A Chronicle is the record your table keeps without trying. The DM taps a token to hand over an item or introduce a stranger, jots a line about what just happened, and that line lands in the right chapter. Players add their own entries from their phones, some of them held back until the very end. When the campaign wraps, all of it comes together in one place you can open years later.
Bramblewick is a sample campaign I wrote to show what a full Chronicle looks like. The table is made up. Everything that happens in it is something TokenTap5e actually does, and under each chapter there's a short note on what was tapped and what showed up on the players' phones.
Open the live Chronicle to see the page itself, or read on for the story with the working shown.
The Hound & Hatchets Co.
Four players, twelve sessions, one river town. Their arc was called The Toll of Bramblewick: a bridge nobody remembers building, tolls that doubled overnight, and two years of town records with pages missing from every quarter. What started as waiting out the spring floods turned into finding out who had been selling the town, and who they had been selling it to.
The party
Lean and watchful, with ink under her nails she's stopped scrubbing out. She wears a long coat cut for a town that doesn't exist anymore, speaks quietly, and counts things when she thinks nobody's looking.
Broad, weathered and taller than most doorways, with a brass whistle on a cord at his collar that he turns over when he's thinking. He knocks on a wall before he trusts it.
Carries a battered hooded lantern he never lets go out, and an oath he won't explain to anyone who hasn't shared a meal with him. Slow to speak and slower to take back what he said.
Keeps a spellbook, two notebooks and a third notebook about the other two. Believes every problem is a reading problem, and is right more often than anyone likes.
All four are written up in full, with backstories, on the live Chronicle.
High Water
Sessions 1 to 2
The party reached Bramblewick two days behind the spring floods. The tolls on the bridge had doubled that morning and nobody would say by whose order. Hendrick Marrow gave them beds at The Salted Hound on credit and asked no questions, which in a town that writes everything down was its own kind of statement.
Arrival at the bridge. Beds on credit at The Salted Hound. Vessel warns the party off the river road.
At the tableThe DM set an NPC coin on the map and slid it toward the players. One tap and Captain Vessel's portrait and description were on four phones at once, with no one asking who the mini was.
Marrow's Back Room
Session 3
Marrow keeps a back room for guests who settle their tab. Six things on a felt cloth, each with a price chalked beside it. Tobias picked up a heavy axe with a nicked blade and didn't put it back down. Mira paid fifty gold for a plain silver ring Marrow swore he couldn't place, which is exactly what made her want it.
Six items on the table. The axe sold first. The ring sold for fifty gold and a lot of squinting.
At the tableThe DM laid six item tokens out, each with its price set, and went to get a drink. The players tapped and argued for twenty minutes without him. The ring was marked unidentified, so tapping it showed only a mystery card and no price. The axe looked like an ordinary axe. It was not.
The Missing Pages
Sessions 4 to 5
Two years of toll records, and gaps in every quarter. The wardens had known long enough to stop being surprised by it. Corwin Thorne, the council's clerk, was in the room when the party found the first gap and said nothing at all. On the way out, Roswyn helped herself to the council's brass seal. Mira spent the evening casting Identify on her ring and came downstairs looking smug.
Council records opened. First gap found. The council seal walks out in Roswyn's coat. The ring turns out to be a Ring of Water Walking.
At the tableMira's player cast Identify, the DM flipped the ring to identified, and her next tap showed the real item with its full description. The seal went into Roswyn's inventory marked stolen, so the DM always knew exactly whose it really was.
Beneath the Chapel
Sessions 6 to 7
The stair behind the chapel wall hadn't been used in a lifetime, and the lamp at the bottom was lit. Sister Nell Cardew was expecting someone. She answered three questions exactly and no more, then handed over an iron box with a riddle etched in the lid. Thorne's hired blades found them on the way back up. Tobias kicked out the old footbridge over the culvert to cut them off, and kept swinging the axe long after the last of them had run.
The Undercroft found. Nell hands over the locked box. Thorne's blades driven off. Tobias attunes to the axe, and the curse shows itself.
At the tableThe blades were marked Dangerous, so tapping their coin played a short warning before the card came up. Survival is not guaranteed. The table went quiet. The iron box was a puzzle-locked token: tapping it showed only Nell's riddle until Roswyn's player typed the answer on her second try. And when Tobias attuned to the axe, its curse finally appeared on his card. It was a Berserker Axe, and he couldn't let go of it.
The Name on the Page
Sessions 8 to 9
It wasn't a confession that gave Thorne up, it was handwriting. The same clerk's hand ran through the missing quarters and the notes he'd signed for the council, and once Roswyn saw it she couldn't unsee it. The originals in Nell's box said the rest. The doubled tolls weren't going to the town. They went upstream, every month, to the flooded quarry, paid to something the ledgers only ever called the Keeper.
