Your First Hour with ScriptoriumGM: A Survival Guide

Welcome. You made it.

Whether you signed up ten minutes ago or you've been poking around the interface trying to figure out where everything lives, this post is for you. I wrote it because I remember what it feels like to open a new tool and immediately wonder if you're doing it wrong. You're not. But a little guidance goes a long way, so think of this as the friend-who-already-uses-it walking you through the important bits over coffee.

By the end of this guide, you'll have a campaign set up, your reference material loaded, and your first real conversation with an AI that actually knows your world. The whole process takes about 20-30 minutes. Less if you're not importing from Obsidian.

Let's get you sorted.

Pick Your System and Create Your Campaign

This part is fast. First, you'll choose your game system. D&D 5e, Pathfinder 2e, Call of Cthulhu, Mothership, your homebrew Frankenstein system. Pick the one you're running. Your campaign is tied to this system, and it's how the AI knows whether you're asking about spell slots or sanity checks.

Once you've picked your system, you need two more things:

A name. Whatever you're calling your campaign. "Curse of Strahd Remix," "Dave's Homebrew Disaster," "That Eberron Thing." Whatever works. You can change it later.

A brief description. Two or three sentences about the campaign. "Gothic horror in a vampire-ruled domain. Party is investigating disappearances in a village called Barovia. Tone is dark with moments of dark comedy." That's plenty. You're giving the AI a starting point, not writing a novel pitch.

Hit create. You now have a campaign workspace.

One thing I'd suggest: if you're running multiple campaigns (and honestly, who among us isn't juggling at least two?), create separate campaigns for each. The AI keeps everything isolated, so your Eberron lore won't bleed into your Curse of Strahd game. I learned that the hard way during early testing when an NPC from my sci-fi one-shot showed up in suggestions for a medieval political intrigue. Separate campaigns. Trust me.

Build Your Campaign Library

Here's where ScriptoriumGM stops being a fancy folder system and starts being genuinely useful. Your Campaign Library is where the AI learns your world. Everything you put in here becomes searchable context that the assistant can pull from when you ask questions.

There are two types of content in the library, and they serve different purposes.

What Are Files?

Files are documents you upload. PDFs, DOCX files, markdown, JSON, plain text. Your rulebooks, sourcebooks, adventure modules, setting guides. The reference material you'd normally have open in twelve browser tabs during a session.

Upload limits are generous: PDFs up to 100MB, everything else up to 10MB. That covers most sourcebooks. I've got the entire Eberron: Rising from the Last War PDF in mine, plus a handful of third-party supplements.

Here's the part that trips people up: uploading a file doesn't automatically make the AI aware of it. You need to "Teach" it. After uploading, you'll see a brain icon next to each file. Click it. That's what tells the system to index the file and make it searchable by the assistant. Until you hit that button, the file is just sitting in your library like an unread book on a shelf. The AI can't see it yet.

I mention this because it's the single most common question we get from new users. "I uploaded my rulebook but the AI doesn't seem to know about it." Nine times out of ten, they skipped the Teach step. So: upload, then Teach. Every file, every time.

Once a file is taught, it gets indexed for semantic search. The AI doesn't just keyword-match. It understands the meaning of your question and finds relevant passages even if you don't use the exact same words as the source material. Ask "what are the noble houses in Sharn?" and it'll pull from your Eberron sourcebook even if the section header says "Dragonmarked Houses and Political Power."

What to upload first:

• Your core rulebook for the system you're running
• The adventure module (if you're running a published one)
• Any setting-specific sourcebooks
• Homebrew rules documents, if you have them

You don't need to upload everything right now. Start with what you'll reference most. Add more as you need it.

What Are Notes?

Notes are different. These are documents you create and write directly inside ScriptoriumGM using the built-in rich text editor. Think of them as your campaign notebook, but searchable by AI.

This is where you put the stuff that's unique to your campaign:

• NPC descriptions and relationships
• Session logs and recaps
• World lore you've invented
• Faction details and political dynamics
• Player character backstories
• Location descriptions
• Plot threads and hooks you want to track

You can organize notes into folders, which helps when your campaign grows past 20 sessions and you've got 50+ NPCs floating around. I use a simple structure: Characters, Locations, Factions, Sessions, and a catch-all "World Lore" folder. Find what works for your brain.

The key thing to understand: both files and notes are searchable by the AI assistant. When you ask a question about your campaign, the assistant searches through everything. Your uploaded Pathfinder rulebook AND your hand-written notes about the corrupt mayor. That's what makes the responses specific to your world instead of generic fantasy filler.

Import Your Obsidian Vault (If You Have One)

If you've been running campaigns for a while, there's a decent chance your notes live in Obsidian. Good news: you don't have to copy-paste 200 documents one at a time.

The Obsidian Vault Importer takes a .zip file of your vault and converts everything into ScriptoriumGM's native format. Here's what it handles:

Markdown conversion. Your .md files become rich text notes in the built-in editor. Headers, bold, italic, lists, callouts, code blocks. All of it carries over.

Image uploads. Any images referenced in your notes (character portraits, maps, that diagram of the tavern layout you drew at 2 AM) get uploaded and linked automatically. Both ![[image.png]] Obsidian embeds and standard markdown images work.

Wikilink resolution. This is the big one. If your Obsidian vault is full of [[NPC Name]] links connecting your notes together, the importer resolves those into proper document references inside ScriptoriumGM. All those links between your notes? They survive the import.

