Guides for Game Masters

Eight short guides, each built around one specific table problem — pick the one that matches tonight’s actual friction, not the one with the best title.

How to use these

These aren’t a syllabus to read start to finish before your first session. Each guide exists because one specific thing goes wrong at real tables often enough to be worth writing down: prep eating a whole evening, NPCs blurring together, a player missing three sessions in a row and dreading the catch-up, momentum dying in the gap between one session and the next, recaps nobody reads. Find the one that matches what’s actually broken for you right now.

Which guide is which

• Prep is eating your week. How to prep a session in an hour builds a repeatable hour-long prep routine around situations, not plots — so prep stops expanding to fill whatever time you give it.
• You blank on NPC names mid-scene. How to keep NPC notes you can actually run from is about the difference between notes you wrote and notes you can actually use at the table under pressure.
• Someone always misses the session that mattered. How to handle a player who misses a session turns the dreaded 15-minute recap-at-the-table into something the absent player reads before you sit down.
• Momentum dies between sessions. The post-session routine that keeps a campaign alive is the 10-minute habit that turns one good session into a campaign that survives the two-week gap before the next one.
• Your recaps go unread. How to write session recaps your players actually read is a format built from what players actually open versus what they skip, not a template for what a GM feels obligated to write.
• The recap is written and nobody sees it. How to get session recaps into your group’s Discord is about delivery rather than craft — putting the recap in the room the party already talks in, posting the substance instead of a bare link, and keeping GM-only material out of a channel more people can see than you think.
• A private note keeps reaching the players. How to share lore without spoiling it separates common knowledge, earned discoveries, and GM-only truth so secrets stay secret without making the shared world feel empty.
• Your character’s inner story disappears between sessions. How to keep a campaign journal as a player is a five-minute, four-sentence habit for recording what your character thought, wanted, and got wrong.

What these guides are not

They’re tool-agnostic — none of them assume you use Storywright, or any particular app, to run your game. A few mention how a tool like Storywright’s Session Tracker or recap drafting removes a step, because that’s true and worth saying, but the technique underneath works with a spiral notebook. No signup, no email gate, no paywall halfway through — read the whole thing, use what’s useful, ignore what isn’t.

Written from actually running games

Every guide here comes from a routine that got refined at an actual table, session after session — not synthesized from a dozen other "GM tips" roundups. That’s also why there are eight of these instead of fifty: better to cover eight real recurring problems thoroughly than fifty shallow generic ones.

If none of these match your problem

Eight guides can’t cover every table’s specific flavor of trouble. If what’s going wrong for you isn’t on this list, the FAQ answers the questions that come up before someone starts (pricing, player access, how notes export), and the contact page reaches an actual person — not a support ticket queue — if you want to describe the problem and ask what fits. New guides get added when a problem shows up often enough in that inbox to be worth writing down properly, not on a fixed content calendar.

Looking for something you can print and fill in instead of read? The free resources hub has fill-in-the-blank templates for a lot of the same problems.