D&D session and campaign notes templates: the in-session sheet, the player scribe page, the session log and the campaign notes page

Why these templates are mostly empty space

Most session note templates fail at the table for the same reason: they were designed by someone who was not simultaneously voicing an innkeeper, tracking initiative and watching a rules argument form. Boxes for weather, mood, session goals and XP look organised on the page, and each one costs a decision during play — and while you are deciding which box a fact belongs in, the game is running without you.

So these sheets are thin on purpose. They are the written-down version of the system in the note-taking guide: capture one line per beat during play, dump for ten minutes right after, review before the next game. That guide explains the method and why it works. This page is the part you copy.

The in-session sheet uses that guide's single-character prefixes — N for a new name, P for a promise, ? for an open thread, X for a wrong belief, R for a ruling — plus one this page adds: # for a number that has to persist, like gold, remaining charges or days elapsed. Six prefixes, one keystroke each, and no decision about where a line goes.

All four sheets are plain text with no formatting to preserve, so they paste cleanly into a notes app, a shared doc, or a page you print. Copy the block, replace the example lines, play.

The DM in-session sheet (a DM notes template)

One sheet per session. Fill in the header before anyone arrives, keep the key visible until the prefixes are muscle memory, then write strictly top to bottom. Draw a new scene line whenever the location changes; in combat, mark the round number instead of a scene.

The example lines show the shape — a handle, not a record. Delete them and write your own, and if yours keep coming out longer than the examples, they are too long.

Notice what has no space here: combat blow-by-blow, verbatim dialogue, anything already sitting in your prep. That is deliberate. Twenty to forty lines out of a four-hour session means the sheet worked.

DM SESSION SHEET
Session #: ____   Date: ________   Recording: Y / N, started __:__

KEY   N new name    P promise    ? open thread
      X wrong belief    R ruling    # number that persists
One line per beat, under 8 words. Top to bottom. Sort nothing.
20-40 lines is a healthy session.

--- scene: tavern, after dark ------------------------------
(the six lines below are examples - delete them, write your own)
N Merrin - barkeep, owes Ash Guild
P party returns for Tam by new moon
? bandit fled at 4 hp
X party thinks duke ordered it - wrong
R firebolt ignites spilled oil - yes
# party gold 212 / torches 5 / day 14

--- scene: ____________________ ----------------------------


--- scene: ____________________ ----------------------------


In combat, number the rounds: "R3 hag teleports out, hurt."
Recording the session? Write the clock time next to any
line you will want to hear again.

The player scribe sheet: notes one player keeps for the table

This is the four-prompt scribe template from the note-taking guide, turned into a page a player can fill without instructions. The rules that make it survive a real table travel with it: rotate the job every session, cap every prompt at five bullets, and finish before anyone leaves — notes that go home do not come back.

A scribe records what the party saw, and nothing else. That is not a limitation to apologise for. A clean record of what the players believe happened is a second document your own notes cannot produce, and the gap between the two is where your next session lives.

The last prompt is the one that earns the page. What we still want to know is the party writing your prep list for you.

This sheet is a player taking notes for the table. A player who wants notes for themselves — their character's leads, grudges and plans — is doing a different job, and the player note-taking guide covers that one.

PARTY SCRIBE SHEET
Session #: ____   Scribe tonight: ______________
Finish before anyone leaves. Max five bullets per prompt.
Write what the party saw. No secrets, no guessing at the
DM's plans.

WHAT WE DID
- 
- 
- 

WHO WE MET   (name + a two-word tag: "Sera - harbormaster,
nervous")
- 
- 

WHAT WE PROMISED, AND WHAT WE ARE OWED
- 
- 

WHAT WE STILL WANT TO KNOW
- 
- 
- 

Scribe next session: ______________

The post-session summary sheet (session log)

This sheet does most of the system's work, and it only works tonight. Set a timer for ten minutes before you get in the car, or before you close the laptop, and expand your one-liners into sentences a stranger could follow. No polish. Nobody reads this but you.

The first four headings are the note-taking guide's. The last three exist because they hold exactly the things that are invisible by Wednesday: what you invented out loud and are now committed to, what the party wrongly believes, and what you want to happen next session. That last line is the seed of your prep, and it is only available while the session is still warm.

If typing feels like too much at midnight, read the headings into a voice memo instead — the structure works out loud. And note what this sheet is not: it is for you, not the players. A recap they will actually read is a shorter, different artifact, and the recap guide has its own copyable template for that.

Kept every week, these summaries are your session log: the campaign's history. Number and date each one, and leave it alone after the week it was written. The campaign notes sheet below is the page that changes, and it is rewritten from these.

SESSION LOG - POST-SESSION SUMMARY
Session #: ____   Date: ________   10 minutes, tonight.
Set a timer. Expand your one-liners into sentences a
stranger could follow. Do not polish.

WHAT HAPPENED


WHAT CHANGED IN THE WORLD


WHAT THE PARTY SAYS THEY WILL DO NEXT


WHAT I OWE THEM
(rulings to confirm, answers promised, loot to price)


INVENTED TONIGHT, NOW CANON
(names, prices, rules, geography - anything said out loud)


WHAT THE PARTY BELIEVES THAT IS WRONG


WHAT I WANT NEXT SESSION
(want, not will - this line seeds your prep)

The campaign notes sheet: the state of the world

The first three sheets are about one session. This one is about the campaign, and it works the opposite way: you overwrite it instead of adding to it. The session log is the history; this page is now. It is the state-of-the-world page from the campaign memory guide, cut down to the blocks you actually reach for mid-session.

