The whole thing about factions had eluded me for a long time. But after reading both Proactive and Collaborative books it really made it simple and explained how everything revolves around factions! So I decided to make a tool for myself that helped me track factions and their relationships with other factions (threads). This turned into a “conspiracy board” type visualisation… thus Conspirita was born! It now does a lot more! Secrets was a big deal for me. I’ve added ability to track secrets, who knows them, and if they’ve been revealed; NPCs, locations, PCs, maps and more. It’s been so helpful! You can share a view of it with players too - just a brief outline of a few things. It can even integrate with things like Claude via its own MCP Server! I'm trying out building session plans with Claude since I like to ideate on a bunch of random stuff and then draw some structure from it all. So now Claude and I just chat about what's happened in the last session, I share what I’m thinking for next session, and Claude asks me clarifying questions. Now, rather than Claude trying to constantly remember all about the factions, npcs, locations and stuff from it's own memory (and regularly getting confused about things), it just references my Conspirita board and we're both clear on what's what and who's who. I'd love for anyone who's curious to check it out and let me know what you think! If you want to check it out, you can find it at https://conspirita.com. Once you're signed in to Conspirita, add this URL to your Claude instance: https://conspirita.com/api/mcp If you have any feedback I’d love to hear it! I keep tweaking things when I find myself wanting something more.

I know people vary in their acceptance of AI, and I have my own concerns, but I've been using NotebookLM lately and really enjoying it. You include sources into a notebook and it adds the content into a model. I add episode recordings into a notebook and it provides stunningly good summaries, and also answers questions about the content very well. It isn't perfect, and occasionally you have to correct it (especially names), but it has proven to be very useful for helping me to remember things that happened 100+ episodes ago.

So I recently finished reading through Jonah and Tristan’s role playing book as well as Return of the Lazy DM. Both excellent reads by the way and you should check them out as a game master, but does anyone suggest other books on running games?

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It's time for a community workshop. This Sunday evening at 7pm Eastern, come talk about your ongoing game(s) that you're running. This event is for GMs who are using (or moving towards) a proactive approach to running the game. We'll talk about: - Your PCs' goals and how to sharpen them - How you could react to those goals with factions, NPCs, and locations - Encounter design that's fun and also moves the story forward in a meaningful way These are pretty fun and usually pretty small (3-4 people), so come with your notes and prepared to talk in detail about your game. Also please come ready to give other GMs ideas - it's best when we all riff together. (This event is for Gold members only - if you aren't Gold yet, you can read about what it is here).