a token builds one out of any picture you drop, drag in or paste.

Limits, plainly. A picture from a site that will not let a browser copy it can be shown but never saved, and the app tells you so instead of failing quietly.

• Measure drags a ruler across the map in squares and feet.
• Draw gives you a pen, a line, a box, a ring and a written note, in eight colours and three widths. DM only keeps a drawing on your screen.
• Players lets a chosen seat draw as well, and Erase clears what they drew.
• Area sets a size in feet, then aims a circle, a cone, a line or a cube from a press on the map or on a token.
• Ping says look here: press the map and everybody at the table sees the ring.

Limits, plainly. The ruler is the one tool on this list that is never shared, and that is deliberate.

• Press Lighting to turn it on, and set the ambient light.
• Drag a wall to block sight, and use Gap to put a doorway in one.
• Press the map with Light to drop a light, or pick a preset: a candle, a lamp, a torch, a hooded lantern, a bullseye lantern, or the light of a spell, each with its own bright and dim range in feet.
• Type your own bright and dim numbers, pick the colour of the flame, and press On token so the light travels with whoever carries it.
• Undo wall, Remove light and Clear all take it back.

Limits, plainly. A creature’s eyes are set on its own token, not on the map, so darkvision is a property of the thing looking.

• Press Battle map and it becomes a Campaign map. Press it again to switch back: nothing is lost either way.
• A campaign map holds pins instead of tokens. Choose what a pin opens: a note, a page, another map, or a piece of text.
• Tap the map to place one, and drag a pin to move it.
• Party here drops the party marker, and Clear marker takes it off again.
• Set the scale in the bar: so many pixels to so many miles, kilometres, feet or metres, and the ruler reads in that.

Limits, plainly. The party marker lives on a campaign map.

• Set the light on this map from the box on the bar, or leave it on the clock and it follows the hour in your world.
• Tick To the table to show the light of day to your players as well as to you, and untick Day and night to turn the whole thing off on every map.
• Open the maps tray and scroll to Starter maps for three plain tiles: Parchment grid, Dungeon stone and Grass field.
• Press one and it opens with the grid already lined up.

Limits, plainly. None of this touches your map image.

• Press Push to table and the map goes to every paired Satchel.
• Their phones get the map, the grid, the fog you revealed, and the tokens they are allowed to see.
• Press it again after a big change.

Limits, plainly. Switching to a different map detaches your table: they still hold the last board you pushed, and nothing new reaches them until you press it again, and the app says so at the moment it happens.

• Press Everything on the bar and choose The Saga, then press the Calendar tab. The calendar and The clock on the bar go straight there.
• Set the day, the month and the year in the three boxes, and type what your table calls the age in the era box.
• Type a number of days and press Advance to move the world on by that many.
• Write a line in the box and press Mark the day to put it on the timeline, dated today in the world.
• Set next sitting to the real night your table next meets.

Limits, plainly. Everything on the timeline is stamped with the day it happened at the moment you write it, so re-labelling your calendar later changes the words on a date and never re-sorts your history.

• Walk the hour an hour at a time, press a number on the twenty four hour strip to jump straight to it, or hold and drag the bar underneath to scrub a whole day past under one thumb.
• Short rest moves the clock by an hour.
• Long rest moves it by eight, and March moves it by eight as well: a day on the road.
• Light torches gives every unlit light on the open map an hour of burning.

Limits, plainly. There is one clock and everything reads it: timed conditions, burning lights, the readout on the War Board, the tint of daylight on the map, and the Chronicle’s stamps.

• Write what happens in the top box, and add a line for yourself in the box under it if you want one.
• Tie it to a person or a place you have already written down, from the list.
• Say when, three ways: in so many hours, days or weeks, then Put it ahead; or on a day, month, year and hour, then Put it there; or simply tap a day on the strip of the month below.
• Everything ahead of you is listed under coming up, with the full date in your own words, and every line can be edited where it sits, moved, or taken off.

Limits, plainly. An event is stamped with its day at the moment you write it, so swapping your calendar re-labels it and never moves it.

• Rest, march, walk the hours or drag the bar, and the day you were waiting for arrives on screen with your note beside it.
• Two answers sit under it: Mark done, and Snooze a day, which is a day on from now so that it genuinely comes round again.
• Several events crossed in the same move show together.
• An event that passed and was never answered stays listed, so it is not simply gone.

Limits, plainly. It fires once, going forward, and never again.

