Bringing a session in
The hard part was never writing the chronicle. It's getting four hours of six people talking over each other into text at all. There are three routes, and which one suits you depends mostly on how you record and what hardware you have lying about.
The short version
C gives the best result, and A is the easiest. If you're not sure, start with A or B and move up later. Nothing is locked in — you can use a different route every week if you like.
| Route | Needs installing | Who said what? | Suits you if… |
|---|---|---|---|
| A — Paste a transcript | Nothing | Whatever's already in the text | You've got a transcript from somewhere already |
| B — Record, let YouTube transcribe | Nothing | None at all — see the disclaimer on that page | You've no NVIDIA GPU, or you want the least faff |
| C — Craig multitrack | Audio Transcription | Every line, correctly | You play on Discord and want it done properly |
What the routes have in common
Whichever way the text gets in, everything downstream is identical: the same six-phase pipeline, the same grounding against your glossary and lore, the same outputs. The route only decides how good the speaker attribution is before the pipeline starts.
You are not choosing once. The route is per session, not per campaign. Paste a transcript this week, drop a Craig recording next week — the chronicle library treats them the same.
If a run hits a quota mid-pipeline
Long sessions on a rate-limited key can exhaust a per-minute or daily quota part-way through. Tomes opens a dialog rather than failing the run, and no work is lost on any of the paths it offers — your grounded transcript, DM answers and partial chronicle are all kept.
The full step-by-step is in the quickstart.
The closed-loop promise
Once you've configured the system to your taste — chosen your provider, populated the glossary, picked your route — the recurring work per session is:
- Hit a download link or paste a transcript (60 seconds).
- Click Run (zero seconds).
- Walk away while the pipeline runs (10–20 minutes hands-off with a GPU).
- Open the finished chronicle when you're back.
Same three clicks per week, forever. That's the design goal — minimal recurring work, maximum recurring value.
Next
- Import a transcript — the easiest route
- Import YouTube captions — no GPU needed
- Import session audio — the best attribution
- Recommended settings — what to run once you're in