Dragonbane hands you its rules as a journal, and Familiar answers out of that journal or not at all.

The sheet does the arithmetic. The pages just sit there.

Open a roll on a Dragonbane character and the dialog is already filled in. Every boon and every bane that currently applies is listed, ticked, and labelled with where it came from: the armour being worn, an injury that has not healed, a condition somebody marked earlier. An attack adds its own on top, for a broken weapon, for a target too far off, for a wall or a bystander in the way, and it measures that distance off the canvas rather than asking you.

The rest is the same story. Damage goes against armour with an undo sitting next to it. Death rolls are counted, resolved and acted on, and that is switched on by default for characters, for NPCs and for monsters. A monster draws its action from its own table and the system remembers the last one so it does not come up twice running. Willpower comes off when you cast and stops you when there is not enough left. Advancement marks set themselves on the two results that earn them. Encumbrance adds itself up out of what is carried.

None of that is reading. The system works out numbers it can see, and it does that well enough that a Dragonbane GM never has to think about it. What sits alongside those numbers is the part nobody automates: the imported pages, the notes you took last week, the names, and everything that was decided out loud and never written into a field.

That is the side Familiar works. It reads what is on the pages, and it puts new pages there, and it does both while the session is still going.

• A rule you half remember, found on the page that carries it, with the page named so you can go and look
• The stranger a reaction roll has just turned friendly, given a name, a trade and a reason to be standing here
• A creature out of the Core Set you imported, put on the map before anybody has to go hunting for it
• A scene dressed to match: how dark it is, what the weather is doing, and something playing underneath
• Tonight's notes going into a journal in your world as the evening runs, rather than after it

• Putting the material where it can be readPrep from the reading end: what has to exist before a question has an answer.

What the dice hand you, and who is left holding it

This is an easy game to run and everyone who writes about it says so, the publisher included. There is no evening being stolen from you here, and a page that offered to give one back would be describing a different game.

What this one does instead is generate. A table for what the monster does, a table for who this is, a table for what turns up on the road. Rolling on them is the fun, and nobody who plays this wants that taken away. The cost lands somewhere else entirely: things enter your campaign that nobody planned, nobody wrote down and nobody expected to matter, and a fortnight later they are yours to reconcile. GMs writing about long Dragonbane campaigns land on the same fix, which is to roll less and continue what an earlier session started. It works, and it costs them the tables.

The other cost is geography. Adventure sites are built to be walked into in any order, so the party can pick the door you did not read up on, and the room they choose has to exist by the time they are through it.

• A place you had not looked at yet, needed now, because the party went left
• Something a table produced three sessions back that nobody wrote down, and that has just walked into the room again
• A shop, a shrine and somebody worth talking to in the village the party has just decided to visit instead
• The person the party is about to meet for the second time, who has to sound the way they sounded the first time
• A name somebody invented on the spot two hours ago, load-bearing by now and written down nowhere

One ask, on a real world, with the pages already in it

This one is not a sketch. It happened on a Dragonbane world with the system's own Adventure imported and nothing else configured, and it went in as two questions on one line: "How does initiative work? Boons and banes?"

What came back took eight assistant turns and nine tool calls, all of them working through the journals sitting in that world. Boons and banes were answered off that world's own Combat page, in the terms the page itself uses, down to the detail that some of them get filled in for you.

It is the second question that earns this section. Nothing in that world covered initiative, and the reply said so in those terms: the accessible content did not go that far, and the call went back to the GM. No rule was produced out of a general sense of how games like this one work. No die was named.

That is the behaviour the rest of this page is describing, seen once, on a bare world, with nothing in it but what the import put there.

It calls the game what your world calls it

Foundry knows this system by both of its names, because that is what the system calls itself: one codebase serving the English line and the Swedish one it was translated from. Whichever of the two you think of it by, that is the string Familiar picks up, because it takes the title off your own world rather than matching it against a list of games it already knows.

It holds for the character read too. Ask about somebody and what comes back is kin and profession, Willpower, the death rolls with their successes and their failures counted apart, and whatever heroic abilities are on the sheet. None of it gets restated in another game's words on the way past.

That same title is the only blank the starter further down this page fills in. Everything after its first line is about conduct rather than vocabulary, and it is printed here in full, so this page will not paraphrase it back at you. What is worth saying is what it leaves out.

What that text has no way to carry is the words you use. A starter written around one table culture can open by naming its terms; a generic one has no terms to name.

So type them in. Boons and banes, Willpower, kin and profession, the six conditions by name, whatever else your table says out loud. It is the one gap the generic text cannot close on its own, and closing it is a minute in a text box.

Where the rules engine stops

On Dragonbane, Familiar runs everything around the rules, and the rules are the one thing it does not touch.

Refereeing the rules is D&D 5e (2024) only. In combat the tracker, the turns, and the tokens still work; the rulings stay yours.