• Open Your own months and type one month a line: a name, then how many days it holds. Press Use these months.
• Start from A plain year, twelve months of thirty days, or The common year, the month lengths most people know, then change whatever you like.
• Name the days of your week in the box and press Use this week.
• Name your moons, and the line underneath tells you what phase each one is in today.

Limits, plainly. The two starting calendars are deliberately plain, and neither of them is anybody’s published setting.

• Write it as a two column table: the month, then how many days it holds.
• Add rows beginning weekday to name the days of your week.
• Press From my notes to read the first calendar table it finds in your own notes.
• Or paste the table into the box and press From the box.

Limits, plainly. Anything it cannot read, it tells you about rather than guessing.

• Press N.
• Type what just happened. Enter saves it; Shift and Enter together give you a new line.
• Paste or drop a picture on the box to keep it in the note.
• Find it again later by pressing Space and typing any word of it.

Limits, plainly. A note holds up to two thousand characters, which is a paragraph and not a chapter.

• Press Everything on the bar and choose Theater, then find Packets.
• Type a name in Build from your Grimoire and it builds the dossier out of what you already own, splitting it in two by itself.
• The top half is what the table gets: a name, a line under it, what kind of thing it is, and a picture.
• The box underneath is yours only and never sent: secrets, stats, what the person really wants.
• Press Send it and only the face travels.

Limits, plainly. The private box is left out of the handout faces shown on the second screen too.

• Press Everything on the bar and choose Thread.
• Write a post to the table.
• Put a roll in brackets, a d20 with a bonus or a handful of dice with a damage type, and it is rolled here as you post.
• Press Post.
• Freeze the thread when the night ends, and Export the thread keeps it as a file.

Limits, plainly. Bold and italics carry; anything richer is written out in plain words, on purpose.

• Press Everything on the bar and choose Chronicle, then find Session recaps.
• Press Import a recap and pick the player copy.
• Read it over in the box and press Save to keep the words as they stand.
• Press Publish to the table.
• Take back removes it from their phones again.

Limits, plainly. The DM copy of a recap is refused at the door, on purpose: the player copy is the one that goes to players.

• Press Everything on the bar and choose Chronicle to read what earlier chapters left behind.
• In the Dice tray, press Chronicle to export the night as one page: the rolls, the battle, your bookmarks, and the notes you wrote in the last eighteen hours.
• If you brought a folder of Markdown notes in, Chronicle → vault writes tonight’s Session Chronicle back into that folder as a note.
• Press Import from Obsidian again after you edit those notes, and the Grimoire re-reads them.

Limits, plainly. The export is a page you can hand to anybody, and it is a page rather than a save: the binder is what remembers.

• Open a creature that casts.
• Hover it with a mouse, or tap it on a touch screen, and the card appears beside the name with its level, its range and the start of its text.
• Press it again for the whole card, opened over whatever you are running.
• Press Esc to close it, wherever you are.

It is reachable from the keyboard as well as the mouse: the card opens when the link takes focus, so a DM who does not want to chase a pointer mid-fight does not have to.

Limits, plainly. A spell you have not got says so in plain words, and names the pack that carries it when your Grimoire knows which one does.

• The conditions are in there, along with exhaustion, concentration, advantage and disadvantage, a saving throw, an opportunity attack, cover, a reaction, a bonus action, a ritual and a cantrip.
• Hover or focus the word in whatever you are reading and the note opens beside it.
• Press Esc to close it.

Limits, plainly. These are plain-words reminders, not the rule text.

• Press Space.
• Type any phrase you remember.
• Narrow it in the same line: kind:monster, cr:2, level:3, school:evocation, tag:undead.
• Press Enter on a hit.

Limits, plainly. The narrowing words are printed under the box, so you never have to remember them.

• Press Space.
• Type book: and a piece of the title, like book:salt.
• Add any other filter beside it.
• Or open the book itself and use the filter box at the top of its Contents, which only ever searches that one book.

Limits, plainly. The book filter matches on the title, so two books with near-identical titles need a longer piece of the name to tell apart.

• Go to longislanddungeonmaster.com/grimoire and scroll to the free packs.
• Download one.
• Drop it into your Grimoire.
• Every monster, spell and item in it answers Space from the next keypress.

Limits, plainly. A spell card exists for a spell you own, which is exactly why a missing one names the pack instead of shrugging. Downloading that pack is the whole fix, and it costs nothing. The SRD 5.2.1 reference is already in the box, free under CC-BY-4.0.