Bardic's Early Access Release

Bardic exists because my brain is a sieve with a personality disorder.

I love tabletop RPGs. I love long-running campaigns, recurring NPCs, half-forgotten locations, offhand jokes that become canon three sessions later. I also have ADHD, which means that the moment a session ends, my brain helpfully deletes about 60 percent of what just happened. Names blur. Motivations evaporate. That “important thing the innkeeper said” is gone forever unless someone wrote it down, and usually no one did.

Bardic started as a selfish tool. I wanted something that could sit quietly during a session, listen, and then retell the story back to me in a way that made sense. Not a raw transcript. A story-aware summary. Something that understood that “that guy with the scar” is actually an NPC, that places matter, that quotes matter, and that RPG sessions are messy, overlapping, emotional things, not clean meeting minutes.

So Bardic is a personal bard. It listens to your sessions and retells your epic stories.

At its core, Bardic does a few simple but important things. It takes recorded audio from your RPG sessions, transcribes it, and then runs that transcription through a story-aware summarization step. From that, it produces structured output that tries to answer the questions we all ask later. Who did we meet? Where were we? What actually happened? What lines were too good to forget?

Right now, Bardic focuses on pulling out individual speakers so player characters and the GM don’t blur together. It tracks NPCs as they appear and reappear, builds notes around locations, captures story beats, and pulls out “quotes of the night” that deserve to live forever in your campaign lore. The goal is not perfection. The goal is usefulness when your memory fails you a week later.

Under the hood, Bardic currently uses ChatGPT for both transcription handling and summarization. That does mean there is a usage cost, and I want to be very transparent about that. Based on current testing, we estimate roughly forty cents per hour of recorded audio on average. That is not a hard guarantee. Cost can vary depending on how dense the conversation is, how many people are speaking, how often people talk over each other, and how chaotic your table gets. Bardic will always show you what it is about to process so you are not surprised, but this is something to be aware of before running it on a ten-hour marathon session.

As for output, Bardic is intentionally boring in the best way. Right now it can export directly to Kanka for campaign management, generate clean Markdown files that work well with tools like Obsidian, and produce a standalone HTML file if you want something you can open, share, or archive without any extra tooling. The idea is that your campaign notes should live where you already want them, not be trapped inside Bardic itself.

This is very much an early access release, and there is a lot I want to build on top of this foundation. One of the biggest roadmap items is local transcription. I want Bardic to support running Whisper locally on your own machine so you can handle transcription without sending audio anywhere and without per-hour costs. That brings its own challenges, especially around setup and performance, but it is a priority.  A linux release will also be coming shortly.  As an individual developer, I have no doubt we will find all sorts of interesting bugs, which is why this is early access.  Currently it does what is on the tin: transcribes, summarizes, and publishes.

On the destination side, Kanka is just the beginning. There are plenty of campaign tools, wikis, and note systems out there, and expanding export targets is very much on the roadmap. I also want to improve long-term memory, so Bardic can better recognize returning NPCs, evolving relationships, and ongoing plot threads across multiple sessions, not just summarize each one in isolation.

There are also quality-of-life ideas floating around. Better handling of chaotic tables. Smarter detection of scene changes. Cleaner timelines. Ways to correct or merge NPCs when the AI gets something wrong. This tool is meant to work with you, not pretend it’s omniscient.