The third leg of the table
Record your session. Get back what your table actually said. The Quill listens on the machine already sitting on your table, transcribes it there, and hands you a night you can read: a recap, the promises you owe your players, a who's-who, and an honest look at how you ran it. Nothing is uploaded. No AI service ever hears your table.
Runs on your own machine · offline transcription · no account, no subscription · ask your table before you record them
They all ask the same thing: upload six hours of your friends talking to somebody else's server, and pay monthly for the privilege. Your in-jokes, your arguments, the bit where somebody's real life leaked into the game. All of it, on a machine you don't own, under a policy you didn't write.
The Quill doesn't, and that isn't a limitation to apologise for. It's the product. The speech engine runs locally, on your hardware, with the network off if you like. The audio and the transcript stay in a folder you can see.
You do nothing during the game except press a button when something good lands.
One audio file covers the whole night. The recording is written so a hard crash at hour five doesn't cost you the session.
A key, a floating button, or your phone. Marks are retroactive. You press after the beat lands, because nobody sees a great moment coming.
Offline, on your own hardware, free. Then it reads the transcript for you and writes the pages below.
Six hours of table talk becomes a wall of unpunctuated text. So the Quill reads it for you and writes the pages a DM actually opens.
The promises, debts, and threats spoken aloud in fiction, across every session. A campaign doesn't die because you forgot last session. It dies because in session 4 an NPC said "come back when you have the seal," the players wrote it down, and you never did.
Every name your table said, gathered as you play, with search across every night you've recorded. "When did we first meet Talia?" stops being an argument.
Twenty minutes before they arrive: how last session ended in your own words, what you pinned, what you still owe, who turned up that you never wrote down, and where the table leaned in.
The shape of the night. Where the clock actually went, your longest unbroken stretch of narration, the dead air. Most session tools tell you what happened in the game. This one tells you how you ran it.
Every moment you flagged, served back with the minutes of audio leading into it, so the line that made the table lose it is still there in context, timestamped in the recording.
Every proper noun your table says, kept in one list the transcriber reads before it writes. It's the difference between "Vethric Ashgrave" and four sessions of phonetic soup. You don't type it: point it at the campaign notes you already keep and it pulls the names out for you.
All of it is deterministic: word lists, timestamps, and counting. Nothing here calls a model to decide what your session meant. Where a number can't be known, it says "couldn't tell" instead of inventing one.
The Lexicon
A transcriber has never heard of Vethric Ashgrave. Left alone it will guess, differently every time, and you'll spend four sessions reading phonetic soup where your villain's name should be.
The Lexicon is one plain list of the proper nouns your table actually says: your party, your NPCs, your towns, your factions. The transcriber reads it before it writes, and the names come out spelled right.
You don't have to type it. Point it at the campaign notes you already keep and it reads the names out of them for you. It shows you what it wants to add before it changes anything, and it never touches a line you wrote yourself.
.md or .txt files you already have.
Gnasher keeps the words.
The Chorus
Working out speakers from one room microphone is genuinely hard, and five people talking over each other defeats it entirely. So don't try. If every voice records itself, the speaker isn't inferred. It's known.
Each player opens a link on their own phone, types their name, and taps record. Afterwards the tracks are braided into one transcript with the names already on it.
Accuracy is the whole brand here. If a tool oversells itself at the table, it's worse than no tool.
Three free tools, one table. They're built as a set, and each one is useless in a different direction without the other two.
the Quill records the Grimoire holds the Satchel carries
The Quill was built for my own table and it has been running there. This is an early build, handed out to find the sharp edges before it goes wide. It's free, it always will be, and it works entirely offline.
v1.8.0 · 177 KB · Windows only for now · unzip and read START-HERE.txt · no account, nothing phones home
Read this before you download it. It is Windows only. The Mac and Linux paths are written but genuinely unproven, and I'd rather say so than waste your evening. The scripts are not code-signed, so Windows will warn you; every file in the folder is plain text you can open and read first. Transcribing takes real time on a real CPU, and a loud table with everyone talking at once is the case I've tested least. Don't take the accuracy on faith, take it for a spin.
What I actually want back. Not downloads, not stars. I want to know where you got stuck, what the screen said, and what you expected it to do that it didn't. Bad news is the useful kind. A one-line "this bit broke" beats a paragraph of nice. There's also a LIDM Discord now, with a help-and-bugs channel. And please don't send me your recordings or transcripts. I don't want them, and your table didn't agree to me reading them.
The companion line: Gnasher's Quill™ (the session recorder) · Gnasher's Grimoire™ (the DM app) · Gnasher's Satchel™ (the player app).
Free tools live in The Hoard. Curious how any of this gets built? How this gets made.