What it installs

Short version: I'm a GM who got fed up and wrote this for my own table. This page is me telling you exactly what it does to your computer, including the parts I'm not thrilled about, because you're about to run a stranger's code and you deserve to make that call with the facts.

I'd rather be transparent than reassuring. Where something could bite you, it's below.

Where this came from

I wanted a record of my sessions. Not minutes — the actual story. The bit where the rogue did something monumentally stupid and it somehow worked. The joke that had everyone crying. The line the DM delivered that made the table go quiet.

The existing options didn't fit. Meeting transcribers are built for standups: you get a transcript and a bulleted summary, for $15 a month, forever, in somebody else's cloud. And none of them have the faintest idea who Pernille is — they'd hear the name, invent a spelling, and confidently use the wrong one for three hours straight.

So this got built. It's a niche tool for a niche group of people: GMs who want their campaign written up properly, grounded in their own names and lore, on their own machine, without a subscription. If that's you, welcome. If you need something polished and enterprise-grade, I'd genuinely point you elsewhere — this is one person's project, and the rest of this page is about what that means for you.

It's a work in progress, and it's tested on one PC

It's not a commercial product with a QA department. It's tested on my machine, which runs Windows and has an NVIDIA card, and that shows up in what I can honestly claim:

I don't expect anything serious to go wrong, but "I don't expect" isn't a guarantee and I'm not going to dress it up as one. What I have tried hard to do is make sure that if something does go wrong, it wrecks files this app created — not the files you already had. Most of this page is about how well that holds up, and where it doesn't.

What you need before you start (I can't install these for you)

Being straight about this, because it's the bit that catches people out: there is no one-click installer yet. You need a couple of things already on your machine, and Tusk's Tomes deliberately does not install them for you — a setup script that silently installs system-wide software is exactly the kind of thing I wouldn't want running on my own PC. It checks, tells you the exact command, and stops.

Two things worth knowing:

• Python 3.13 does not work for transcription — the speech-to-text libraries have no builds for it yet. If you have 3.13, install 3.12 alongside it. Setup checks your version and says so rather than letting you discover it partway into a failed install.
• You do not need Visual Studio Build Tools, whatever older guides say. Nothing in the dependency tree compiles native code any more.

So yes — realistically this is still a "you're comfortable installing Node and running a .bat file" project. I'd like that not to be true, and a proper standalone installer that handles the whole thing is on the roadmap. Right now it isn't done, and pretending otherwise would just waste your evening.

What it installs, and where

There's no installer. You clone a folder and run setup.bat (or setup.sh). No MSI, no elevation prompt, nothing added to Windows itself.

The first six live inside the folder you cloned. Delete that folder and they're gone.

Three things I think you should understand

node_modules is other people's code. It's the standard JavaScript dependency set from npm, and it's by far the largest body of code on your machine that I didn't write. I can't personally vouch for all of it — nobody in this ecosystem can. What I can tell you is that it's all listed in package.json, npm audit will report known problems in it any time you ask, and CI fails the build if a shipping dependency has a high-severity advisory.

The Whisper add-on is the heavy one. It installs Python packages including PyTorch, plus a CUDA build if you have an NVIDIA card. It's big, it's fiddly, and it's the step most likely to fall over on your machine. It's also entirely optional and lives in exactly one folder.

Your API key is encrypted, but it's still on your disk. It's tied to this machine — hostname, username, platform — so copying the file to another computer won't decrypt it. That defends against someone stealing the file. It doesn't defend against someone already sitting at your computer.

Everything it writes outside its own folder

I'd rather list these than tell you "it all stays in one place", because that isn't true. Every one of them happens because you asked for it.

The Obsidian vault is the one that would worry me

That folder is your notes. It's the only place this app writes to something you made, and I don't take that lightly. Reading is the normal mode. There are exactly three writes, all behind a button you have to press:

1. Markdown conversion — makes a .md copy of a Word or PDF file, beside the original. It never modifies or deletes your original, and it refuses to overwrite an existing .md.
2. CLAUDE.md generator — writes a navigation guide into the vault root. If one already exists it stops and asks before replacing it.
3. Graphify index — writes a graphify-out/ folder into the vault.

The code that reads your vault during a normal chronicle run cannot write at all. That's not me promising to be careful — there's a test that fails the build if a write call ever appears in those files.

If your vault matters to you and isn't already backed up or in git, back it up before you first use those features. I'd tell you that about any tool that touches your notes, including mine.

What it never does

• No registry entries, no services, no scheduled tasks, no startup items, no PATH changes.
• No Administrator elevation, ever. If something asks you for admin rights while you're installing this, it didn't come from me.
• No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, no update pings. There's nothing to opt out of because there's nothing there. I don't know how many people use this and I'm fine with that.
• No account, no login, no server of mine anywhere.
• It listens on 127.0.0.1 — your machine only, not your network.

