About TxTavern

TxTavern started as a CLI tool called the Archivist -- a dungeon master's assistant that lived in the terminal. It read session recaps, maintained a wiki of world lore, prepped encounters, and tracked canon. It was built for one DM, one world, one campaign.

It worked. The Archivist knew the world better than its creator did. It remembered which NPCs the party had met, which plot threads were dangling, which rumours were planted and which ones the players invented. It turned scattered notes into a living, cross-referenced knowledge base.

TxTavern is the Archivist grown up. The terminal workflow is still there -- now powered by MCP, so any AI assistant can connect. But there's also a web portal for the parts of the game that aren't just for the DM: the character sheets, the session schedules, the lore library, the live play surface.

Philosophy

MCP-first. Every feature in the web app has a corresponding MCP tool. The web interface and the AI interface are peers. Neither is a wrapper around the other. This means you're never locked into one way of working.

Bring your own AI. TxTavern doesn't ship an AI. It ships an API that any AI can use. Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, a custom agent you built yourself -- if it speaks MCP, it can run your world.

The DM's tool, not the DM's replacement. The AI doesn't generate your world. It maintains it. It doesn't write your story. It tracks it. The creative decisions are yours. The bookkeeping is the machine's.

Pen and paper spirit. TxTavern is not a virtual tabletop. There are no battle maps, no token movement, no fog of war. It's a knowledge management tool for people who play at a table with dice and imagination. The technology serves the analogue game, not the other way around.

Built by

TxTavern is built by a DM who wanted a better way to run a game. It's a Rails app deployed on a single server, developed with Claude Code as a pair programmer, and used in production for a real campaign. It scratches its own itch.