Keeping a Scene log
While you're playing, drop lines into the Quick note box as things happen. Afterwards, turn them into a recap and publish it.
The trick is doing the first part during the game. Nobody writes a good recap on Tuesday about a Friday.
Starting a Scene
Pressing Start Scene on your campaign page opens today's Scene and its log — that's all it does. Nothing ends, nothing locks in, and nobody but you sees it happen.
From there it's the same loop either way: drop lines into the quick note box as things happen, and whenever you're ready — mid-session or days later — turn what you wrote into a recap and publish it.
During the Scene
Once a Scene is running, your campaign page carries a note box right at the top. Type a line, press add, carry on. It goes straight into tonight's log.
What to put in it
Facts you'll otherwise lose, not prose. “Named the barkeep Ferris”, “promised the widow they'd be back by the festival”, “Dara stole the ledger — nobody noticed”.
Especially: anything you made up on the spot. That's the stuff that has no other record anywhere, and it's the stuff a player will ask about in three weeks with total confidence that you remember.
Five seconds each. If it's taking longer than that you're writing the recap early, which is a different job.
Between Scenes
The Scenes page also keeps Between-Scene Notes — a scratchpad for the things you think of in the shower, waiting to be folded into a session later.
Notes vs. recaps
A note is loose, private to you, and doesn't belong to anything yet. A recap belongs to one Scene and is the thing your players read.
Keeping them apart means you can dump half an idea somewhere at midnight without it turning up on the campaign page as if it happened.
Writing the recap
Open the Scene and write the Recap. Your notes from the night are right there to work from.
A recap is a draft until you publish it. Nobody sees it before that.
Published, a recap lands on the campaign page (the three newest) and in the recap archive — View all recaps — which everyone reads.
Why that matters more than it sounds
The archive is also reachable from the Scenes page, and it's the campaign's whole published history in one place. If you're the player: any tags you put on a recap there are yours alone, like every other tag.
It's the one place in this app where writing something down doesn't show it to anyone. That's deliberate — you can write next week's consequences into this week's recap and publish the half you want them to have.
But it cuts the other way too: a recap you wrote and never published is a recap your players never read, and they won't know it exists to ask about. If you write them, publish them.
A recap can have a bullet list in it — a few typed characters do that, and the log entries you drop in during the night take the same ones.
The plot hook
A Scene carries a Plot hook as well as a recap — the loose end you want picked up next time.
Once a Scene's ended, that hook is what leads your campaign page, with a link back to edit it. It's the first thing you see when you sit down to prep, which is the moment you actually need reminding what you left dangling.
Scenes take tags too
A Scene is one of the six things you can tag. Tag it with the people and places that turned up, and their pages will show that night from then on.
Why bother
Because it turns "when did we last see this person?" into a question with an answer. Tag the Scene with the innkeeper's name and the innkeeper's page grows a list of every night they appeared — without you ever having written that list.
Your players can do the same to a published recap, from the archive — their tags, invisible to you, exactly like every other tag. The archive's Your tags row filters the list to the recaps carrying one, so "every night the innkeeper appeared" is one tap.
This is help for ACT VI: The Tabletop Turns — a system-agnostic companion app for running tabletop RPGs. Players never pay, and a GM's first campaign is free.