Run the table. We'll hold the world.

Before the session

You start by telling Throughline about your players: names, classes, the kinds of scenes that light each one up, the kind of table you like to run. Then you describe the world. A homebrew in any depth, from a one-paragraph sketch to a full setting bible. Or pick a setting from a book, show, or game you love, and Throughline will work in that canon.

Throughline takes a couple of minutes to plan. When it's done, two things appear in your dashboard. First, an opening narration to read aloud at the table: three or four paragraphs that put the players in the scene. Second, the first checkpoints, depicting where the opening could land in the fiction. You're ready to start.

During the session

Read the narration. The players say what they do. You run the table in your own words.

Throughline is listening through your microphone the whole time, transcribing in the background. While the table plays, Throughline is drafting the next checkpoints — one branch per plausible next player action, depicting what your players will encounter if they take that path. A frame might establish the room, show the emotional pressure, or isolate the clue your players are likely to reach for. When the next beat is more about who's aligned with whom or what's politically at stake, the checkpoint comes as a diagram instead: nodes for the people, lines for the relationships, labels for what's been said and what's been concealed.

When the scene reaches a natural transition point, you glance at the dashboard and use what helps. If your players take one of the prepared branches, Throughline hears that and starts planning from the branch they actually entered. If they do something else, you keep running the table normally; Throughline reorganizes around what happened. If you want to steer tone or destination, send a note like "less combat, more politics" or "Liam wants to go back to the ship."

The cycle repeats for as long as you're playing. A typical 2.5-hour session goes through 20 to 25 scene-beats.

What Throughline tracks for you

Across the session and across sessions, Throughline holds:

• Every NPC you've voiced and their established traits. Voice, motivation, scar, accent, whatever you and the players have made stick.
• Every piece of canon the players have surfaced or you've revealed. Who knows what, what's been said in front of whom, which questions are still open.
• Callback opportunities. Throwaway player lines from earlier sessions that could be paid off, backstory hooks that haven't been bitten yet.
• Long arcs. The political moves of factions you've named, the slow consequences of choices the table made three sessions ago.
• The lore you fed it at setup, plus everything the table has improvised since, treated as one coherent world.

Between sessions

Throughline saves your session transcript and the canonical state. When you start the next session, all of it is still there. The vampire NPC from session two has the same scar over the same eye. The bard's mentor still died in the temple fire. The faction the players slighted is still moving against them.

What Throughline doesn't do

Throughline never speaks to your players, never narrates at the table, never appears in any form your players see. You are still the only person at the table. Throughline doesn't run combat: you handle that with your own dice, your own rules, your own rulings. It doesn't manage initiative, calculate damage, or interpret the rulebook. It also doesn't replace your prep entirely. It replaces the long-horizon planning that's hard to do solo. The shorter "what's this NPC's name" or "what's in this dungeon room" prep, you can still do if you want, or skip and see what happens.

One-shots versus campaigns

One-shots are a single contained session: a heist, a mystery, a dungeon. They're heavily tested and run reliably. Multi-session campaigns work too but are still the frontier. We're learning what fails over weeks of play, and we recommend starting with a one-shot to see how the loop feels before committing to a longer run.