DM session notes in ten minutes

By Brenn and Lindsay, the two writers who built Inkling

You do not need a wiki, a transcript or an hour of homework. You need short bullets during play, ten honest minutes after it, and one page that always says where things stand. Here is the routine we use, and a template you can copy tonight.

On a D&D Beyond forum thread about what DM notes actually look like, one DM admitted to writing fourteen words across a three-hour session, then turning them into proper notes afterward. We laughed, and then we recognized ourselves. You cannot run a table and take minutes at the same time. The trick is not to write more during play. It is to write the right few words, and then spend ten minutes with them before they go cold.

This is the routine we settled on after a lot of lost names and one very awkward “wait, who was the innkeeper again?”

What should a DM write down during the session?

Short bullets, only about what changed. Not what you planned, not what you already know. If the party did exactly what you expected, you do not need a note. If they bribed the gate sergeant instead of sneaking past him, you do.

We use four little marks in the margin so the page is sortable later at a glance:

• N for a new NPC you made up on the spot. Write the name the second it leaves your mouth, plus one detail (“N: Odile Brand, ferry keeper, missing two fingers”).
• ! for a consequence: something the party did that the world will react to.
• ? for an open thread: a question the players asked, a promise they made, a door they did not open.
• C for a clue. Circle it if they found it; leave it plain if they walked right past it.

That is it. On a good night you will have ten or fifteen of these. The pattern in that forum thread holds up: the DMs with the best records describe a messy page during play and a tidy page after.

What do you do in the ten minutes after the session?

Do it the same night, or the next morning at the latest. Memory of a session drops off fast, and the fourteen words only make sense while you still remember the other ten thousand. Set a timer and go in this order:

1. Minutes 0 to 2, names. Every N from your page gets one line: who they are, what they want, how they left things with the party.
2. Minutes 2 to 4, consequences. Every ! gets a sentence on how the world responds. Who heard about it? Who is angry, grateful, or now in debt?
3. Minutes 4 to 6, threads. Every ? goes on the open threads list. Cross off anything the party closed.
4. Minutes 6 to 8, clues. List what they found and what they missed. Missed clues are not wasted; they move somewhere else.
5. Minutes 8 to 10, where things stand. Update your status page (below) and write one line on where the party is when you stopped.

A post-session template you can copy

Paste this into whatever you write in, and fill it in straight after the session. Leave a section blank if nothing happened there. Blank is information too.

SESSION __  ·  date ______

Where we stopped (one line):

NEW NPCs (made up at the table)
- Name / who they are / what they want / how it was left

CONSEQUENCES (what the party did, how the world reacts)
- They did... / so now...

OPEN THREADS
- Opened tonight:
- Still open from before:
- Closed tonight:

CLUES
- Found:
- Missed (where could it turn up next?):

MOMENTS WORTH REMEMBERING
- A line someone said, a choice that surprised you

NEXT TIME
- Strong start idea:
- One thing to ask the players:

The last two sections are for you, not the record. A quote from the table is what makes a campaign feel like a shared story months later, and it takes five seconds to write down. If you also send your players a short recap, our read-aloud recap template turns this page into a ninety-second “previously on” in a few more minutes.

What is a campaign status document, and why keep one?

Session notes pile up. After twenty sessions nobody, including you, wants to read them in order to find out what the smugglers are up to. The fix we have borrowed comes from Justin Alexander at The Alexandrian, whose campaign status document is one living document holding everything that is currently active in the game: the events coming for the party, what is happening in the background while they are busy, and how each situation has changed because of what they did. You update it after every session and you prep from it.

Our pared-down version is a single page we call “where things stand”:

WHERE THINGS STAND  (updated after session __)

The party: where they are, what they are trying to do next

Coming for them (things that will happen if nobody stops them)
- 

In the background (the world moving without them)
- 

Situations in play (and how each has changed)
- The Greyfen ferry: ...
- The Weaver's debt: ...

People who matter right now (and what they want this week)
- 

Clues still out there
- 

The session notes are the diary. This page is the present tense. When you sit down to prep, you only read this page and last session’s notes, not the whole history.

Why prep situations, not plots?

Because your players will not follow the plot, and they should not have to. The Alexandrian’s essay Don’t Prep Plots makes the case well: prepare a situation (who wants what, what they will do about it, what happens if the party does nothing) and let the players decide what to do with it. That respects player agency, and it also makes notes much more useful. A note that says “the ferry keeper now owes the party a favor” keeps paying off whatever direction the party goes next. A note that says “Act two begins at the ferry” is dead the moment they turn left.

The same goes for clues. If the party missed one, do not force them back to it. The Alexandrian’s Three Clue Rule suggests planting at least three routes to any conclusion you need them to reach, which is exactly why the “missed” list in the template asks where the clue could turn up next.

How do session notes fit the Lazy DM eight steps?

If you already prep with Mike Shea’s method from Sly Flourish, your notes slot straight in. His eight steps, in short:

1. Review the characters.
2. Create a strong start.
3. Outline potential scenes.
4. Define secrets and clues.
5. Develop fantastic locations.
6. Outline important NPCs.
7. Choose relevant monsters.
8. Select magic item rewards.

Your ten-minute notes do a lot of this for you. Step one is easier when “moments worth remembering” tells you which character had the spotlight and which did not. The strong start is often sitting in your consequences list. Secrets and clues carry forward from the missed list, and important NPCs come straight from the names section. Shea has written that his own prep usually takes thirty to sixty minutes, and in a 2020 poll he ran, about a third of DMs said they prep an hour or less for a four-hour game. Short prep is normal. Good notes are what make it feel safe.

Should you just record the session and transcribe it?

Honestly, recording and transcription tools exist, some of them will summarize the session for you, and for some tables they are a real help: a player who missed the night, a DM who wants to catch a great line, a group that likes to relive it. We are not going to pretend otherwise.

But a transcript is not a set of notes. It is three hours of everything, and the work of deciding what mattered is still waiting for you. That deciding is the prep. When you write “the ferry keeper owes them a favor” in your own words, you have already started thinking about when she calls it in. Writing it yourself is what makes you remember it at the table next week, without looking anything up. Ten minutes by hand beats three hours of audio you will not go back to.

How Inkling fits

We built Inkling as a writing app, and it turns out a campaign is a lot of writing. Here is how we use it for session notes, and what it does not do.

• One story per campaign. Add each session’s notes to the bottom of the same story. When you open it again next week, Inkling hands you a one-paragraph “Previously...” recap of where you left off, written from your own words (it never writes your notes for you, and you can switch it off entirely).
• A Storyboard for threads. Put a card on the Storyboard for each open thread, NPC and place, and draw threads between them. When the ferry keeper, the smugglers and the missing ledger end up on one line, you can see the next session forming.
• Character cards for NPCs. Promote a recurring NPC to a character card: a one-line pitch, what they want, why, and notes for voice and quirks. The cast is searchable, so “the one with two missing fingers” is a search away. Our post on how to keep track of NPCs goes further.
• Share the player-facing part only. Keep your status page private and send the party a separate recap with a private read-only link. Nothing for them to sign up for.

Try the Storyboard below. It is set up as a DM’s board for an invented harbor town: the places, the people and the clues, each on a card you can drag and add to.

What Inkling is not: it is not a virtual tabletop. There are no dice, no initiative tracker, no stat blocks and no battle maps. Pair it with your VTT or your paper character sheets, and use Inkling for the words around the game. If your notes start turning into something bigger, we wrote about turning a campaign into a novel too.

Inkling is an independent writing app. Dungeons & Dragons and D&D are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC. Inkling is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Wizards of the Coast.