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Running Sessions: A Campaign That Remembers Itself

Log a recap after each game and Grimoire keeps the score: what became canon, which threads are still hanging, and what your players have discovered.

The gap between sessions is where campaigns die: promises forgotten, consequences dropped, players asking "wait, who was that again?" Grimoire's answer is a small habit with outsized returns. Log what happened, and the app carries the story's state forward for you.

Log the session

After each game, create a Session record:

  1. Open Sessions in the sidebar and click Add Session.
  2. Write a short summary of what happened. Prose is fine; you are writing for future-you and your players.
  3. Add key events: the discrete moments that mattered. Key events can be marked as canon, which makes them part of your world's established record.
  4. Link the NPCs met and locations visited. This is the step that pays off everywhere else, so do not skip it.

Ten minutes, most weeks less.

What one log entry unlocks

That single record fans out across the app:

  • Your dashboard leads with the recap under "Where you left off," so next session starts with a thirty-second read instead of an archaeology dig.
  • Canonical facts accumulate into a permanent record of what the table changed forever.
  • The timeline gains an entry, so campaign history builds itself as you play.
  • Your players' portal (under the Revealed world preset) reveals the NPCs, locations, and loot that session touched. Logging the session is literally how the world unfolds for your table. See the Player Portal guide.
  • AI context rolls forward: recent sessions and the entities they touched stay in the spotlight for connected assistants.

Open threads: promises with an age

A thread is anything left dangling on purpose or otherwise: a favor owed, an unexplained symbol, a villain who escaped. Create them from the dashboard or a session record, and give each a type: consequence, promise, mystery, foreshadowing, or callback opportunity.

Threads age. The dashboard shows how many sessions each has been open, so a promise from two months ago does not quietly rot. Resolve a thread when you pay it off, and the resolution becomes part of the record; a resolved thread can be reopened if your players dig it back up.

The command palette opens with Ctrl K or Cmd K and has five modes: search, connections, canon, open threads, and wiki. Search this world, or pick a question below Ctrl K Search Connections of... Canon about... Still hanging Wiki find anything an entity's full web established facts open threads by age page text One keystroke from anywhere in the app. Players get their own palette in the portal.
The command palette answers story questions directly. "Still hanging" lists open threads, oldest debts first.

Mid-game, the palette (Ctrl K) is your recall engine: Still hanging for open threads, Canon about a person or place before you improvise something that contradicts it, Connections of an NPC when the party corners someone and you need their whole web at a glance.

Session prep

Session Prep is a separate category from session logs: goals for next time, planned scenes, NPCs to feature, hooks to advance. Prep records are permanently GM-only. No visibility setting, no preset, and no AI connection your players use can ever surface them.

A prep record pairs naturally with the dashboard: open threads tell you what the story owes, prep is where you decide which debts come due next session.

A rhythm that works

  1. After the game (10 minutes): log the session, link who they met and where they went, mark what became canon, open threads for anything left dangling.
  2. Before the next game (5 minutes): read "Where you left off," skim the open threads, jot a prep record with two or three scenes.
  3. At the table: Ctrl K when memory fails.

The payoff compounds. Twenty sessions in, your campaign is a searchable history instead of a pile of notebooks.