About
Allow me to introduce myself.
Would you like to hear the best story I have ever carried? Of course you would! There is a villain on the roads at this moment, travelling with the five people who were sent to kill him. A tower, a prophecy, and a grievance he had kept since childhood. They talked him out of every bit of it in an afternoon.
I was there on business, carrying messages for the man who built the place. He was making something immense, and every inch of that dungeon obeyed the story he was telling: the door was locked because he said so, the guard had a sister in the town because he said so, the villain wore a ridiculous hat because he said so.
Then the five arrived and took the place apart. They would not listen to a word he said. Deaf, I assumed. All five of them. He was delighted. He watched his own work go somewhere he had never planned it to go, and by the time they left he was marvelling at the story they had made of it instead. That was when I understood what the roads had been missing: news that nobody expected. Not even the man who planned everything.
Harold, incidentally. Metal, thirty years a herald, seeking stories worthy of my trade.
I go where that sort of thing happens now, which is what brings me to your door. So. What are you building, and how badly do they mean to break it?
A word from the maker
Hello, fellow DMs! I'm the one behind the screen (computer or master, take your pick). I'm a professional developer with a decade of XP (I wonder what level that makes me), and I've been running monthly tables for a few groups of friends for two years now, so this whole thing is still quite recent to me. But as with everything, I'm incapable of doing things halfway, which you've probably gathered from the number of features here and the fact that I'm building this alone.
It started with wanting to run a campaign I'd written myself, and what a pain that was. So much time spent writing, restructuring and linking things by hand, in tools that weren't helping much, when all I wanted was to craft an engaging story to bring to my players. So I did the obvious thing for a dev and built myself a little rig in Obsidian: a folder structure, a file template per kind of thing, and a validation script that told me when I'd broken a link or left a page incomplete.
Tidier notes only got me so far, and what I really wanted was to tell better stories. That's when the rabbit hole opened: reading books, watching YT videos, dissecting wikis, you name it! As long as I was becoming a better DM, I'd do it and it helped a lot as I folded that knowledge into my templates, a bit at a time, campaign after campaign.
AI has also reshaped my job in the past four years; I don't work at all the way I did even a year ago. It's unsettling, genuinely transformative in really good and really bad ways at once. But seeing how prolific it made me at work (I've always been a snail programmer), I decided to try it on my campaign. Getting it to work properly was a hell of a challenge: to actually help draft my ideas instead of doing its own thing, and to make me a better DM by holding me to my own worldbuilding rules I'd often forgotten. I think I found the right formula, because things have been running smoothly ever since. I spend far less time prepping, I focus on the story while it handles the fluff. I also use it for inspiration as it's far easier to pick parts of ideas than conjuring the perfect one.
I was happy enough with this new way of prepping to show it to some DM friends and they were so eager to try it that I decided to build a proper tool. And me being me, instead of keeping it small I obsessed over the details, the features, and putting it out there for everyone. So here we are: Herald.ink is now live. The AI-free features are free (I hope to keep it that way) and already make for a very convenient tool. Try it, tell me on Discord what you'd like to see next, or just come talk about your campaigns!
I'm sure Harold will serve you well
- Philip
The hearth is lit. Pull up a chair.
Yours in service, whenever you're ready. Harold.