One setting to change: turn the combat auto-pilot off in Familiar's settings. It drives NPC turns through the 5e engine, so it does not know your system; the monsters' turns stay yours to run. Playing solo, that is the part you will feel.

Everything in this table was run on a real Dragonbane world, not read off a spec.

The starter your table begins from

Familiar carries a Table Rules field per world, under Settings, System Rules. Whatever you put there is appended to every request, and it reaches your MCP client too.

Dragonbane has no tailored starter yet, so Familiar offers the generic one with your system's name already filled in. The text below is that starter, written out for this page.

We play Dragonbane / Drakar och Demoner. Use its own terminology, look rules up in this world's compendium and journals, and defer all rules adjudication to the GM.
Let the game system resolve dice, checks, and conditions where it can.
Standing guidance:
- Run the prepared material and treat what is written as canon.
- When the notes are silent, ask the table and make that answer canon rather than inventing.
- Describe the world through the senses. Do not tell players what their characters feel.
- After setting a scene, hand the moment back with clear options and room for other ideas.
- Give NPCs one clear want and a distinct voice. Let them be wrong, stubborn, or unhelpful.
- Warn before a point of no return with in-fiction cues so players can choose to press on.
- Recall past details from the written notes, not memory, and admit when something was not recorded.
Setting: [name or short description].
Tone: [describe the table's tone].
House rules:
- [rule one]
Never speak or decide for the player characters.

Familiar keeps no second copy of any of this

Four things sit on the far side of all that, and they are there for the same reason each time: your system is the one holding them, and what Familiar has is a look rather than a copy.

• Nothing can be found until you import. The single pack the free system installs is an Adventure document, and its contents are sealed inside it until the import in it is run, so a search before that comes back empty and is right to. The system offers you that import on first load; take it. And there are no creatures in there afterwards either, at any point: the monsters and the campaign are in the Core Set, which is a separate purchase and arrives the same way, as pages you put in your world.
• Willpower is not read as a pool. It sits beside the other one in the identical three-part shape, and it is the one this game actually spends, on magic and on heroic abilities. What reaches Familiar is the raw field, which is enough to answer a question about it and nowhere near enough to notice it moving. Death rolls arrive the same way and matter more: the successes and the failures beside a downed character are what settles whether that character gets back up, and they turn up as two numbers on a sheet rather than as anything being watched.
• The pool goes to the character read and no further. It gets there in full, off the path the table above prints, and then it stops: a scene, a token list, the GM screen, none of them will have it. The reason is more particular than a missing field. Those surfaces go straight to a container called attributes and expect to find a pool sitting in it, and on a Dragonbane sheet that container is real and holds the six scores, strength through charisma, with nothing of the kind inside. So they are looking in the right place at the wrong contents, which is why they come back quiet instead of wrong.
• A condition switched on from chat is an icon, not a mark. Your six are genuine Foundry statuses, pushed in by the system when the world loads, so they can be listed and switched and the reply will tell you truthfully that one landed. What it landed on is the token. The box on the character sheet stays unticked, and that box is what the system reads before it decides whether a bane belongs on the next roll. Your system also takes those six back out of the token menu on purpose, because the sheet is meant to be the control, so this is one to do where it expects it and let the icon follow on its own.

Read that list again and it is one sentence four times. Dragonbane keeps its state where a Dragonbane GM can already see it: on the sheet, on the token bar, on a page. What you get here is a reader, and a reader is only ever as current as the last time you asked.

The tables invent things. Nobody is writing them down.

Most games put the GM in charge of what turns up. This one hands a good part of that job to dice, and it is better for it: the stranger, the weather, the thing in the corridor, what the monster does this round. A GM who rolls honestly gets a campaign nobody could have planned, which is the pitch and it is a true one.

It also means the material accumulates in a way that has no author. A name got made up at the table and then used twice. A promise was extracted from somebody whose entire existence began as a die roll. None of it started in a prep document, so none of it is in one, and it is why the standard advice for a long campaign is to stop rolling and continue an old thread instead.

This is the thing worth pointing Familiar at. Say who turned up and what came of them, and that becomes a page, phrased the way it actually got phrased. Weeks on it is still sitting there to be opened, which is a different proposition from hoping somebody at the table remembers.

Which does not make it a memory. It makes it a habit: the record only holds what somebody asked to have written, and the tables will keep producing whether or not anybody does.

• Keeping what the dice madeWhy a written page survives a campaign and a conversation does not.

The parts that are the same everywhere

Connecting an AI, choosing a model, and what it costs do not change with your game system.

• Everything Familiar can doThe full tool reference. Everything outside combat refereeing runs on your system too.
• Connect Claude, ChatGPT, or GeminiThe connection steps, identical on every game system.
• Choosing an AI modelWhich model, and how much thinking headroom a hard scene needs.
• AI voices for your NPCsTTS setup and voice pinning, the same on every game system.
• Campaign memoryThe record and the recall, unchanged by your game system.