We're starting to see actually useful tools that utilize AI, and NotebookLM is one of them. It's one of the only tools that has made it out of Google Labs into its own product, and the combination of a personal wiki, a deep dive into topics, with curated sources (both your own and the internet's) makes it a powerful notebook in its own right. But the most powerful thing is the AI chatbot, which sticks to the assignment and sources you give it, staying away from hallucinated facts and figures.

It's fantastic for studying new topics, and that's precisely why I love it for helping me during tabletop gaming campaigns. I grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons with the 2nd Edition rules, and haven't kept up with the changes apart from playing the Baldur's Gate video game series. I also used to bounce around multiple systems, like GURPS, Earthdawn, Shadowrun, and Battletech. I'm sure I'm not remembering a few, which brings me to my point about NotebookLM.

It's my memory for me, for taking campaign notes, so I know where things stand when we take breaks between sessions, and for when I need to check rules or how encounters are handled. I wish this was a thing when I was more active, because our gaming sessions would have been more organized and less flipping through rulebooks, letting us focus on the role-playing aspect more.

NotebookLM lets me organize campaigns easily

It's the interactive Dungeon Master's Companion I always wanted

I have entirely too many rulebooks, campaign add-ons, and supplementary sources scattered between physical books, PDFs and bookmarked websites from the myriad of tabletop gaming systems I've played or am actively playing. And that's a pain to manage even for the most meticulously organized player, who is not me, by the way. I'm always having to flick through books or get people to wait while I find things, and that's a big problem.

Okay, it was a big problem, because now I have every sourcebook, every bookmark, and every PDF uploaded to my respective NotebookLM notebooks. Now if I need reminders of rules in games, I ask the chatbot and let it run, which is far better than scrolling through digital files or thumbing through books. I don't quite have digital versions of every book I have paper versions of (yet) but that's a work in progress.

Planning campaigns is a cinch

I've found that pairing NotebookLM with Perplexity gives me a better set of sources for new campaigns. That's partly because NotebookLM has a low cap of ten recommended sources at one time, which doesn't really span much of the source material out there. But searching in Perplexity and then adding those sources to a new NotebookLM notebook gives me the background I need.

This usually starts with a couple of sources diving into a known location in whichever game system I'm playing in, plus the rulebook. Then I'll add sources of real-world things, like a source on deep jungles if that's the setting, plus sources on the animals found in that location, and any other things that I can think of that would make the game world feel more alive. Being able to make overviews, mind maps, and use the chatbot for specific queries makes planning and running campaigns much less painful.

Having an interactive dungeon master companion is amazing

But the best thing is being able to ask the chatbot to drag out details from the earlier campaign notes, to settle disagreements or misremembered actions. That solves so many of the issues I have always accepted as a part of role playing, but now they are kept for posterity. Plus I can use the chatbot to surface specific rules, or give me details of the city or environment that the party is currently in, so I can focus on the fun part of DMing.

Currently, I keep typed notes for encounters, but I really should be using an AI transcription service for this so that it keeps everything. The only problem I've found with transcription is that AI struggles with complex words, especially those made-up terms that role play systems use. I could teach it how to transpose things, and I will, but it's a longer task than simply typing out encounters at the minute and one that will have to wait until I have enough spare time.

It's even better when used with other AI tools

I suck at making up campaigns, so I contract that out to AI

NotebookLM serves as the repository for my tabletop gaming, but it can't do some things. For ideas, ingame items or maps of the dungeons and other locations I turn to other AI tools. Copilot has been the best and most consistent tool here, so there must be a ton of tabletop game fans over at Microsoft. I've always hated making maps, whether they were sketched on graph paper or not.

And then importing those maps with proper tags and a text description of every location and relative position makes NotebookLM able to index it, and tie it into the chatbot for explorative purposes. I love taking the drudgework out of campaigns so that my imagination and scripting of encounters can be the main focus.

Then adding those maps to Foundry so they're interactive makes running the entire campaign digital, even if you're playing face-to-face. That takes another layer of annoyance away from me, although it does require a little more setup to begin with.

And to make some sweet loot

Whatever gaming system your group plays, creating magic items and other end-of-campaign loot is hard work. It needs to be balanced, scaled to the level the characters will be after the campaign, and not break any of the game systems that are already in place. Okay, sometimes it's okay if they break game mechanics slightly, especially if it was a terribly difficult campaign. Just be aware you'll have to think up a new campaign around that game breaker, so that you can balance everything again.

It's an absolutely head-scratching experience, and I have the full respect for the gametesters and creators at the companies that are in charge of balance. Or, you could ask AI to create items for you, with pictures, backstory, stats, and also, if you feed the rulebook, a better chance at not breaking the entire game.

NotebookLM makes running and playing tabletop gaming campaigns much easier

I love being able to query the chatbot during games so I don't have to remember 50 books worth of rules. It's even better being able to have each campaign in its own notebook, keeping notes, prior encounters and future plans all together. And being able to use it as my memory for everything else is just the icing on the cake. I'm not sure how I managed playing tabletop games before this, because NotebookLM makes it much less of a cognitive load.