Why I’m Building Everlore

I got into tabletop RPGs a little later than a lot of people, but once I started playing, I was completely hooked. I’ve been a DM for about four years now, and running games has become one of my favorite things to do.

I have a particular love for OSR games and older systems. AD&D 2E is probably my favorite, though I also enjoy 5E and classic Traveller. I like long campaigns with messy histories, strange little details, recurring characters, forgotten kingdoms, ancient ruins, and things the players heard six months ago that suddenly become important again.

The thing I was looking for

The problem is that keeping track of all of it gets difficult pretty quickly.

Before long, your campaign is spread across session notes, recordings, character sheets, documents, random messages, and whatever you can still remember. I wanted a better way to preserve everything without turning campaign management into a second job.

I tried some of the other products in this space, and there are genuinely good ideas behind many of them. They just never worked quite the way I wanted. Some took too long, some missed details I cared about, and others gave me so much disconnected information that cleaning it all up became another project.

I didn’t just want a session summary. I wanted to preserve the people, places, items, battles, rumors, discoveries, and bits of lore that make a campaign feel alive.

If the players learned about an ancient general, found a strange artifact, or heard that dragons had returned to the region, I wanted those details to have somewhere to go.

I also wanted the process to be simple. Upload a session, let Everlore do the heavy lifting, review what it found, correct anything uncertain, and decide what actually becomes part of the campaign.

That was the kind of workflow I was looking for.

It started as a little CLI tool

Before Everlore became a proper product, I had already built a basic command-line tool to do this for my own games. It was rough, but it worked. While using it, I realized there was a huge difference between what it actually cost me to process sessions and what some of the biggest products in the space were charging.

That was a big part of why I decided to build Everlore for other people.

Campaigns can run for years, and sessions happen regularly. I didn’t want this kind of tool to feel like something people had to ration. You should be able to record your campaign, process every session, and build a real history of your world without worrying about whether you can afford to upload the next game.

I wanted to make something that worked better for the way I run campaigns, while also making it affordable enough for people to use consistently.

Eventually, I decided to turn that small CLI tool into a real product.

The questions I keep coming back to

I’ve been a software engineer for about ten years, including time as a senior engineer at a FAANG company. One thing I’ve learned is that more features do not automatically make a product better. Usually, the smaller details matter more.

Those are the questions I keep coming back to while building Everlore.

I want it to be fast, accurate, affordable, and easy to use. I want it to catch the details that matter without taking control away from the DM. I want it to help you remember your world, not tell you what your world is supposed to be.

Everlore is still growing, and there is a lot I want to add before the public beta. But the reason I’m building it is pretty simple.

I wanted something like this for my own campaigns. I couldn’t find the version I was looking for, and I knew it could be done better and for less, so I started building it.