Using NotebookLM for D&D: a campaign notebook that answers from your own sessions

What NotebookLM does for a D&D campaign

Using NotebookLM for D&D comes down to one idea. You give it your own campaign material — session transcripts, typed notes, a setting document — and it answers questions from that material, with inline citations to what it used. Hover a citation and you see the quoted passage; click it and you read that passage in context. For a campaign whose memory lives in a dozen half-finished documents, that is a real step up from Ctrl+F. Google's chat help now also describes agentic actions, web search among them, so open the citation: an answer cited to your session came from your session, and one that is not may have come from the web — a published-setting fact your table never established, for instance.

One thing to know first: in July 2026 Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook and describes it as the same standalone product. Google's help pages and website now use the new name. This guide uses both, and nothing in the workflow below changed with the name.

It is free to start with a personal Google account, and the paid Google AI plans raise its limits. Every figure on this page is in the table at the bottom, sourced to Google's own pages with the date we checked them, because limits on a product like this move.

Setting up a NotebookLM D&D campaign notebook

The structure that holds up over a long campaign is one notebook per campaign and one source per session. A notebook's chat draws its cited answers from that notebook's sources, so two campaigns in one notebook means two campaigns in every answer. Keeping them apart costs nothing.

Name every session source the same way: session number, then date, then a few words. "S14 2026-09-26 Ash Guild ambush" sorts into play order and tells you which game you are looking at. "transcript (3).txt" does neither, and by session thirty that is the difference between a source list you can use and one you scroll.

1. Create a notebook named after the campaign.
2. Add a campaign bible as a Google Doc from your Drive: the party, the factions, the places, and the names you keep forgetting how to spell. Drive documents re-sync on their own, so this is the one source you can keep editing without uploading it again.
3. Add each session as its own source, named S01, S02 and so on, with the date.
4. If you run a published adventure you own, add its PDF too, so a question can be answered against the module and your table's version of it side by side.
5. If you will ever share a notebook with players, plan a second, player-safe one now (the sharing caveat is further down, and it matters).

What it is genuinely good at

Cited answers are the headline, and rightly. A campaign question answered without a source is a guess you cannot check; with one, you read the passage and decide. You can also tell it which sources to use, so "what happened recently" can mean the last three sessions rather than the whole campaign.

Audio Overview is the part nothing else in this guide does. It turns your sources into spoken audio, and one format, The Brief, is a single speaker covering the key takeaways in under two minutes, which is close to a ready-made "previously on" for the start of a session. Listen to it before your players do. Google's own caveat is that the overviews are AI-generated and may contain inaccuracies, and an invented detail read out confidently at the table becomes canon by the next session.

It also turns sources into study guides, briefings and mind maps. For a DM the useful ones are a briefing on a faction before it comes back, and a mind map when the plot has knotted itself.

And it reads whatever you give it: the setting document you wrote before session one, a module PDF, a player's three-page backstory. A question can cut across all of them at once, which a tool that only knows your sessions cannot do.

BEFORE THE SESSION
What did the party say they would do next, in the most
recent session?
List every promise the party made, to whom, and in which
session.
What does the party know about [villain] so far, session
by session?

WHEN A NAME COMES BACK
Summarise everything that has happened with [NPC], in
session order, citing each session.
Where was [item] last seen, and who had it?

AFTER THE SESSION (select only the newest source)
List every new name, every open thread, and anything the
GM improvised that is now part of the world.

Before you repeat an answer at the table, open its
citation.

What it needs from you: the session, as a file

A notebook is only as good as its sources, so the real question for a D&D table is how four hours of play becomes one. On the web you bring a file. In September 2026 Google announced an audio recorder for the mobile app, rolling out from late that month and pitched at capturing lectures; its help pages do not document it yet. A phone in the middle of the table running it would be the closest thing to a free all-in-one setup. Google's announcement gives no length limit and no detail of how a recording is processed, and we have not tested one against a four-hour session, so try it on a short game before you trust it with a long one.

Otherwise any recorder works: a phone voice memo, Craig on a Discord game, or a browser recorder like the one DM Scribe has. The recording guide covers getting audio worth using, and the consent guide covers the conversation to have with your table first.

Then it will transcribe for you, which is the underrated part. Upload an audio file as a source and Google transcribes it at import and keeps the text as the source. For a lot of tables that removes a whole step.

Two things shape how well that goes. Uploads are capped at 200 MB, which is less than it sounds: an uncompressed four-hour WAV is about two and a half gigabytes, and even a standard 128 kbps MP3 of four hours comes in at around 230 MB. A mono export at 64 kbps, plenty for speech, is about 115 MB for the same four hours, so export small or split the recording at the break.

And Google's help page describes no way to give that transcription a list of your names. Invented names are what general speech recognition gets wrong as a rule (Thordak Ironforge comes back as three ordinary words), and a notebook cannot cite its way past a name it never heard correctly. We have not run a session through Google's transcriber, so check one before you rely on it. If your campaign leans on invented names, a transcript made with a name list is the better source, and the Whisper guide explains how to make one.

