Long Island Dungeon Master ← Back to the realm
Built at my own table · testers first

The third leg of the table

Gnasher's Quill

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

Every other session tool is a cloud subscription

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.

No cloud No subscription No account No AI service listening Your machine, your folder

Three moves, and one of them happens while you sleep

You do nothing during the game except press a button when something good lands.

1
Before the game

Hit record

One audio file covers the whole night. The recording is written so a hard crash at hour five doesn't cost you the session.

2
During the game

Mark the moments

A key, a floating button, or your phone. Marks are retroactive — you press after the beat lands, because nobody sees a great moment coming.

3
After everyone leaves

Transcribe and mine

Offline, on your own hardware, free. Then it reads the transcript for you and writes the pages below.

A transcript nobody reads is worthless

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 Ledger

What you owe your table

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.

The Concordance

A who's-who that builds itself

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.

The Cold Open

The page you read at 6:40

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 Mirror

How you ran it

The shape of the night. Where the clock actually went, your longest unbroken stretch of narration, the dead air. No other session tool tells a DM anything about their own craft.

The Marks

The bits worth keeping

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, in their own voices.

The method

Arithmetic, not opinion

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 Chorus

Who said what, known — not guessed

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.

  • One phone per voice. No app to install; it's a page on your table's own network.
  • Remote tables get it free. Everyone records their local mic — nobody has to capture the call.
  • It also shows who didn't get to talk. That is a harder read than it sounds, and a useful one.
  • Phones sleep. The page asks for a wake lock and warns you; if one dozes, that player rejoins and everything already uploaded is safe.
session-transcript.txt 3 voices
01:42:08DMThe warden's hands are shaking.
01:42:15KrisI step between them.
01:42:19GarthaxBad idea. I ready an action.
01:42:24DMHe looks at the door, not at you.
01:42:31KrisThen I look at the door too.
Timestamps and names, straight out of the merge — no model decided who spoke.

What it won't do

Accuracy is the whole brand here. If a tool oversells itself at the table, it's worse than no tool.

  • Ask your table before you record them. Every time. A recorder nobody agreed to is a betrayal, not a tool.
  • One microphone means no speaker labels. That's what the Chorus is for. Crosstalk across a loud table beats single-mic speaker guessing, and the Quill won't pretend otherwise.
  • It's a tool for a table in a house, not a hardened server. Controls and transcripts are locked to the machine running it. Don't put it on a network you wouldn't hand a USB stick to.
  • Windows is where it was built and measured. The macOS and Linux paths are written and follow the documented interfaces, but nobody has recorded a real session on a Mac with it yet.
  • It transcribes; it doesn't write your campaign. The pages above are counted and quoted from what was said. The judgement stays yours.

The Quill, the Grimoire, and the Satchel

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

Not out yet — and that's deliberate

The Quill was built for my own table, and it has been running there. Before it goes anywhere else it goes to a handful of testers, because a tool that eats a six-hour recording of your friends is a tool that has to be boring and correct first.

When it's ready it lands here, free, alongside the Grimoire and the Satchel. The fastest way to hear about it is the newsletter — the same one the free tables and one-shots go out on.

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.

Gnasher's Quill™ · local · offline · free · © 2020–2026 Frank Papaleo — Long Island Dungeon Master • HomeGnasher's GrimoireGnasher's SatchelAdventure KeepersPrivacy
An independent tool; not affiliated with, endorsed, or sponsored by Wizards of the Coast LLC. Dungeons & Dragons and D&D are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC.