The Discord Bot for Tabletop RPG Sessions
Whatever system your table plays, NotesBot sits in the voice channel, records the whole session, and posts an AI recap shaped around the things your game actually tracks: clues, scores, contacts, feats, or anything else you tell it to watch for.
Every System Generates Details Nobody Writes Down
Tabletop games produce an enormous amount of state that lives only in conversation. The Pathfinder party stacks three buffs before the boss fight and nobody records which ones. The Call of Cthulhu investigators find a telegram in the professor's desk, and by next month nobody remembers what it said or why it mattered. The Blades crew agrees on a plan for the score, then spends the first twenty minutes of the next session reconstructing it from four conflicting memories.
The usual fix is appointing a chronicler, and it always costs the table something. The player writing everything down is half absent from the scenes they are recording. Their notes lean toward their own character's storyline, and when they miss a week the record simply stops. Game masters end up keeping shadow notes on top of prep, which is more homework for the one person already doing the most.
NotesBot removes the job entirely. It joins the voice channel, listens to the whole session, and delivers both a structured recap and a word-for-word transcript. Everyone stays in character, and the record still gets kept.
How NotesBot Fits Into Game Night
There is no prep, no overlay, and nothing your players need to install. The whole loop is two slash commands wrapped around the session you were going to run anyway:
Type /join Once Everyone Is in Voice
Any member of the group types /join in a text channel. NotesBot enters the voice channel as a visible participant and starts recording each speaker separately.
Run Your Session
Narrate, scheme, roll, and argue about initiative like always. The bot stays silent in the channel and never interrupts the game or changes anyone's audio.
Type /leave When You Wrap Up
The recording stops and NotesBot hands the audio to its transcription and summarization pipeline. Marathon sessions are fine; the audio is processed in segments.
The Recap Posts Where You Called It
A structured session recap appears in the channel your server sends notes to, ready for the group to read. By default the notes arrive in a thread under the text channel they post in rather than as loose messages, and /config switches that to plain messages. The transcript comes with it as a timestamped .txt file in Discord, and the whole call is archived on your dashboard at notesbot.io.
The recap is only half of what each session produces. There is also a complete word-for-word transcript with speaker labels, which the RPG session transcription page covers in depth.
What Your Session Notes Look Like
Here is the shape of a recap for a Blades in the Dark crew, generated with a custom prompt asking the AI to track the score, heat, faction standing, and downtime plans. Swap the prompt and the same structure bends to any system.
NotesBotBotToday
Session 9 Recap: The Dimmer Sisters' Vault
🎠The Score
- The crew hit the Dimmer Sisters' vault during the Forgotten Gods festival, entering through the canal grate Nyx scouted last session.
- Vex posed as a wine merchant to talk past the door wardens, then unbolted the servants' hall from inside.
- The ghost bound to the vault recognized Sable's family name and let the crew pass in exchange for an unnamed future favor.
🔥 Heat and Consequences
- Heat rose by 2 after a Bluecoat patrol spotted the crew's boat leaving the canal.
- Sable now owes the vault ghost a favor; the table recorded it as a 6-segment long-term clock.
🏛️ Faction Standing
- Standing with the Lampblacks improved to +1 after the crew handed over the forged ledger.
- The Dimmer Sisters dropped to -2 and know someone breached the vault, though not who.
âŹď¸Ź Next Session
- Downtime opens the session; Nyx wants to start a long-term project on the ghost door in the lair.
- The GM will begin with the entanglement roll the crew skipped this week.
One Bot, Tuned to Your System
The custom focus prompt, set once with /config, is what turns a generic meeting bot into a session chronicler for your specific game. It tells the AI what your system cares about, and every recap afterward follows that shape.
You do not have to start from a blank box. /config offers a built-in D&D and TTRPG template as a starting point, which is the fastest way to a usable recap, and you can edit it from there.
Pathfinder tables can use: "Track feats and abilities used, conditions applied, and loot assigned to each character." Call of Cthulhu keepers might prefer: "Record clues discovered, sanity losses and what caused them, and leads the investigators have not followed yet."
Blades in the Dark crews can ask for: "Summarize the score, heat gained, faction standing changes, and downtime plans." Shadowrun teams might run: "Log contacts met, payouts negotiated, and loose ends left over from the run." None of these are special modes. They are the same prompt field doing different jobs, which is why a homebrew system works exactly as well as a published one. /config is your own panel, and the settings that apply to a recording come from whoever's plan pays for it. On a server where one plan covers everyone, that is the account holder.
If your table plays D&D 5e specifically, the Discord D&D bot page goes deeper on prompts for NPCs, quests, and loot.
Built for the Way Tables Actually Talk
Structured Session Recaps
After /leave, the AI turns hours of play into a recap organized under emoji headers, posted straight into the text channel where you called the bot.
Per-System Focus Prompts
Tell the AI what your game tracks, from sanity losses to faction clocks, starting from the built-in D&D template if you want. On a shared plan, settings come from whoever's plan pays for the recording.
Crosstalk-Friendly Recording
Every speaker is captured separately, so overlapping voices during a tense roll do not cancel each other out. The transcript keeps each reaction attributed.
Word-for-Word Transcripts
Every session also produces a full transcript with speaker labels. Quote the warlock's exact wording when the pact comes due three sessions later.