How to Do It

1. Export your Obsidian vault as a .zip file (or just zip the vault folder)
2. Upload it in ScriptoriumGM's import interface
3. The system analyzes your vault first, showing you how many notes it found, how many images, the folder structure
4. Review and confirm
5. It processes everything: uploads images, converts markdown, resolves links

For a vault with around 100 notes and a handful of images, the whole process takes a couple minutes. Larger vaults with hundreds of notes will take longer, but you can watch the progress in real-time as it works through each phase.

A few things to know going in:

• There's a 1,000 file limit per import for safety reasons
• Images only get uploaded if they're actually referenced in your notes (no orphaned files clogging your storage)
• If an image upload fails, it logs a warning but keeps going. One missing portrait won't stop the whole import

If you don't use Obsidian, skip this entirely. You can create all your notes directly in ScriptoriumGM's editor, or upload your notes as files if they're in PDF or DOCX format.

Talk to Your AI Assistant

This is the part you've been building toward. You've got your campaign set up, your rulebooks uploaded, your notes in place. Now you talk to the AI, and it actually knows what you're talking about.

Open the Scriptorium Assistant panel in your campaign and just... ask it something.

Try something like: "What factions are active in my campaign right now?"

Or: "I need an NPC for the party to meet at the docks. Someone shady but not hostile."

Or: "Remind me what happened with the Merchant's Guild in our last few sessions."

How Does the AI Use Your Library?

Behind the scenes, the assistant has a tool called searchCampaignLibrary. When you ask a question that needs information from your uploaded materials, the AI automatically searches your files and notes, finds the relevant passages, and uses them to build its response.

You don't need to tell it to search. You don't need special syntax. Just ask your question normally. If the answer lives in your campaign library, the assistant will find it and cite it.

This is what separates ScriptoriumGM from asking ChatGPT for campaign help. ChatGPT gives you generic fantasy. Your Scriptorium assistant gives you answers grounded in YOUR world, YOUR lore, YOUR established facts. Ask for a plot hook and it connects to threads you've already established. Ask for an NPC and they fit your setting's tone and political structure.

We wrote a deep dive on how this RAG system works if you want the technical details. Short version: it's semantic search that retrieves only the relevant bits of your library for each question, rather than trying to stuff everything into the AI's memory at once.

Tips for Getting Better Responses

After months of using this myself, here's what I've found works best:

Be specific about what you need. "Give me an NPC" is fine. "Give me a dwarven blacksmith in the Ironforge District who has a grudge against the Merchant's Guild and might help the party if they do her a favor first" is better. More context means more relevant output.

Tell the AI about your session. Before you start prepping, give it a quick summary of where things stand. "The party just arrived in Waterdeep after escaping the goblin caves. They're looking for the stolen artifact and they're suspicious of the city guard." Now every response has that context.

Ask follow-up questions. The assistant remembers your conversation. If it generates an NPC you like, ask "What would she know about the missing diplomat?" or "How would she react if the party tries to intimidate her?" Build on what it gives you.

Don't accept the first draft. If something doesn't fit, say so. "That's too friendly for this setting, make her more paranoid" or "I like the concept but she needs a connection to the thieves' guild." The assistant adjusts. It's a collaboration.

Choosing Your AI Model

ScriptoriumGM offers three AI model tiers, and you can pick which one to use per conversation:

Fast: Quick responses, great for simple lookups and brainstorming. Available to everyone.

Balanced: Stronger reasoning, better at complex creative tasks. Available at higher Patreon tiers.

Powerful: The heavyweight. Best for deep worldbuilding, long-form content generation, and tasks that need careful reasoning. Available at the top tier.

For most session prep, Balanced handles everything you'll throw at it. I use Fast for quick lookups mid-session ("what's the DC for climbing a wet stone wall in Pathfinder 2e?") and Powerful when I'm doing deep worldbuilding or need the AI to juggle a lot of interconnected lore.

Beyond the First Hour: Make It Yours

By now you've got the foundation. Campaign created, library stocked, assistant ready. Here's what the GMs who get the most out of ScriptoriumGM tend to do next:

Update your notes after each session. Even a quick bullet-point summary keeps the AI current. "Session 12: Party allied with the resistance. Discovered Lady Vance is funding both sides. Kira lost her sword in the river." Five minutes of notes means the AI knows exactly what happened when you sit down to prep the next session.

Ask the assistant to create notes for you. Instead of writing NPC documents yourself, describe the character in conversation and ask the assistant to create the note. It formats everything and puts it in your campaign workspace. One click to approve. We covered this in detail in our collaborative assistant post.

Upload player backstories. Ask your players to send you their character backstories and upload them as notes or files. Now the AI can weave backstory elements into its suggestions. My favorite moment was when the assistant suggested a plot hook involving a PC's estranged sister, a detail buried in a backstory I'd honestly forgotten about.

Experiment with different prompting styles. Some GMs prefer "give me three options for X." Others like to have a back-and-forth conversation where they workshop ideas with the AI. Neither is wrong. Find the style that fits how your brain works.

You're Going to Be Fine

Look, I know a new tool can feel like one more thing on the pile. GMs already juggle enough: rules, prep, scheduling, managing player expectations, pretending you planned that plot twist when you absolutely did not.

ScriptoriumGM is here to take things OFF that pile. Not add to it.

Start with whatever feels most urgent. If you've got a session this weekend, upload your adventure module and ask the assistant to help you prep the next encounter. If you're between campaigns, take your time setting up your library and exploring what the AI can do with your world lore. There's no wrong order.

And if you get stuck, the Discord community is full of GMs who've been exactly where you are right now. Ask a question. Someone will answer. That's the kind of community we're building here.

Welcome to ScriptoriumGM. Your prep just got a whole lot shorter.

What's the first thing you're planning to ask your AI assistant? Drop into the Discord and tell us. We're always curious what GMs try first.