D&D Campaign Notes Your AI Can Read Before the Next Session

Who has the brass key? What did you promise the ferry keeper? Was the baron's betrayal confirmed, or did someone just accuse him?

A campaign journal needs to preserve those distinctions. When you use ChatGPT or Claude to help organise a D&D campaign, give it a record it can check before answering: what happened, what the party believes, and what remains unresolved.

Hjarni holds that record as Markdown notes. A connected assistant can search, read and update them. You can inspect the same notes yourself, including their edit history. The assistant still needs to retrieve the right material and you still need to check its changes.

This guide is for players and GMs using an assistant between tabletop sessions: organising what happened and preparing a briefing for next time. Your group still plays the game and decides what becomes canon. The examples are fictional and work for other tabletop RPGs too.

Before using the prompts, follow the Hjarni setup guide to connect your assistant. Then choose a campaign name and replace [campaign name] in each prompt below.

Start with the questions you ask before playing

Create a folder named after your campaign with these notes. Our fictional campaign is called Greybridge, so its folder is also named Greybridge.

Start with these five notes. Split a character or location into its own note only when the combined note becomes difficult to search.

Keep three kinds of memory distinct. Stable lore describes the setting and its rules. Current state says where people and items are now. Session history records how things changed. A recap can be accurate about last week and still give the wrong answer about who holds an item today.

For a player, record what your character and party know. For a GM, keep private preparation separate from anything you share with players. An instruction saying “keep this secret” is not an access restriction. Review actual sharing permissions before making campaign material available to anyone else.

Already have a campaign? Start with what you have

You may already have a Google Doc, an Obsidian vault, character sheets or a collection of session recaps. Start with your latest recap, the party's current situation and the unresolved quest log. You can keep your older archive where it is while trying this workflow.

In an August tabletop notes discussion, a GM describes turning a session transcript into a recap and keeping it in Obsidian. Solo AI players also use manual handovers: in a ChatGPT campaign discussion, a player describes carrying a handbook, world bible and current status into fresh chats. A Claude roleplay discussion describes reviewing summaries to catch details lost between conversations. These are individual reports, but they make the maintenance problem concrete.

With Hjarni, the record lives in notes your connected assistant can read and update. The aim is to maintain that record once, so the next conversation can retrieve it. You still review what gets saved.

Paste the material you want to start with and ask:

Help me prepare campaign notes for [campaign name] in Hjarni.
Read any existing notes in that campaign folder before proposing additions.
Read and follow its folder instructions if present.
Use only the source material below. Organise it into Campaign brief,
Current situation, People and places, Open threads and Session journal.
Put stable setting facts and house rules in Campaign brief. Preserve source
session labels and distinguish current state from dated history.
Keep confirmed events, NPC claims, player theories and unknowns separate.
Do not turn rumours or suggested story ideas into established facts.
Flag conflicting accounts or missing dates; do not guess which is current.
Show the proposed notes and updates before creating or changing anything.

Source material:
[paste your latest recap, current party details and quest log]

If you work from a transcript, check names, speakers and in-character claims before accepting the notes. You can also start from a few rough bullets; recording a session is optional, and should be agreed with the people at the table.

Keep facts separate from rumours

Consider this entry:

Greybridge campaign, session 8: Mara the ferry keeper said the baron funds the smugglers. The party has not verified this. We promised to return Mara's brass key. Iona is carrying the key.

There are three different kinds of information here:

• Known: Iona has the key.
• Claim: Mara says the baron funds the smugglers.
• Commitment: The party owes Mara her key back.

A summary that says “the baron funds the smugglers” has changed the story. Ask your assistant to preserve who made a claim and whether it has been confirmed.

Open your campaign folder's AI Instructions panel and save the following as its folder instructions. The AI instructions guide shows how folder rules apply.

Read the relevant notes in the [campaign name] folder before answering
questions about this campaign.
Distinguish confirmed events, NPC claims, player theories and unknowns.
Include the source session when available.
If the notes disagree, show the disagreement and ask me to resolve it.
Do not invent missing history or turn suggested ideas into established canon.
Propose changes for my review before saving them.

The assistant receives these rules when it reads a note in the folder in full or retrieves the folder's instructions. That is why the prompts begin with a request to read. The earlier import prompt also states the fact-and-claim rules explicitly, so you can use it before saving folder instructions. Saving instructions does not guarantee that every answer will be correct.

Turn rough session notes into changes you can review

After a session, paste your rough notes into your connected assistant and ask:

Work only in the [campaign name] folder in Hjarni. Read its Campaign brief,
Current situation, Session journal, Open threads and relevant People and
places entries. Compare them with the session notes below.

Draft a dated session entry. Then list proposed updates to existing notes:
changed locations, transferred items, promises made or fulfilled, and
threads opened or closed. Keep claims and theories labelled.

Flag missing or conflicting details. Do not fill them in.
Append the new session entry without rewriting earlier entries. Propose
updates to current situation and open threads separately from the journal.
If we correct an earlier event, append a dated correction identifying what
it supersedes and update the affected current state after my approval.
Show me the changes before saving anything.

Session notes:
[paste your notes here]

Suppose your session 9 notes say: “Iona returned the brass key to Mara. We still haven't checked Mara's accusation about the baron.” Here is the update to review:

The promise is resolved, the history is preserved, and the rumour has not quietly become a fact. If the assistant only adds a recap but leaves Iona holding the key in Current situation, ask it to correct that proposed update before saving.

Once the changes look right, ask the assistant to save them. Check the affected notes. Hjarni records revisions, including the AI client where it can be identified, and lets you roll back to an earlier version if needed.

Ask for a briefing before the next session

Open a fresh conversation with your connected assistant:

Work only in the [campaign name] folder in Hjarni. Read the latest session
entry, current situation and open threads. Retrieve the relevant people
and places notes for anyone mentioned. Give me a short briefing:

- Where are we, and what were we about to do?
- Who holds the important items, and when was that last confirmed?
- Which promises or debts are still open?
- Which relationships or allegiances changed in the latest session?
- What do we know about the people we are likely to meet?
- Which clues are unverified?

Link to the source notes and name the latest session you found.
Compare current state with that session. Flag stale or conflicting entries.
Say when an answer is missing from the notes. Do not invent an answer.

Treat this as a restart checkpoint. Confirm the location, important possessions, relationships and open threads before relying on the briefing. In our example, the answer after session 9 should put the key with Mara, mark the promise fulfilled and leave her accusation unverified. If the assistant cites only session 8, have it read session 9 before continuing. This checks the handover; it does not prove every future answer will be correct.

The same campaign notes can be used by ChatGPT and Claude when each is connected to Hjarni. Ask each assistant to read the notes at the start of its work.

If your campaign also involves writing fiction or building a setting, see Hjarni for writers for organising characters, world rules and timelines.

If you play solo with an AI game master

Solo play needs an additional agreement about how the assistant runs the game: rules, player agency and when it may change the world. Use the same read, review and save pattern around each scene, keeping proposed adventures separate from events that happened. Campaign notes support continuity; they do not make the assistant a reliable rules engine or guarantee spoiler control.

Try it with one session

You do not need to move your whole campaign first. Save one session entry and one unresolved promise. Ask your assistant about them in a fresh conversation, then update them after the next session.

Give your next session a record you can check. Start with the Hjarni setup guide, then use the prompts above with a campaign you already know well.