Transcribing your sessions
SoonSpeak instead of type. Familiar transcribes the session in real time and saves it to a searchable Foundry journal you can edit later.
Guide
How to play D&D with AI.
Good AI D&D is not a clever model inventing your story. It is good prep. Give the AI authored, structured material and its job becomes reading and running what is on the page, not making things up.
Can an AI actually run a D&D game?
Yes, but not the way people expect. Ask an AI to dream up a campaign and it drifts: it loses the thread, contradicts its own map, and grabs at whatever sounds good next. Give it a written adventure to read and run, and the drift goes away. The story is already on the page. The AI only has to follow it.
That is why Familiar does not ask the AI to be a novelist. You bring a published adventure, its maps, its NPCs, its monsters, its journals, and the model works from that fixed text instead of its imagination. Professional designers already did the hard part: making a plot that holds together.
Prep is the first lever. The model is the second. A capable one with room to think holds a messy scene where a small one slips, and choosing it is its own short guide.
- Invent: the model guesses the plot, loses the thread, and rewrites your world to fit its last sentence.
- Read: it works from the prepared page, so the plot, the cast, and the stakes stay put.
- The fix lives in the prep, not the prompt. The material has to exist before the session starts.
Familiar runs the adventure you bring. It does not author the plot. Hand it a character you wrote and it voices them, filling the small talk itself.
How do you play D&D with an AI?
The method is three steps: prep, read, run. You do the heavy prep up front and line up each session before you play, the AI reads from what you wrote, and it runs the mechanical side at the table while you stay in the story.
Prep
Lay a published adventure into Foundry: journals for the story beats, sheets and statblocks for the cast, and a one-page outline of what happens next. The import is a one-time job; you build the next chunk before each session, not all at once.
Read
The AI reads those pages, so it works from what you wrote, not what it imagines. Full-text search and a persistent memory keep the campaign consistent as the sessions pile up.
Run
It handles the combat bookkeeping and the downtime between fights. You decide which capabilities are live, so it only ever touches the part of the table you hand it.
Journals & NotesCombat & AIKnowledge & Memory
Who runs what at the table?
The split is the honest part, so here it is plainly. You hold the story and the judgement calls. The AI holds the bookkeeping, the cast you wrote, and the recall. Nothing crosses that line by accident.
| At the table | Who runs it |
|---|---|
| The plot and where it goes | You. The AI reads the spine you brought; it never invents one. |
| Monsters and the 5e rules | The AI, through Foundry's own dice, so it cannot fudge a roll. |
| NPC voices and small talk | The AI, from the character pages in your adventure, the module's own or ones you wrote. |
| Hidden information | Foundry's fog of war and dice-gated reveals, not the model's discretion. |
| Rulings and house rules | Yours to set. Prep your house rules in and the AI follows them; the ambiguous calls it surfaces for you to make. |
| The session record | The AI drafts the recap; you confirm it is right. |
Hand it an ally in a fight on a 5e world and it takes their turn too: a friendly NPC on the combat auto-pilot, or a party character you set up for it. You stay the DM, and it never decides what a player does.
What does a session actually look like?
Here is one of ours. I run Ember, Foundry's official sandbox campaign, laid into my world as linked journal pages, with the monsters pulled from the module before we sit down. My wife plays Naia, a sorcerer. When we play, she makes Naia's choices and the AI runs everything on the other side of the table.
One night the party reached a sealed temple door and spoke a phrase they had earned two sessions earlier. The AI did not improvise the moment. It opened the prepared journal page and read what was written there: the low hum through the stone, the old inscriptions lighting up, the doors grinding apart. The drama was already on the page. The AI just delivered it.
Then the fight. While they explored I had the journal and scene tools live and nothing else; when the doors opened I switched combat on. The AI ran the temple guardian from its sheet, a water-thing behind a shield fed by six orbs, and threw a wave the size of a house at Naia. It rolled that wave on real dice, at the real save. My wife rolled a natural twenty and stepped through it like a beaded curtain. That is the split the whole method is for: the AI runs the monster, she gets the moment.
When the shield finally broke, four allied NPCs shouldered through the doors, and the AI voiced each of them from the notes I had written: the glory-hungry mage, the blunt fighter, the healer hanging back. Distinct people, because I had made them distinct people first.
That fight did not finish in one night. We stopped mid-combat and picked it up a week later, and the AI opened by reading back exactly where we froze: two orbs gone, four still turning, a fresh sprite climbing out of the fountain. Nobody had to remember it. It was written down.
Journals & NotesCombat & AIVoice & Image GenerationKnowledge & Memory
Can you play solo, or with one other person?
The same loop runs at any table size, and it runs more of the table the fewer humans are at it. At a full group the AI is your co-pilot: it takes the monsters and the bookkeeping so you can run the story for everyone else. Drop to one player and it runs almost the whole DM side around them.
That is the version a lot of Foundry owners actually want. You bought the software to run games for other people, you know these modules cold, and you would like to play one for a change. Bring a full campaign, take a single character, and the AI runs the rest: the monsters, the NPC voices, the 2024 5e rules, the memory from week to week. Solo and one-on-one are where it earns its keep.
Do you need AI voices or transcription to play?
No. Two features come up a lot, and neither is part of the method. You can play well without either.
The first is spoken NPC voices. Give a character an AI voice and it speaks their lines aloud in your browser as the scene plays. Fun to switch on, and completely optional.
The second is session transcription: it listens, writes the session down in real time, and saves the transcript to a searchable Foundry journal. It gets its own guide soon. Neither one is required to start, so leave them for later if you want them.
Start playing
You do not need a full campaign prepped to begin. Install Familiar in Foundry, bring the first chapter of a published adventure you own, and connect the AI you already pay for. One evening on that first chapter will tell you more than any guide can.
From there, prepping the next chapter and wiring up your assistant are each a short guide away.
More in Run your game
Prepping a published adventure for AI
NewLay a published adventure into Foundry as journals, sheets, and a one-page outline, so the AI has the pages to run from.
Writing characters the AI can play
NewGive an NPC who they are, what they know, what they want, and how they speak. Anchored to that, the AI voices them and fills the small edges itself.
Staying consistent across sessions
NewA long campaign overflows any context window. Keep a searchable record in Foundry so the AI reads from your notes, not from a fading window.
Running combat with AI
NewRun combat with an AI that cannot cheat. Foundry's own dice enforce range, damage, and conditions, while you stay the DM.
Giving your NPCs a voice
NewLet the AI speak. Set a narrator voice and character voices, bring your own provider key, and Familiar voices each line in your browser as the scene plays.
New to Familiar? I'm Ryan, the person who built it. The Discord is small and brand new, so if you join now I'll help you get set up myself.