Free GM resources & printable templates

Seven printable, copyable templates — the fill-in-the-blank version of the guides above. No signup, no watermark, no product to install first.

A template, not an article

If a guide teaches you a routine, a resource is the blank form you fill out while running it. Print one, keep it in a binder, or copy it into whatever note-taking tool you already use — Storywright, a wiki, a plain document, the back of your GM screen. These are formats, not features; nothing here requires our app to be useful. Every one of them started as something scrawled by hand before a session, cleaned up once it proved worth reusing.

Which template solves which Tuesday-night problem

• You sit down to prep with a blank page. The session prep packet gives you the exact sections to fill in — objectives, NPCs, situations — instead of staring at nothing.
• Your recap either takes an hour or never gets written. The session recap template is the format from How to write session recaps, stripped down to just the fill-in-the-blank skeleton.
• A player missed last time and the table stalls catching them up. The absent-player catch-up template is what you copy-paste to that one player at 11pm instead of retelling three hours of plot from memory.
• You keep forgetting which NPC said what. The NPC card template gives every recurring character the same handful of fields, so "wait, who’s this guy again" stops happening.
• You want a pre-flight check before the table sits down. The pre-session prep checklist is a two-minute pass to catch the thing you forgot to prep before players notice.
• You want the same thing during the session. The at-the-table session checklist is the in-session version — things worth checking between scenes, not before them.
• You want to open with a recap instead of a Q&A. The "Previously on…" briefing template turns your notes into the thirty-second cold open every episodic show uses to reorient the audience.

How these differ from the guides

The guides above explain the thinking behind a routine; these are the routine itself, ready to fill in. Read the guide once, then reuse the template every session after — you shouldn’t need to re-derive the reasoning at 7pm before your table shows up. A good pairing: skim the matching guide once for the "why," then never open it again — the template alone carries the routine from there.

Printing versus copying

Some GMs run entirely on paper and want these as a physical checklist clipped to a binder — print them straight from the browser, no formatting to fight. Others run everything digitally and want the same structure inside whatever app already holds their campaign notes. Both are the intended use; neither is the "wrong" way to use a template that’s just plain text underneath. If you’re not sure which fits your table, start on paper for a session or two — it’s cheaper to find out you prefer digital than the other way around, since going digital-to-paper just means printing what you already have.

Every template is plain text or Markdown under the hood, so it pastes cleanly into Storywright, Notion, Obsidian, or a text file — whatever you already use.