You play on Discord
It joins the voice channel like another member of the table, and whispers to you in a private channel.
However you play, it just turns up
You play in person
One microphone in the middle of the table is enough. Your phone or a laptop off to the side is the whole setup.
You play something that isn't 5e
The SRD ships with it. Bring the rulebooks and adventures you already own, and your house rules beat both.
No virtual tabletop required, and it will never become one. If you use a VTT, Scout drives yours rather than replacing it.
You describe a tavern.
Someone walks straight up to the barkeep.
You have about two seconds to invent somebody. Scout heard you say “barkeep” and has had a name waiting since before the question was asked.
At the table
- DM“You push into the tavern. Low beams, a peat fire, and a lone barkeep polishing a glass — scowling at you.”
- Magnus“I walk up and say — hi, I'm Magnus, and you are?”
- DM“He doesn't look up. ‘Fargul.’ … ‘Sober, unlike my brother. What'll it be?’”
Only you can see this
Fargul
Sober, unlike his brother.
What you said is what's true. Use the name or invent your own — Scout records what you said, and everything else you improvised in the same breath.
three sessions later
The party walks back into that tavern. Before anyone asks, Scout hands it back: Fargul. Sober, unlike his brother. Drinks Romulen ale. Owes the harbourmaster money. All of it invented on the spot, months ago, and completely forgotten.
The same thing, at three sizes
“…and a lone barkeep.”
A name and one hook.One line.
“…the square is full of market stalls.”
Eight vendors and their wares.A scannable list.
“I search every one of the corpses.”
Pockets, tiered by the roll they just made.Only the tier that happened.
Two years in?
Start there.
Scout is worth most to the campaign you have already been running for ages — which is exactly the campaign that has the most history to catch up on. So you don't start from nothing.
Point it at what you already have: session transcripts, that folder of notes, the Discord channel where half your lore actually lives, the PDFs. It reads the lot, works out who everyone is, notices the same name spelled four ways, and hands you back your own campaign to check.
It is never too late to start. The longer you have been playing, the more there is for Scout to have read.
Three clocks, one body of knowledge
Worldbuilding tools let you author but never see play. Session tools capture play but you can't author into them beforehand. Scout closes the loop — which is the only reason it can run ahead at all.
Before
It tells you what they're going to ask about
Not what you wrote down — the gaps you didn't notice. Where you left off, what the party said they intended, which threads have gone cold, and the questions your players will find that your prep doesn't answer.
Load the adventure and it can see the rooms ahead of them.
During
It whispers, and only to you
A name. A list. A rule with its page. A quiet flag when what you just said contradicts session four — with both sources, before anyone else notices.
One thing at a time, in the corner of your eye. Ignore it and it evaporates.
After
A recap for you, a journal for each of them
Your canon updates itself. Each player gets an account of what their character learned — not the party's, not yours. Then what happened tonight becomes what you prepare from next week.
Their journal is live during play, too. Hour four, they can check hour one.
Everyone else remembers what happened.
Scout knows what you'll need.
RetrospectiveRecords what happened, after it happened.
ReactiveAnswers — once you think to ask it.
StaticStores exactly what you typed into it.
PredictiveHas it ready before the question is asked. Nobody else does this one.
Split the party.
Nobody has to pretend they didn't hear.
Every fact Scout holds carries who is allowed to know it — enforced when the answer is retrieved, not by asking a model nicely to keep a secret.
Magnuswent to the docks
- The harbourmaster keeps a second ledger. He was nervous about the third page.
- A ship called the Verity was never logged as arriving.
Drifting Featherstayed at the inn
- The innkeeper's daughter hasn't been seen for six days.
- Magnus came back late and said nothing about where he'd been.
The whole table hears everything — their characters weren't there. Knowledge moves between them by being told, so if nobody mentions the ledger, nobody knows about the ledger.
Fargul? A name Scout heard but hasn't confirmed the spelling of is marked, never hidden. Ask the DM how they spell it and it settles itself — for everyone, at once.
Your players get something too
Which matters, because you are the one who has to ask them to be recorded. The honest answer to “what do I get out of it?” should be better than “nothing”.
A journal they can ask questions of
Not just a log. “What did the harbourmaster actually say about the smuggler?” — twenty sessions back, answered from what their character saw and was told, and nothing else.
Live during the session, too. Hour four, they can check hour one.
Missing a week costs them nothing
They come back caught up. And if you ran their character while they were away, everything done in their name is in their journal — marked as done in their absence, not quietly folded in as though they were there.
Nothing done in your name is hidden from you.
Help with their character, on their terms
Levelling up, Scout can suggest what suits how they have actually been playing — not the strongest build on the internet. At session zero it can help them invent someone who fits your world.
If the advice would suit every bard alive, it isn't worth giving.
Always typed, and always started by them. Scout never messages a player out of the blue, never speaks up at the table, and never announces what anyone asked it. A question about your own character is nobody else's business — including yours.
A scout does not fight,
and does not command
These aren't caveats bolted onto a pitch. They're the design.
- Neverrolls dice for a player. Your rolls are yours.
- Neverplays your character, or speaks as one.
- Neverreplaces the DM. It has no opinion about your game.
- Neverbecomes a virtual tabletop. It drives yours instead.
- Neverspeaks to your table. Only ever to you.
- Nevermodels you. It models characters, and has no view on how engaged anyone seems.
It's yours,
and it stays yours
The one product in this space that reached real scale died of a privacy failure. We read that story carefully.
- Local‑first. Runs on hardware you control, if that's what you want.
- Your own model keys, if you'd rather not use ours.
- It never trains on your table. Not the audio, not the canon, not the journals.
- Export is a campaign, not a data dump — something another person could actually run from.
- Paying gates what Scout makes, never what you read. Stop paying and your history stays readable, searchable and exportable.
- Delete it whenever you like — and every player can do that for their own data, not just you.
The question you're already asking
Yes — it uses language models. Being cagey about that would be worse than useless, so: plainly.
It does not write your campaign. It hands you options you either use or bin, and what you say is what counts — invent something different and that becomes canon while the suggestion is thrown away. It has no authority to change anything without you.
Your recordings stay yours, they don't train anything, and you can delete the lot whenever you like. The creative work remains entirely yours. What's being handed off is the bookkeeping that was crowding it out.
Ride with us
Scout is being built slowly and deliberately, for a small closed alpha of DMs running real campaigns. If that's you, tell us what actually costs you your evenings — it shapes what gets built next.
Sent ahead.
Thank you — genuinely. What you put in that last box is the part that changes what gets built.