I personally use 3 cards (red, yellow and green), but I give the following spiel: Red: I'll communicate anything anyone has already shared in an anonymized, "this is what we collectively have agreed to leave off the table/lines". But I also indicate that consent is ongoing, and that you may not know until you're in it that something is a line for you. Examples I have seen in play are car accidents and pregnancies. This de-stigmatizes the process, and I assure them that I can pivot away should something like that occur. Yellow: These match "veiled" items, and the example I usually give is that for me, a little eye gore goes a long way. Similarly, if we're allowing sex there will likely be a 'fade-to-black' threshold defined here. Green: this is two-fold: it's great for cheering on fellow players in a way that is non-disruptive. It's also great if you're giving an impassioned roleplay in which your *character* is having a hell of a time, but you the *player* are here for it. I give this spiel nearly verbatim in all of my games. For campaigns there's usually a preliminary process for getting agreement on overall tone and content, but then these are the actionable tools in-session.

My top four games are, in no particular order: Legend of the Five Rings, 5e (which is kind of a fusion of L5R 4e and GeneSys). The One Ring, 2e (yes, there is a D&D 5e-compatible parallel game, this one is infinitely better) Mouse Guard (effectively Burning Wheel, but simpler) Root (Powered by the Apocalypse, based on the board game Root)

Regarding D&D: I refuse to financially support Wizards of the Coast, and haven't since 2022. Also, as a game, it is too tactical and fiddly for fun and easy narrative play, but it also doesn't do the tactical play well either. If you want solid tactical play, do Draw Steel or Pathfinder or Lancer or something. If you want solid narrative play, try almost anything else.

CR is functionally useless as a metric. There are lots of resources out there on how to fix combat building, but the one that worked best for me was not running D&D. The two D&D games I do run are completely unoptimized for combat and are more social intrigue games with some fighting where 'balance' is more of a vibe check than a calculation. As a point of comparison, the encounter-building instructions for both Daggerheart and Draw Steel work infinitely better, in similar genres. Daggerheart's tends to err slightly softer than I prefer, so I aim for the upper end of any threshold I'm aiming for.

The stronger and more opinionated your starting prompts are, and the more willing you are to reject responses as incorrect/inadequate, the better the overall feedback becomes. You're still going to throw out 80%, but the remainder is quite actionable.

So I use a combination of tools for note-taking, since I'm running so many different games/etc. The big combo is Google Recorder + My Archivist + Obsidian + Foundry + Claude Code. - I record audio of all my sessions. - I dump the transcript into My Archivist, which creates a session recap as well as timeline and NPC/item/location compendium. It's AI-generated but it allows you to proofread and edit, which is always necessary, but it saves a ton of work. - I export the markdown files from My Archivist to store locally in my Obsidian notebook for that campaign. When applicable I also have things like Foundry actors exported into the same directory, and I used to primarily use Notion, so I have exports from there (still using it for my Ars Magica campaign). I've attached a couple images with my folder structure. - I have a series of text files (THREADS.md, SCENES.md, GM-TODO.md) in the 03-planning subfolder. During the previous session or throughout the week or two I'll make notes about key things I hope to have happen or am considering. Where appropriate I'll write up internal canon and put it in 02-gm-canon so that it doesn't show up for the players in My Archivist, but it can still be taken into consideration by me and my tools. I'll provide a couple examples below. When I'm ready to lock in a new session, I'll back up these files and then point Claude Code at it to propose updates to THREADS and GM-TODO based on my notes and the updated campaign files. - Run the session, rinse, repeat. Here are some examples: Ars Magica: **Completed events:** - Certamen: Eogan eliminated Round 1 by Mira of Fudarus - Hastiludium: Won R1 (vs. Montverte) and QF (vs. Scarem Montem). Semifinalists. - Dimicatio: Dagmar won R1 (vs. Exspectatio) and R2 (vs. Kunfin). Semifinalists. **Still pending for the PCs:** - Hastiludium Semifinals - Dimicatio Semifinals (Dagmar) - The Joust Round 1 (vs. Cunfin) - The Melee (all teams simultaneously) - The Norman Conquest (Group: Sjorseidr, Carnac, Fudarus, Merces Aurea)