A live companion for game masters
Throughline sits behind your table live. It listens, thinks several scene-beats ahead, and draws a storyboard for each path your players might take next — all of them true in your world, waiting to be found. When they go somewhere none of the paths predicted, you improvise, and Throughline builds new storyboards that fold your improvised details into the story. The part of the game your players see is still all you.
Your first sessions are free. No card or access code.
What happens during play
You run the game the way you always have. Throughline works in the background, a few beats ahead of the table, and leaves everything on your screen for when you have a moment to look.
Turn on the mic and play. Throughline follows the conversation at your table, including every detail you improvise on the spot, and adds it to the campaign’s memory.
When your players near a decision, it works out where each choice could lead and draws a storyboard for every path. Each one is consistent with your world and ready before they get there.
Glance down between beats. Use a scene, a name, or a line of dialogue, change it, or ignore it. Your players hear your voice, and see only the combat board you choose to share.
Your session desk
This is the real dashboard with an example session loaded. Open a storyboard, try an NPC line, or move a token and switch to the player’s view.
Real app components. Nothing you do here records audio or needs an account.Open it in a full window
Watch a full session · 3:43
A campaign set up, a session run live, a fight prepared and put on a shared board, and the next session picking up the story.
Who this is for
You're strong on the social side of the table — voicing NPCs, improvising, narrating, keeping the energy up — and what's hard is everything around it:
Throughline works those parts with you, at the table, as they happen. The parts you're already good at stay yours.
You're already a great GM who enjoys deep prep and does it well.
This is built to raise the floor for people who'd love to run something deeper than they have the time or practice to build alone.
When someone asks the unexpected
NPC dialogue arrives where you’re already looking. Read a line, adapt it, or dismiss it. You’re still the one speaking to the table.
Try an NPC lineWhen talking turns into a fight
Prepare the encounter in your private GM draft. Keep opponents hidden, publish when you’re ready, and give each player a personal link to move their character.
Explore the shared boardBetween one session and the next
End the night with a recap and a suggested opening. Plan the next session in conversation, and pick up exactly where the table left off.
What it keeps track ofAcross a session and across months of them
The campaign's memory, kept across a session and across months of them.
What it actually feels like
During play, you improvise details the way you always have. Throughline treats each one as a commitment the story has made, and works out — ahead of you — how those commitments can resolve into one coherent plot.
Here's the situation every GM has lived. Your players are in a tavern. On a whim, you give the innkeeper a sparkle in her eye that doesn't quite read as natural. A player rolls Insight, and you narrate the unease:
"The sparkle lasts a beat too long. She sees your expression change, and for a split second something flashes — anger, maybe — then she covers it. 'Ale, was it?'"
If you have a plan behind that moment, it's a hook. If you don't, it's a debt: you've promised the table a thread, and now something has to be at the end of it. A campaign accumulates these debts faster than anyone can pay them down — that's why so many long games end with threads pointing nowhere.
With Throughline listening, the sparkle goes into the campaign's memory the moment you say it. Over the sessions that follow, it looks for the version of the story where that detail — and the twenty or thirty others you've planted — were always pointing somewhere, and it prepares the scenes that pay them off. When your players swerve, it re-threads the plot around what actually happened.
Good GMs already do this between sessions, with a notebook and a free evening. What nobody can do is re-plan mid-session, at the speed of play. That's the part Throughline covers.
From the first idea to the next session
Add your world, your characters, and where tonight begins. Bring detailed notes or a single good premise.
Choose your audio source and start playing. Throughline follows the conversation and prepares possibilities as your players make decisions.
End with a recap, add your notes, and return to the same campaign next time. The people, places, and consequences come with you.
Start with a real session
Your first sessions are free. If it fits your game, choose a monthly plan. You’re never billed past the plan price.
Try it with your table
No card. No code. Sign in and start a campaign.
Start playing freeAn occasional game
About two four-hour sessions. For tables that meet once or twice a month.
Choose this planA weekly game
About six four-hour sessions. A regular game, with room to spare.
Choose this planA few things to know
You run the game, voice the NPCs, and make the rulings. Throughline prepares possibilities and remembers the campaign. It does not speak to your players.
Yes. Use your microphone for a room, capture a browser tab, or select an audio input device for your online setup. Players can open their combat-board links in a browser.
Players don’t need accounts to use their personal combat-board links. The GM signs in to run the campaign.
As much as you want. Bring your existing world and plans, or start with a premise. Throughline works within the world you give it and what happens at the table.
Pick your system when you set up a campaign: D&D 5e, Pathfinder 2e, Call of Cthulhu, Fabula Ultima, Blades in the Dark, Mothership, Powered by the Apocalypse, or any other system you name. Stat blocks are written for your system, and fight difficulty is scored for D&D 5e.
Yes. Choose your table’s language in setup and Throughline listens and writes in it: English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, or Korean.
From Ted
I'm Ted — an educator and software engineer. I play Fabula Ultima and D&D, and I run games in both.
I loved playing in my friend Ben's campaigns. Ben is one of the smartest people I've ever met, and he loved prepping. He built custom stories for us from scratch, and I got to grow up playing TTRPGs the way they're supposed to feel — open worlds, real narratives, the whole thing.
Then Ben moved away. Nobody in my friend group is remotely as good at it now, including me. Some of us try. None of us prep enough, because we're all busy. It's a bummer.
The specific thing that pushed me to build this: I told my friends I'd run a pirate campaign. They've been successful pirates for twenty years; the captain announces he's going to rob Smuggler's Bounty, a protected cove where the penalty for robbing other pirates is death; the next morning the captain takes a monkey as his wife. The captain is going insane. My friends were thrilled. I was thrilled. Then I tried to actually prep it the way it deserved, and realised I couldn't.
So I started wondering whether a tool could handle the parts I'm bad at — long-term planning and narrative coherence — and let me focus on the part I enjoy, which is running the table. It took a lot of iterations and some real game-design insight. But that's what this is. A system that helps you be a better GM. Cheap enough to be worth it. Doesn't replace any humans, which matters to me. And fun to use.
Your world is waiting
Free for your first sessions. Plans from $4.50 a month after that.
