Tusk's Tomes

Who it's for

I built this because I wanted a record of my own campaign and couldn't find anything that did the job. So the honest answer to "who is this for" is: people with the same problem I had.

That problem, specifically. You finish a four-hour session at eleven on a Sunday. Something genuinely brilliant happened around hour two — the sort of thing the table will still be quoting in a year — and you know full well that by Wednesday you'll remember roughly half of it, and by next month you'll remember that it was funny without remembering why.

Everyone says they'll write it up. Almost nobody does. Twice.

You'll probably get on with this if…

You're a GM with a backlog you've stopped mentioningPoint it at old recordings and go to bed. It works through them unattended. Nobody needs to know how many sessions were in the backlog.
You took notes for exactly one sessionA noble effort. It happens to everyone. Let something else do it and post the recap on Monday.
Your campaign has been running for yearsIt deserves better than a half-abandoned wiki and "I think Vellichor the Pale showed up around session nine?".
You're not sending your friends' voices to a cloud serviceEntirely fair. Whisper runs on your own machine and the audio never leaves it.
You make actual-play contentRecaps, show notes and pull-quotes without re-watching a four-hour VOD hunting for one line.
You tried Otter or NotebookLM and hit the wallThe wall being: it's clearly capable, and it has no idea who any of these people are. That's the specific thing this fixes.
You tried a tabletop service and liked it, but not the uploadFair, and they are good. The difference here is that the recording of your friends never leaves your machine, and attribution comes from per-speaker tracks rather than a guess at a mixed one.
You'd rather fork it than file a feature requestMIT licensed, no obfuscation, no telemetry. Have at it.

Never opened a terminal? That's fine, and it's not a silly question — the beginner's guide assumes nothing. If you get stuck, the feedback form comes straight to me.

The bits I actually enjoy

Some of this genuinely surprised me once it was working, so at the risk of sounding pleased with myself:

The quotes list. This is the one. It pulls out exchanges rather than single lines, because table humour almost never lands as one sentence — it's the setup, the terrible response, and the pause afterwards. Getting a list of those back at the end of a run, weeks after you'd forgotten them, is worth the whole exercise on its own.

Backfilling a campaign in one night. Feed it a stack of old recordings and leave it running. Waking up to years of sessions written up properly is ridiculous in the best way.

Names that stay spelled correctly. Sounds trivial. It isn't. Every general transcription tool will hear an invented fantasy name, guess a spelling, and then commit to that guess with total confidence for four hours. Grounding against your own glossary fixes it before anything gets written, which is why the prose reads like it was written by someone who was actually there.

Settling arguments. A speaker-tagged transcript ends "I definitely never agreed to that" in about ten seconds. Use responsibly.

Concrete scenarios

You have…You get…
A four-hour session recorded on Sunday nightA finished chronicle to send the party on Tuesday
Three weeks of arguing about what someone said in session 12A speaker-tagged transcript, searchable by name
Thirty sessions of backlogThirty chronicles by morning, via staged batch upload
Fifty archived YouTube sessionsCleaned transcripts and chronicles for the wiki
A group that won't touch cloud transcriptionWhisper on your own GPU; audio never leaves the machine
A finished chronicle you want searchableOne click to send it to Tusk's Vault

Depending on where you sit at the table

  • GMs — Recover what was said when everyone's memory has quietly diverged. Backfill years of notes from old recordings. Send a recap to whoever missed last week. Stop being the person who has to write it all up on a Sunday night.
  • Players — Win the "I said X / no you said Y" exchange decisively. Remember what your character swore three sessions ago and has been conveniently ignoring since. Keep a personal record of your own good bits.
  • Streamers — Turn long VODs into a searchable archive without editing anything by hand.
  • Actual-play podcasters — Write-ups in the time it used to take to transcribe the cold open.

What you bring, what it handles

You bringIt handles
A recording — Craig multitrack zip, per-speaker WAVs, or a YouTube .sbvTranscription, speaker labelling, grounding against your glossary
A glossary of your campaign's proper nouns (set up once, edited in-app)Cleaning, narrating, and pulling out the quotes, jests and grislier moments
One API key, or a local model — built in, you just supply the runnerEncrypted key storage, per-phase routing, sensible fallbacks
Optionally, your lore documentsExtracting the text and using it as grounding
Optionally, a GPUUsing it if it's there, falling back to the processor if not — though see the honest timings before relying on CPU