Rewrite it straight after the post-session summary, while the session is still warm — two or three minutes once the page exists. A thread that closed gets deleted, not crossed out; a faction that changed its mind gets its line rewritten. If this page were the only thing you read before the game, you should still be able to run it.

Keep the NPC roster to one line a person. When someone needs more than a line — a voice, a want, a secret — they graduate to a page of their own, and the NPC tracker template has one ready to copy. The roster is the index; the pages are the detail.

CAMPAIGN NOTES - STATE OF THE WORLD
As of session #: ____   In-world date: ______________
Overwrite this page every session. Do not add to it.

WHERE THE PARTY IS, AND WHAT THEY ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF


ACTIVE THREADS   (thread - who cares - last touched,
session #)
- 
- 
- 

FACTIONS AND WHERE THEY STAND   (name - stance toward
the party - what changed, session #)
- 
- 

OUTSTANDING PROMISES   (who owes whom, what, by when)
- 
- 

NPC ROSTER   (name - two-word tag - last seen, session #)
- 
- 
- 

HOOKS FOR NEXT SESSION   (what is likely to come up,
and what you want to come up)
- 
- 

Pasting them into Notion, Obsidian or Google Docs

The sheets are deliberately app-agnostic. Plain text pastes into anything, so the workflow is the same everywhere: keep a master copy named template, duplicate it at the start of each session, and name the copy by session number. A note called Session 14 is findable in March; one called Thursday's game is not.

If your app has real headings, promote the all-caps lines to headings and the sheets get a free table of contents. Nothing breaks if you skip this — the caps are the structure.

Put the scribe sheet in a document the whole table can edit, in whatever shared space your group already uses. That removes the failure mode where session nine's notes live on one player's laptop, and it makes the rotation visible: the scribe-next-session line at the bottom is the whole handoff.

Paper works too. The DM sheet prints fine at one page per session, and a clipboard behind the screen beats a laptop at tables where a screen feels wrong. The session log and the campaign sheet are better typed, because in three months you will want to search them.

Change the sheets freely — but refuse two changes

Adapt them to your table. A combat-heavy campaign can pre-print round markers down the margin. An intrigue campaign will fill more X lines than N lines, which is itself information about your game. And a campaign past its tenth session will lean on the campaign notes sheet more than the other three — it is the state-of-the-world page from the campaign memory guide, and the other sheets are what feed it.

But refuse the two changes every template drifts toward. Do not add boxes: every labelled box is a decision you will be asked to make mid-scene, and the box for the thing that actually happened never exists. And do not pre-sort the sheet into a section per prefix — sorting is where attention goes, and the prefixes exist precisely so that ordering can wait until the game is over.

Using these for Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu or any other system

Almost nothing on these sheets is D&D. Names, promises, open threads, wrong beliefs and rulings exist in every game, and the prefixes work unchanged. What changes is which lines get busy, and a few labels worth renaming so the sheets read like your game:

• The # line holds whatever your system keeps score of between sessions. Replace the example — gold, torches, days — with your own resources the first time you copy the sheet, and keep only the numbers that carry over to next session.
• Pathfinder, and any long published campaign: add the book and chapter to the header of every sheet. Months in, "session 31" means nothing and "book three, chapter two" means everything — the Pathfinder page has more on keeping a years-long campaign straight.
• Call of Cthulhu and other investigation games: add a C prefix for a clue, with who or what it came from, and expect the X line to fill up, because the gap between what the investigators believe and what is true is the campaign. On the scribe sheet, WHAT WE STILL WANT TO KNOW becomes the list of open leads. The Call of Cthulhu page covers why clue continuity is the thing to protect.
• Daggerheart and other games where consequences come from the dice rather than from prep: add a line to the summary sheet for consequences nobody planned. They are the canon most likely to go unrecorded, and the Daggerheart page explains why.
• For a political game such as Vampire: The Masquerade, the factions block on the campaign notes sheet will be the busiest part of it, and the P line — who owes whom — deserves the most care.

If you record the session, use the thin version

A recording changes what the in-session sheet is for. It stops being the record and becomes an index into one: names still get written the moment you say them, but most lines shrink to a clock time and three words, because the line only has to help you find the moment, not preserve it. The recording guide covers getting audio worth indexing, and the consent guide covers the conversation to have with your table first.

Machines can then fill parts of the other sheets. Paste your scrappy in-session lines into the free session recap generator and you get a first-draft previously-on back, no account needed. A transcription tool can write the session log's WHAT HAPPENED heading for you from the audio — DM Scribe is one of those, and it will also import a transcript you made elsewhere and pull the names into a wiki, so the N lines stop being your typing problem.

Two honest limits. If your table does not record — and plenty should not, starting with any table where someone is uncomfortable being recorded — then no transcription product has anything to offer you, ours included: these sheets are the whole system, and they cost nothing. And even with a perfect transcript, the session log's last heading survives every automation. What you want to happen next session is not on the recording, because it was never said out loud. That line stays yours.