Somewhere in your campaign channel there’s a recap you’re proud of. Eight hundred words, chronological, every NPC named, the initiative order of the big fight preserved for posterity. You posted it at 1am, still buzzing from the session. It got one reaction emoji. From your spouse. Who was at the table.

If you’ve searched “dnd session recap template,” that recap is probably why. You know the writing is worth doing, you’ve felt the difference when the table shows up current, and you also know your current format costs you forty minutes a week to produce something nobody finishes. So here’s the position this post takes: a session recap should be three paragraphs, stakes-first, in your table’s own vocabulary, and it should take you five minutes while the kettle boils. There’s a fill-in template below. Steal it.

One scope note so you grab the right tool. This is about the written recap, the artifact that lives in the channel between sessions. The spoken one you perform at the top of the night is a different craft with its own guide (we wrote the long version), and the question of who should deliver it has a surprising answer. Write first, perform later; the written recap is where the performance steals its material.

Why the long recap dies unread

The 1am recap fails for a boring mechanical reason: it’s written as minutes. Minutes preserve the order of events, and your players already have the order, because they were there. What slips away between Tuesdays is the weight: which promise is coming due, which enemy is now personal, which dumb plan they were one night’s sleep away from executing. Memory keeps stakes and discards logistics, so a recap that’s mostly logistics is a document engineered out of the exact material brains throw away.

The length is a symptom of the same mistake. When you write events-first, everything that happened feels equally entitled to a sentence, so the recap grows until it’s a chore to write and a wall to read. When you write stakes-first, most of the session visibly doesn’t matter, and the recap shrinks on its own.

So throw out “what happened” as your organizing question. The template uses three better ones.

The template

Three paragraphs, one question each, two to four sentences per answer. Under 200 words total, written in second person or “we,” whichever your table talks in.

**[Session number]: [a title in your table's words]**

WHAT CHANGED
The two or three things that are different about the world
now. New ally, dead enemy, burned bridge, opened vault.
Changes only. If it reset to normal by session's end, it
doesn't go here.

WHAT WE OWE (AND WHO OWES US)
Every promise, debt, and deal still open. Who you made it
to, and what happens if it slips. This paragraph is the
whole reason the recap exists.

WHAT'S LOOMING
One or two lines of pressure. The thing that gets worse if
the party does nothing, phrased as a question when you can:
"The handoff is tomorrow at midnight. Nobody has told Veska
about the second buyer. Do we?"

That’s the entire format. A worked example, from a session you can imagine:

Session 12: The Goose Knows

What changed: The smuggler’s ledger is ours, and Veska knows we have it, which means the Harbor Guild knows by now too. Bram is down to one working hand until someone finds a real healer. The goose has been formally adopted and answers, reluctantly, to “Admiral.”

What we owe: We promised the dockworkers half the ledger money, out loud, in front of witnesses. Kira owes the fence a favor of his choosing, which everyone agreed was fine and is obviously going to be a problem. The captain thinks we’re handling the manifest; we are not handling the manifest.

What’s looming: The buyer arrives in two days, and the ledger says there’s a second one nobody’s met. Veska set the meet. Veska also set the last meet.

Read that back and notice what it does to a player on Thursday. Every line either touches their character or loads the next session. There’s nothing to skim past, so they don’t learn to skim.

Write it in your table’s vocabulary, because that’s the test

“The Goose Knows” is doing real work up there. A recap written in neutral summary-speak (“the party acquired the ledger and encountered complications”) is technically accurate and emotionally inert, and your players will read two of them before they stop opening the post. The version they read names the goose, keeps the running joke’s exact wording, and calls the fence “the fence” because nobody at your table has ever used his name.

This is also the honest reason a template helps instead of flattening everyone’s recaps into the same voice: the structure is generic, the vocabulary is yours. Fill the three paragraphs with the words your table actually said and no other group’s recap could be mistaken for it.

Two rules of thumb keep the vocabulary honest. Quote your players when they were funny, with attribution, because a recap that occasionally immortalizes table banter gets read for the banter and retains the stakes as a side effect. And write the party’s knowledge, never yours. If they don’t know who the second buyer is, the recap doesn’t either. A recap that leaks DM knowledge trains your players to read it as spoilers instead of as their own memory.

When to write it, and what “done” looks like

Within a day of the session, while you still remember which promises were made out loud. Past that, you’re reconstructing instead of recalling, the job triples in size, and that’s the week the recap quietly dies. Five minutes Wednesday beats forty minutes Saturday, and the quality gap favors Wednesday too.

Done is: three paragraphs filled in, under 200 words, posted where the table talks. Done is specifically not comprehensive. The shopping trip, the travel day, the combat round-by-round all happened, and the recap’s job is to let them go. If a player needs the exact loot split, that’s what party notes are for; the recap is the campaign’s memory of what mattered. Protecting that boundary is what keeps the thing short enough to write every single week, and a mediocre recap every week beats a beautiful one that ships monthly.

Then on game night, you open by reading it aloud, or better, a player does, and the written artifact pays for itself twice.

The part where I tell you we automate this

You’d be right to see it coming, so here it is plainly. Loracle sits in your Discord call while you play and writes the recap for you from the recording, stakes and promises included, in whatever language your table plays in. The three-paragraph shape above is roughly what comes out, except it’s built from what was actually said instead of what you managed to remember on Wednesday.

But the template costs nothing and works tonight, bot or no bot. Copy it into your campaign channel, fill in the three questions for last session, and watch the difference in who’s actually read it when the table sits down next week. Your 1am recap deserved readers. The five-minute one will get them.