The one thing that leaves your computer is transcript text going to whichever AI provider you set up, so it can write the chronicle. That's the entire network story. Point it at a local model and even that stops.

What could go wrong — the things I already know about

The folder isn't writable

The most common failure by a mile. It happens when the folder is in C:\Program Files, at the root of C:\, on a disconnected network drive, or being held by OneDrive or antivirus. Setup checks for this before touching anything, so you get told rather than left with a half-finished install.

Fix: move the folder to Documents or Desktop and run setup again.

Please don't "fix" it by running as Administrator. It's the first thing everyone tries and it makes things worse — you end up with files your normal account can't modify, and the app fails later in far more confusing ways. This never needs elevation.

The Python / Whisper install falls over part-way

Python packaging is fragile and this step downloads a lot. I've seen it fail from: no Python, Python not on PATH, no disk space, a dropped connection mid-download, and antivirus interrupting file creation.

How bad is it: contained to vendor\python-venv. Delete that folder and re-run the add-on install. Your system Python is never touched — the whole reason it builds a separate environment is so a bad day here can't reach it.

Antivirus gets involved

To a heuristic scanner, installing software looks a lot like malware: a process creating hundreds of files fast and pulling down executables. If setup dies with no explanation, check your antivirus history before assuming the app is broken. All the source is public if you want to look first.

The uninstaller genuinely deletes things

It's the one part with real destructive power, so here's how it's fenced in. It refuses to run unless it's sitting in a real Tusk's Tomes folder. It resolves every path through the filesystem before deleting, so a symlink can't redirect it somewhere else. It refuses any path that isn't either inside the program folder or inside a folder with tusks-tomes in its name. It makes you type I UNDERSTAND before it starts. It keeps everything you authored unless you explicitly tell it not to, and it never touches a lore folder or a custom session folder.

It's still code, and code has bugs. npm run uninstall -- --dry-run shows you exactly what it would delete and deletes nothing. Worth doing first.

One sharp edge I know about: it decides which folder to clean from its own location on disk, not from where you run it. If you copy uninstall.mjs somewhere else and run it there, it will still go after the folder it was copied from. Run it in place with npm run uninstall. I know this because I caught it out exactly that way during development.

Platforms I can't test

On Linux or macOS you may well be the first person down that path. I don't expect breakage, but I haven't earned the right to say more than that. If you hit something, please tell me — that's genuinely the fastest way it gets fixed.

Putting it on your network

By default only your own machine can reach it. Setting TUSKS_HOST=0.0.0.0 makes it reachable across your local network. Even then, write operations stay off unless you separately enable them — but anyone on that network could still read your transcripts. Only do it on a network you control.

It runs other programs

Tusk's Tomes launches other software on your machine: Python for transcription, ffmpeg for audio, nvidia-smi to ask about your graphics card, and — if you turn those add-ons on — the claude, codex or ollama commands. All with your normal user permissions, never elevated, and all programs you installed yourself.

Keeping the blast radius small

Things that genuinely limit what a bug of mine could reach:

• Clone into a normal folder. Documents or Desktop. Not Program Files, not a synced OneDrive folder.
• Back up your Obsidian vault before first using the conversion or generator buttons, if it isn't in version control already.
• Run the uninstaller with --dry-run first.
• Skip add-ons you don't need. Everything past "paste a transcript" is opt-in. Not installing Whisper skips ~1.5 GB and the most fragile step there is.
• Keep your lore folder outside the program folder — that's the default, and it means deleting the app can never reach your notes.

Don't take my word for it

It's all public at github.com/KochiTusker/Tusks-Tomes. If you only read four files, read these — they're the ones that actually answer this question:

• setup.bat / scripts/setup/check-deps.mjs — everything the install does.
• scripts/uninstall.mjs — everything the uninstall does, guards included.
• scripts/whisper/setup.ps1 — the Python environment build.
• server/lore/obsidian/ — the vault code, and the read-only test that enforces what I claimed above.

If any of it doesn't match what you see happening, that's a bug and I want to know: open an issue.

Getting rid of it

npm run uninstall

It keeps everything you authored unless you pass --purge-user-data, and leaves a TUSKS-TOMES-uninstall-notes.md in the folder listing what was removed, what was kept and where, and which leftovers are shared with other software and shouldn't be deleted just to tidy up. Move that file somewhere safe before you delete the folder.

npm run uninstall -- --list-locations prints the same paths and deletes nothing at all.

Then delete the folder. Nothing of mine is left outside the locations at the top of this page.