A D&D session recap you can read aloud in 90 seconds

By Brenn and Lindsay, the two writers who built Inkling

The best recap is short enough that nobody reaches for their phone and specific enough that the party remembers what they were doing. Here is a template you can copy, a worked example, a group chat version for whoever missed it, and what to do after a long break.

Every table knows the moment. The snacks are out, the character sheets are out, and the DM says “so, where were we?” Silence. Someone gets an NPC’s name wrong. Someone else is sure the party was in a different town. Ten minutes go by before anyone rolls a die. A good recap fixes that in about 90 seconds, which is 150 to 200 words read aloud at an easy pace.

Why keep a session recap short?

Because the recap is not a record. It is the door back into the game. The Angry GM makes this case in The Art of the Recap: its job is to get the table focused and remind them what matters now, not to retell everything. A full prose account of a four-hour session can take as long to read as the session took to play. Nobody wants that at 7 pm on a Friday.

Short recaps also hand the spotlight back to the players faster. The last line of a good recap is a question, and the question is theirs.

What goes in a good D&D session recap?

• Where and why. Where the party is, and what they were trying to do. One sentence.
• Three beats, no more. The three things that happened that matter now. Not the four fights, not the shopping.
• What changed. A promise, a debt, a secret, a new enemy. Something the characters carry forward.
• One clue, repeated. Pick the single detail you most need them to remember and say it twice. Players lose clues because nobody writes them down, a complaint that runs all through this D&D Beyond forum thread on recaps.
• Where you stopped. The last image, said vividly, ending on “what do you do?”

Use names in every beat. Hearing “Sister Anneliese” three times is how a name sticks.

The read-aloud recap template

Copy this, fill in the blanks after each session, and read it at the start of the next one. The labels in square brackets are for you; skip them when you read.

PREVIOUSLY...

[Where and why]
When we left off, the party was in ______,
trying to ______ because ______.

[Three beats, no more]
First, ______.
Then, ______.
And finally, ______.

[What changed]
Now ______ knows / owes / wants ______.

[The one clue worth repeating]
Remember: ______.

[Where we stopped]
And as ______, the last thing you saw was ______.

What do you do?

A worked example

Here is the template filled in for a made-up campaign: a marsh town called Brackwater, a sunken chapel, and four PCs (Corra, Pell, Isaak and Juniper). It runs about 180 words, a comfortable 90 seconds with a pause or two for effect.

PREVIOUSLY...

When we left off, the party was in Brackwater, the marsh town on stilts, trying to find out why the bells of the sunken chapel ring at low tide, when no one is there to ring them.

First, Old Tamsin the ferryman agreed to row you out to the chapel, but only after Pell won back his lucky oar in a truly terrible game of knucklebones.

Then, inside the chapel, you found the bell rope freshly cut, and a line of wet footprints leading down into the water. Not out of it. Into it.

And finally, Sister Anneliese admitted she has been lighting candles every night for someone she calls the Drowned Abbot, and she begged you not to tell the town council.

Now Isaak has sworn to keep her secret, and Juniper is carrying the cut rope in her pack, still dripping.

Remember: the footprints went in, not out. And whoever cut that rope wanted the bells to stop.

As the tide turned and the chapel floor began to flood, Corra saw a pale light moving under the water, coming closer.

What do you do?

Notice what it leaves out: the fight with the eels on the way over, the long haggle for the boat, the joke about Pell’s hat. They were fun. They are not what the party needs to remember tonight. Notice what it does twice: the footprints. That is the clue.

How to recap last session for a player who missed it

Absent players need something different: a version they can read on their phone, in the group chat, before the next session. Bullets beat prose here. We add a pronunciation for any new name, and one line addressed straight to the absent player’s character, so they arrive knowing what to do.

Session 14 recap (for anyone who missed it)

- Where: Brackwater, inside the sunken chapel
- Goal: find out why the chapel bells ring at low tide
- What happened: Tamsin rowed us out. The bell rope was cut. Wet footprints lead INTO the water.
- NPCs: Sister Anneliese (AN-uh-leez) is lighting candles for "the Drowned Abbot" and asked us to keep it quiet
- Promises: Isaak swore to keep her secret
- Loot and clues: the cut rope (Juniper has it)
- Open question: what is the light under the water?
- Your character: Corra, you were closest to the light when we stopped
- Next session: Friday at 7. We start as the chapel floods.

Post it within a day of the session, while you still remember the details. If you keep session notes, this is a two-minute job. Our post on DM session notes in ten minutes covers what to write down so the recap nearly writes itself.

Let the players recap first

One of our favorite techniques comes from Sly Flourish, who asks the players to recap the last session themselves. It works like this:

1. Open with “what do you remember from last time?”
2. Go round the table. One thing each, in character or out.
3. Say nothing yet. Just listen and note what they bring up.
4. Fill the gaps with your prepared recap, trimmed to what they missed.
5. Correct gently. If they misremember a clue, that is information: repeat it now.

What players remember tells you what mattered to them, which is gold for your next prep. What they forget tells you which clue needs a second or third appearance. Some tables rotate a chronicler each week, the player who writes the recap and reads it next time. It spreads the work, and players remember what they wrote.

How do you recap after a long break?

A break of a month or more is where campaigns quietly die. In an EN World thread about restarting after a multi-month break, DMs land on the same few moves, and we would add a couple:

1. Send the recap ahead. A written recap a few days before the session, not on the night. People can read it at their own pace.
2. Include a short cast list. Five to eight NPCs who matter, one line each, with pronunciations.
3. Give each player one personal reminder. What their character wanted, what they carry, whom they owe.
4. Recap together on the night. Players first, then your 90-second version.
5. Start with something happening. Not a tavern. A knock at the door, a flood, a stranger who knows their names.
6. Let some threads go. Anything nobody remembers can quietly fade, or come back later as a fresh hook.

A long-running campaign journal helps with all of this. The Alexandrian writes about how a campaign journal keeps a paused campaign alive and brings new players up to speed, and we agree. If you are a player who wants to keep one, try our 30 prompts for between sessions.

Keep a session log, and let it hand you the recap

Here is how we do it in Inkling. Each campaign gets one story, used as a session log. After each session, spend ten minutes adding what happened in your own words: names, promises, clues, the last thing that happened. When you open the log again before the next session, Inkling hands you a short “Previously...” recap of where you left off, built only from what you wrote. It never writes your story for you, and you can switch it off entirely if you prefer.

That paragraph is a first draft, not the final read. Trim it into the template above, add the clue you want to repeat, and end on the question.

Then share the log with the party. Inkling can send a story to the people you trust by a private, read-only link, with nothing for them to sign up for. They can leave notes in the margins, which is how you find out that Pell’s player thinks the ferryman’s name is Tamsen, or that everyone forgot the rope. It also becomes the catch-up page for anyone who missed a night, and the raw material if someone ever wants to turn the campaign into a novel.

How Inkling fits

Inkling is a writing app, made by two writers who play. For recaps it gives you a campaign log with “Previously...” recaps built from your own notes, private read-only sharing for the party, and a Storyboard and character cards if you want to keep NPCs and places somewhere you can see them. There is no recording or transcription: you write the notes, and that is part of why they stick.

What Inkling is not: it is not a VTT. There are no dice, no initiative, no stat blocks and no battle maps. Keep running the game in your VTT of choice or on paper sheets, and use Inkling for the words around it. If you want a player primer for your homebrew world, our post on one page and a map has a template.

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.