The hands match. Vessel names Thorne. The tolls lead to the quarry, and to the Keeper.
At the tableThe DM marked Thorne as the campaign's antagonist. From then on he had his own section in the Chronicle, set apart from every other NPC.
What the Quarry Keeps
Session 10
They went to the quarry at dusk to see the Keeper for themselves. The water was black and too still, and something under it was bigger than the boat they'd borrowed. Aldric said the word they'd agreed meant run. Mira and Aldric made the shore. Roswyn walked across the water on Mira's ring. Tobias turned around. Whether that was the axe or just Tobias, nobody at the table could say, and his player didn't want to argue it.
The party sees the Keeper and runs. Tobias Vance falls at the quarry.
At the tableThe DM set down an enemy coin marked Deadly. Every phone that tapped it showed the same thing: no name, no health, nothing but a veil. The players had no idea what they were facing, only that it would kill them. That was the point. When Tobias went down, the DM marked him fallen, and his face on the Chronicle went grey.
What the River Kept
Sessions 11 to 12
Thorne didn't run and he didn't raise his voice, because he'd never needed to. He stood on the bridge with the council behind him and explained, quite reasonably, how much worse Bramblewick would be without the arrangement he'd built. Then Roswyn set the council seal on the parapet next to Tobias's whistle, and Vessel took it from there. The town stopped paying. On the last night the DM finally lifted the veil, and the table learned what had been living in the quarry. A black dragon, two years fat on the town's money, and very soon about to be hungry.
Thorne taken in. The tolls stop. The veil lifts on the Keeper, and the campaign ends on what comes next.
At the tableLifting the veil is the DM's call. He tapped the Keeper's coin himself, lifted the veil, and from then on every tap showed its real name and stat block, three sessions after it killed Tobias.
The fallen
Knocked on every wall. Bought the wrong axe and kept it anyway. Held the water long enough for three people to make the shore. His whistle is still on the bridge.
Fallen heroes keep their place in the Chronicle. Their story doesn't end when the character does, and it shouldn't.
The antagonist
Kept the town's books for eleven years and kept a second set for two. Never once raised his voice. Believed, right up to the end, that he was the only thing standing between Bramblewick and the Keeper, and the worst part is he might have been right.
What was never said
Players can write an entry and keep it private until the campaign ends. The DM can too. Nobody at the table sees these until the Chronicle is opened at the end, so a player can be honest in writing about something their character never said out loud. Bramblewick ended with eight of them. Here are four.
Roswyn KellWhat I Didn't Say at the TableI've seen a coat like Thorne's before, in a town that doesn't exist anymore. I didn't tell the others. I'm still not sure if that was caution or something worse.
Tobias VanceAbout the AxeI know something's wrong with it. I like it anyway. If I start acting strange, someone take it off me. Don't let me make it an argument.
Mira FenwickOn the RingI identified it on the first try. I told them it took three. A wizard needs a little mystery.
Brother AldricThe LanternI kept it lit at the quarry until morning. I knew he wasn't coming back. I just didn't want him walking out of that water in the dark.
The DM's held-back entries do a different job. They record what was true under the scene rather than what the players saw, which is why they only make sense afterward: Marrow knew the axe was cursed. He'd sold it twice before, and both times it came back to him.
From the Dungeon Master
Twelve sessions. We rescheduled four times, and between two new jobs, a move and a baby, I honestly think that's a record for us.
Dana, Marcus, Jess, Eli. Thank you. Not for the campaign, for showing up. Everyone says yes to a game at the start. Almost nobody is still saying yes four months later on a night when it would be easier to stay home.
Marcus, about Tobias. You saw that dice roll coming and you charged anyway, and then you sat there and agreed it made sense. That's the best thing that happened at our table all year. A game without stakes isn't worth playing, and you made it worth it.
I'm keeping this so that in ten years, when none of us can agree on how it ended, we'll have something better than memory. Don't read it now. Read it then.
Thanks for playing. I'd do it all again next week. And the Keeper is still out there.
Tyler
How this got written
In a real campaign, nobody sits down to write a Chronicle. The chapters get made during play. A chapter is just where the DM files the taps from a session or two. Every name in bold above is a physical token or coin that was on the table, and the line under each name is the note the DM added in the moment, which takes about as long as saying it out loud.
The private entries get typed by players on their own phones, sometimes weeks apart, and sit unread until the campaign ends. The DM's letter is the one part that isn't in character. It takes ten minutes on the last night, and it's the part people actually reread.
What you can't see from the page is the part that makes it work. None of it happened on a screen. An item was set on a felt cloth with a price beside it. A stranger arrived when a coin went down on the map. Something in the quarry stayed a mystery until the DM decided otherwise. The record is what's left over from a game played with real objects in front of real people, and that's the only reason it's worth keeping.
Read the live Chronicle or see how a tap actually works. The tokens land on Etsy very soon.
