u/Independent-Soft2330

I think modern AI in ttrpgs is a slam dunk, and its awesome to see you building something here. Gonna look into it more!

Throughline is an AI tool that helps human GMs run tabletop RPG sessions. It heavily uses modern AI (hence posting here), and does not replace any humans.

While you're at the table running the game, Throughline listens to your session live and generates scene-beat storyboards (small grids of images showing what the players would encounter if they make a choice) that you can glance at and parse quickly. It also tracks campaign canon across sessions, plants and tracks callbacks, and proposes opening narration when you start a new arc. Throughline does not narrate to your players, run combat, or appear at the table. Players never see anything it produces. The GM does all the live performance: voicing NPCs, improvising, reading the room. The job of Throughline is to handle the long-horizon planning so the GM can focus on running the table. We're at pre-alpha. We've done 6 live playtests plus a lot of internal testing. One-shots have been reliable. Multi-session campaigns are less proven, so we'd suggest starting with a one-shot.

We're opening access to about 10 outside GMs to use it for their own sessions and give us feedback. The fit we're looking for is GMs who are strong on the social side of the table (improv, NPC voices, table feel, in-the-moment narration) but who either don't have time to prep extensively or don't have years of practice at long-term narrative planning. If you're already a great GM who enjoys prep and does it well, Throughline probably isn't for you.

The product is a web app. You sign in with Google. There's no GitHub or terminal setup. You can run a homebrew world by giving it the lore, or a setting you already love from commonly known books, games, or shows. You'll need a payment method on file because we forward LLM API costs at cost (no markup during alpha). In practice that works out to about $0.50 per hour of live play, so a weekly three-hour session runs around $6 to $10 per month. There's a trial for $5 that should get you a beefy 1-shot. If you can’t pay the API prices, i can cover you, but it’s out of my pocket.

There will be bugs. We want testers who find that interesting rather than frustrating, and who are willing to be in active conversation with us. Design feedback is the main thing we want; we're not looking for early customers or business partners. If you have an eye for game design, that's especially welcome.

About the developer: I'm Ted Shachtman, an educator and software engineer. I play Fabula Ultima and D&D, and GM both. The reason I'm building Throughline: a friend of mine, Ben, is a math PhD and the best GM I've played with. He preps three hours per session, voices a dozen NPCs, plans coherent arcs in large worlds, and adapts brilliantly on the fly when the players do something he wasn't planning for. He moved away, and the next best GM in our group is me, and I'm not very practiced nor have the time to prep. I built Throughline so I could be a better GM. We're trying to raise the floor for people who can't prep the way Ben does, so they can still run a session worth playing.

If you're interested, you can read more about the system at our website (link in comments) and sign up for the waitlist. The site has a longer writeup of how the system works and the design behind it. I'll respond to everyone within a few days.