A Campaign That Remembers Itself
Recordings, transcripts, and recaps collect in your dashboard at notesbot.io, so checking what happened in session 4 takes a search, not an interrogation.
Runs in 80+ languages
Tables that play in Spanish, German, Japanese, or almost anything else get transcripts and recaps in their own language. The language is detected automatically, with nothing to set.
DnD Mode Is for Every Table, Not Just D&D
The name comes from the game that made it necessary, but the setting is about how your sessions run, not what you play. Switch to D&D Mode with /config and two things change. Each recording can run up to 5 continuous hours instead of the standard 2.5, which is the difference between covering a real session and cutting off mid-boss. And the summary switches to a style written for campaigns: a session story that reads like an actual-play recap, followed by structured notes with sections for NPCs and factions, encounters, loot, rolls, and next steps.
That recap style works just as well when a Shadowrun run goes sideways or a Blades flashback lands mid-argument as it does during a beholder fight. Pair it with a custom focus prompt naming what your system tracks, and the notes speak your game's language. You can change modes between sessions whenever your group's style shifts.
To see what the resulting verbatim record looks like at a real table, the D&D session transcription page walks through a labeled transcript excerpt.
Two Games, One Night, Two Recordings
A server that hosts several groups usually has more than one of them playing at the same time. Each table can have its own recording rather than taking turns.
NotesBot itself records one call at a time. Each assistant bot you invite to the server adds one more, up to 7. The assistants join the voice channel and record; they never post, so the notes always come back from NotesBot in the channel you expect.
Every call running at the same time draws on the same hour balance, so two recordings for an hour spend two hours. Invite as many or as few as you need:
The invite asks for View Channel and Connect, the two permissions that matter, and never Speak. More on recording several calls at once.
For Servers That Host Several Tables
Once a server runs more than one game, two questions need an answer: whose plan pays, and where each recap posts. An admin settles both from /setup in Discord.
One plan covers the server
One plan can cover the whole server. An admin opens /setup, goes to Team & billing, names the account holder and an optional role, and the account holder accepts by DM unless they set it up themselves. Leave the role empty and only the account holder can record.
Nothing is billed until the account holder says yes, and ending it later leaves their own plan and hours untouched. How team billing works.
Notes land where you want them
An admin can send every call to one channel from /setup, under Where notes go, and give a single voice channel or a whole category a place of its own.
The closest match wins, so a voice channel beats its category, and Preview shows you the answer before a single call is recorded. Where notes go.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which tabletop RPG systems does NotesBot support?
All of them, because NotesBot does not need to know your rules. It records the voice conversation in your Discord channel and summarizes what your table actually said. Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, Blades in the Dark, Shadowrun, Savage Worlds, FATE, Mothership, Lancer, and every homebrew in between produce recaps the same way. The AI works from your table's own words, so whatever vocabulary your system uses shows up naturally in the notes.
How do I tune the summary for my specific game system?
Use the /config command to set a custom focus prompt, a short instruction that steers what the AI pulls out of the transcript. You do not have to start from a blank box. /config offers a built-in D&D and TTRPG template as a starting point, which is the fastest way to a usable recap, and you can edit it from there. From there, a Blades crew might use 'Summarize the score, heat gained, faction standing changes, and downtime plans.' A Call of Cthulhu keeper might use 'Record clues discovered, sanity losses and their causes, and leads the investigators have not followed yet.' You set it once and every recap follows the same structure until you change it. Because settings come from whoever's plan pays for the recording, at a table where one plan covers the group it is the account holder who sets it.
Does it work for homebrew systems nobody has heard of?
Yes. NotesBot never consults a rulebook, so a system you invented last month is no harder for it than Pathfinder. Write your custom prompt using your own terminology, whether that is corruption points, dream tokens, or clan favor, and the AI will look for those things in the conversation. If your table says it out loud, it can end up in the recap.
Does my whole table need to be on Discord?
NotesBot records the audio that flows through the Discord voice channel, so fully online tables are the ideal setup: every player gets picked up individually with speaker labels. Hybrid tables can work too if the in-person side joins the voice channel from one device with an open microphone. The bot will hear everyone through that mic, but the transcript will attribute all in-room voices to the single Discord account carrying them, so labels are less precise for the people sharing a mic.
How long can a session run, and what plan do I need?
Each Discord account gets a one-time 30-minute free trial with no credit card, and it does not renew. Paid plans run from $3 to $40 per month, 5 to 100 hours of recording. There is also Annual at $96 a year: 240 hours for the year, granted up front. Hours reset each cycle and do not roll over. As a rough guide, a weekly four-hour game uses about 16 to 18 hours a month, which sits comfortably inside the mid-range plans, while a biweekly table fits in a smaller one. By default the hours come off the plan of whoever's paying for that recording; if you would rather one plan covered the whole server, an admin turns on team billing in /setup under Team & billing and names the account holder. Long single sessions are fine; the bot processes the audio in segments after you type /leave.
Each Discord account gets a one-time 30-minute free trial with no credit card, and it does not renew. Trials are also capped per server: three people and an hour and a half of trial time in total, and a server covered by team billing skips trials altogether. Paid plans run from $3 to $40 per month, 5 to 100 hours of recording. There is also Annual at $96 a year: 240 hours for the year, granted up front. Hours reset each cycle and do not roll over. See every plan.