Run the table. We'll hold the world.

During play, you improvise details the way you always have. Throughline treats each one as a commitment the story has made, and works out — ahead of you — how those commitments can resolve into one coherent plot.

Here's the situation every GM has lived. Your players are in a tavern. On a whim, you give the innkeeper a sparkle in her eye that doesn't quite read as natural. A player rolls Insight, and you narrate the unease:

"The sparkle lasts a beat too long. She sees your expression change, and for a split second something flashes — anger, maybe — then she covers it. 'Ale, was it?'"

If you have a plan behind that moment, it's a hook. If you don't, it's a debt: you've promised the table a thread, and now something has to be at the end of it. A campaign accumulates these debts faster than anyone can pay them down — that's why so many long games end with threads pointing nowhere.

With Throughline listening, the sparkle goes into the campaign's memory the moment you say it. Over the sessions that follow, it looks for the version of the story where that detail — and the twenty or thirty others you've planted — were always pointing somewhere, and it prepares the scenes that pay them off. When your players swerve, it re-threads the plot around what actually happened.

Good GMs already do this between sessions, with a notebook and a free evening. What nobody can do is re-plan mid-session, at the speed of play. That's the part Throughline covers.

I'm Ted — an educator and software engineer. I play Fabula Ultima and D&D, and I run games in both.

I loved playing in my friend Ben's campaigns. Ben is one of the smartest people I've ever met, and he loved prepping. He built custom stories for us from scratch, and I got to grow up playing TTRPGs the way they're supposed to feel — open worlds, real narratives, the whole thing.

Then Ben moved away. Nobody in my friend group is remotely as good at it now, including me. Some of us try. None of us prep enough, because we're all busy. It's a bummer.

The specific thing that pushed me to build this: I told my friends I'd run a pirate campaign. They've been successful pirates for twenty years; the captain announces he's going to rob Smuggler's Bounty, a protected cove where the penalty for robbing other pirates is death; the next morning the captain takes a monkey as his wife. The captain is going insane. My friends were thrilled. I was thrilled. Then I tried to actually prep it the way it deserved, and realised I couldn't.

So I started wondering whether a tool could handle the parts I'm bad at — long-term planning and narrative coherence — and let me focus on the part I enjoy, which is running the table. It took a lot of iterations and some real game-design insight. But that's what this is. A system that helps you be a better GM. Cheap enough to be worth it. Doesn't replace any humans, which matters to me. And fun to use.