Where a campaign notebook runs out

Source count. The free plan holds 50 sources per notebook, so at one source per session a weekly campaign fills it in about a year, sooner once the campaign bible and a module PDF take their slots. The fix is cheap: a single source can hold up to 500,000 words and a four-hour transcript runs to tens of thousands, so merge each finished arc into one text file and swap it in for that arc's session sources.

Freshness. Google documents imported from Drive stay in sync on their own; the help page describes no such sync for a file you upload or text you paste. Treat those as snapshots. If you correct a transcript after uploading it, upload the corrected one and remove the old source, or the notebook will keep citing the version with the mistakes.

The weekly chore. Nothing arrives by itself. Every session has to be captured, added and named, and the notebook is only as current as the last time you did that, which in a busy month is precisely the step that slips. That is not a flaw so much as the shape of the tool, and it is worth being honest with yourself about before you build your campaign memory on it.

Who's who. A notebook answers questions; it does not keep a register. Nothing in Google's documentation describes a page per character that grows as sessions arrive. Ask who Merrin is and you get a fresh answer assembled from the sources each time, which works until two sessions spell her differently. If you want that register, keep it yourself: the NPC tracker template is built for exactly this, and it makes a good source in its own right.

Usage limits. Since September 2026, on personal Google accounts, Google meters usage by compute: the allowance weighs prompt complexity, the features used and the length of the chat, refreshes every five hours, and stops at a weekly ceiling. No fixed count is published, so a long prep evening of big questions can run into it, and there is no number to plan around.

Sharing with players. You can share a notebook by link, but every player needs a Google account, and Google states plainly that the chat-only view hides your materials without completely revoking a viewer's access to them. Treat anything in a shared notebook, your secret faction notes included, as readable by everyone you share it with, and build any player-facing notebook from player-safe sources only.

Summarizing a D&D session transcript with ChatGPT or Claude instead

The other DIY route is to paste the transcript into ChatGPT or Claude and ask for a recap. It works, and it suits a different job. A chat assistant is good at one session, one output, in your voice: the recap you post in the group chat. It is weaker at what a notebook is for, which is answering a question about session four while you prep session twenty.

Three things separate a usable recap from a confident fiction. Give it your name list, or the transcript's misspellings become the recap's. Tell it to use only the transcript and to say when something is unclear rather than fill the gap. And tell it the shape you want back; what players actually read is covered in the recap guide, and the prompt below builds that shape in.

A four-hour transcript is long. If it will not go in at once, split it by hour, run the same prompt on each part to get notes, then ask for the recap from the notes. And whatever an assistant does or does not remember between conversations, do not let it be your campaign record: save the recap somewhere you own, next to the transcript it came from.

Then check it. Names, promises and anything a player will hold you to are worth thirty seconds against the transcript before the recap goes out. The same prompt works in a notebook's chat, with one source selected.

You are helping a tabletop RPG game master recap one session.
Use ONLY the transcript below. Do not add events, names or
motives that are not in it. If something is unclear, say so
instead of guessing.

The transcript is automatic speech recognition, so names are
often misspelled. Use these spellings exactly:
- Player characters: [name], [name], [name]
- NPCs: [name], [name]
- Places and factions: [name], [name]
Ignore table talk, rules arguments and food orders.

Return, in this order:
1. PREVIOUSLY ON: one paragraph, under 150 words, past tense,
   to be read aloud at the start of next session.
2. KEY EVENTS: up to 8 bullets, in order.
3. NEW NAMES: each new person, place or item, one line each.
4. PROMISES AND DEBTS: what the party promised, and what is
   owed to them.
5. OPEN THREADS: questions the players raised and left open.
6. NEXT: what the party said they would do next.
7. CHECK THESE: anything you were unsure of, quoting the line
   it came from.

TRANSCRIPT:
[paste here]

Which DIY route fits your table

Choose by the job rather than the tool.

• You record, you want cited answers across the whole campaign, and a weekly upload does not bother you: NotebookLM, set up as above. It is free and it is good at this.
• You want one good recap a week and nothing that persists: a chat assistant and the prompt above.
• You do not record and do not want to: a notebook still works on typed notes. Your session notes are the source, and a notebook built from them answers just as honestly.
• The weekly upload is the step that keeps slipping: that chore is the gap dedicated session tools exist to close, and it is the only good reason to pay for one.

If the notebook covers you, keep it

A free tool you already maintain beats a paid one you would have to migrate to. A dedicated tool earns its price by removing the chore, not by being cleverer about your campaign than a well-fed notebook, and if the chore does not bother you, there is nothing to buy.

And the routes are not exclusive. A notebook answers just as well from transcripts and notes produced anywhere else, so whatever you use to capture the session today, the notebook can sit downstream of it.