One premise in, a session you can run out
Prep for a tabletop game, in the shape you actually need it at the table.
A game master with a full week has two hours on a Thursday and a table on Saturday. The half of prep that gets dropped is the unglamorous half: statting the fight so it is dangerous instead of lethal, writing down what the innkeeper wants, and deciding what happens when the party ignores every hook you wrote.
SessionSmithy takes a line of premise and returns a packet: a hook, paced scene beats, encounters built to 5e math, NPC quick references, contingencies for what the party will really do, and a one-page run sheet. A gallery of finished packets is readable without an account, so you can see the output before you make one.
Open SessionSmithy.comThe app.
The gallery and the sample packets are open to anyone. These are the real screens, not a mock-up of them.
What it does.
What comes out
- A hook that gives the party a reason to be in the room
- Scene beats with a time budget, so the session fits the evening you have
- Encounters built to 5e math, with the difficulty band and the XP computed in code
- NPC quick references, and contingencies for what the party does instead
- A one-page run sheet, printable, or a PDF in one click
What you can do to it
- Regenerate any single section without disturbing the rest of the packet
- Five nudges per section: harder, easier, shorter, longer, grittier
- Edit anything afterwards, including find and replace across the whole packet
- Share a read-only link with the people at your table
- A free account gets three sessions a day, which is the plan rather than a trial
On a phone.
Reading a packet on the way to the game, and the gallery when you want somebody else's idea.
Run mode is the half that gets used at the table.
A prep document is something you read on Thursday. On Saturday night you need something else: big type, one beat in front of you at a time, and a way to tell whether you are running long before the players notice.
Run mode is a full-screen view of the same packet. Every beat carries its own stopwatch, and the running total sits against the session length you asked for and turns red once you pass it. The initiative tracker seeds itself from the party size and that encounter's monsters, with hit points you tap down as the fight goes. It writes nothing back into the packet, so nothing that happens at the table edits the prep.
One rule holds the whole thing together: the model writes, and the code does the arithmetic. A "harder" nudge steers the prose. It does not touch the numbers, because the difficulty band and the XP are recomputed every time the packet is opened.
SessionSmithy is not affiliated with, endorsed, sponsored or approved by Wizards of the Coast LLC.
Tell us what your business does by hand.
This one exists because most of the prep for a game night turned out to be bookkeeping rather than imagination. That is the same shape as most of the work we get asked for.
Based in St. Clair Shores, working across Metro Detroit.
The rest of the work
- GVST Wellness A yoga and group fitness studio running two St. Clair Shores locations, rebuilt off a template.
- LionHeart Fitness A strength and burnout coach in Fraser, selling a coaching relationship rather than a gym membership.
- Kozdron Homes A ground-up home builder working across Livingston County, and a homepage that lays a drawing sheet over a house they finished.
- WeeklyAsk A directory, this week's asks, the referral log, attendance and dues, in one place instead of five.
- PokerThangs A trainer for live low-stakes poker, where you get a messy pot, an uncounted stack and no time to work either of them out.