Story, chapters and memory

A language model has no memory of its own between turns. The app gives it one: a story arc it follows, a record it is shown, facts it is reminded of, and chapters that summarise the past so the recent past stays vivid. Knowing how that works explains most of what the Dungeon Master does, and why a setting or two matters.

The secret story arc

Every AI campaign is given a hidden spine at creation: the premise, the antagonist, the beats that lead to a climax, the twists. The party lead can read and edit it from the Story tab; players cannot. As chapters close, the arc is refreshed with a small, clamped delta, so the plot advances without the model rewriting history. Story beats can be solvable, with the relationship meter and romance gates feeding in. A human Dungeon Master writes the arc themselves, or leaves it blank.

Chapters

Chapters are grouped under acts, each with its recap and announcement, and the title screen names the act the tale is in. A beat is reached through waypoints the server ticks from play, so the story advances at the table's pace. A chapter closes when its story beats are completed, not after a number of messages, and never on a single scene. The close does four things: awards experience, extracts facts (names, promises, debts, wounds) into the campaign's memory, writes the chapter summary, and takes a snapshot the lead can rewind to. Title cards announce chapters, fights and rests at the table.

Table language

A campaign's Table language setting (fifteen languages, English by default) is the language the Dungeon Master writes the story in. Every model call that writes for people uses it, and the server reads story and player text the same way in every one of them. Picture prompts are rewritten into English before they reach an image model.

What the Dungeon Master is told

Each turn the prompt is built from blocks: the setting and arc, the party's sheets, the current scene and map, the open quests and the shop if one is open, factions and their standing, lines and veils, recent messages in full, older chapters as summaries, and any lore the recall search found relevant. The Context tab (story authority only) shows those blocks and what each costs against the model's context window, including a Tool definitions row: the descriptions of the Dungeon Master's tools take about 27,000 tokens on every call, which the budget accounts for. When the window is small, the oldest material is compacted first; a model served with a 64K window, or an OpenAI model with its 128K window, sees far more of the story than a 16K one, which is the single biggest lever on a Dungeon Master that seems to forget.

Recall

Lore entries, PDF pages in the binder, past chapters and extracted facts are indexed with a small local embedding model on the server, so "the innkeeper who owed us" can be found even when it is not in the recent messages. Ask the DM uses the same search. The default model understands English; for a table that plays in another language, the desktop app's Settings has a Story memory choice of Many languages, and a self-hosted server sets a multilingual model with EMBEDDING_MODEL. The story is re-read in the background after a change.

Recaps

Opening a campaign after a break shows a recap card. At a human-DM table there are two: the party's card, and a DM-only whisper with what the players do not know. Recaps come from chapter summaries, and, when transcription is on for a human-DM table, from what was said aloud.

The Story tab and the archive

The Story tab is the campaign's binder as the party sees it: chapters and recaps, quests the Dungeon Master has set and ticked, a timeline of dated events, handouts that unroll from a painted scroll, and the relationship graph of who knows whom. The archive is a book whose pages turn.

Correcting the record

The party lead can reroll a narration with guidance, continue a scene that stopped short, fix a typo in place, or rewind to a chapter boundary. Rerolls change only the words: dice, sheets and resolved outcomes stay identical, so a bad paragraph never undoes a good roll. See Steering the story.

Exporting a campaign

A finished (or unfinished) campaign exports to DOCX, ODT or HTML as a reading copy: the chronicle with chapter headings, without the dice noise. Play state moves only with the server's database, so an export is for the shelf, not for continuing on another server. Workshops and characters export as their own bundles.