Why Hearth?

There are plenty of tools for playing tabletop games: virtual tabletops, character builders, encounter trackers. Hearth isn't one of them. Hearth is for what remains after the dice are put away: the story your table is telling. Here's the thinking behind how it works.

Text first

A campaign's memory is made of words. Not maps, not tokens, not stat blocks: the recap someone writes on the train home, the fiction a player can't stop thinking about, the graveyard of characters, who the mayor is and what everyone did to annoy her. Hearth is built around writing because writing is what a campaign actually leaves behind.

Markdown, so your words stay yours

Everything in Hearth is plain Markdown, the same simple text format used across half the internet. There is no proprietary editor to learn and no format to be trapped in. If you can type, you can write here; if you already write in Markdown, you'll feel at home in the first minute.

Simple on purpose

No databases to design, no plugin trees, no wiki taxonomy to invent before you've written a word. A handful of entry types, a title, and the words. The best campaign journal is the one that actually gets written after a four-hour session, so the writing has to be the easy part.

We meet your table where it lives

Years of recaps already sitting in Google Docs or Word? Import them as they are. Your group talks in Discord? Hearth can post new entries to a channel you choose, so the story arrives where the table already is. Somebody reads everything on their phone at lunch? That works too.

The whole table writes

A campaign's memory doesn't belong to the game master alone. Players add fiction, character notes, and recaps alongside the GM's lore, each with their own name on it. The table that writes together remembers together.

A librarian, not an author

The optional AI Lorekeeper answers questions about your campaign from what your table wrote, cites where it found things, and only reads what you're allowed to read. It doesn't write your story, it helps you find it again. And it stays off until a game master turns it on.

If that sounds like your table, light the fire. It's free to start, and your first entry is the kindling.