Keeping a Scene log
While you're playing, drop lines into the Quick note box as things happen. Afterwards, turn them into a recap and publish it.
The trick is doing the first part during the game. Nobody writes a good recap on Tuesday about a Friday.
During the Scene
Once a Scene is running, your campaign page carries a note box right at the top. Type a line, press add, carry on. It goes straight into tonight's log.
What to put in it
Facts you'll otherwise lose, not prose. “Named the barkeep Ferris”, “promised the widow they'd be back by the festival”, “Dara stole the ledger — nobody noticed”.
Especially: anything you made up on the spot. That's the stuff that has no other record anywhere, and it's the stuff a player will ask about in three weeks with total confidence that you remember.
Five seconds each. If it's taking longer than that you're writing the recap early, which is a different job.
Between Scenes
Callback also keeps Between-Scene Notes — a scratchpad for the things you think of in the shower, waiting to be folded into a session later.
Notes vs. recaps
A note is loose, private to you, and doesn't belong to anything yet. A recap belongs to one Scene and is the thing your players read.
Keeping them apart means you can dump half an idea somewhere at midnight without it turning up on the campaign page as if it happened.
Writing the recap
Open the Scene and write the Recap. Your notes from the night are right there to work from.
A recap is a draft until you publish it. Nobody sees it before that.
Why that matters more than it sounds
It's the one place in this app where writing something down doesn't show it to anyone. That's deliberate — you can write next week's consequences into this week's recap and publish the half you want them to have.
But it cuts the other way too: a recap you wrote and never published is a recap your players never read, and they won't know it exists to ask about. If you write them, publish them.
The plot hook
A Scene carries a Plot hook as well as a recap — the loose end you want picked up next time.
Once a Scene's ended, that hook is what leads your campaign page, with a link back to edit it. It's the first thing you see when you sit down to prep, which is the moment you actually need reminding what you left dangling.
Scenes take tags too
A Scene is one of the six things you can tag. Tag it with the people and places that turned up, and their pages will show that night from then on.
Why bother
Because it turns "when did we last see this person?" into a question with an answer. Tag the Scene with the innkeeper's name and the innkeeper's page grows a list of every night they appeared — without you ever having written that list.
This is help for ACT VI: The Tabletop Turns — a system-agnostic companion app for running tabletop RPGs. Players never pay, and a GM's first campaign is free.