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Most session recaps fail in one of two directions. Either they are a bare list of events that reads like a receipt, or they are a thousand words of prose nobody in your group is going to open on a Tuesday.
The useful version sits in between, and it has a shape. Here is the shape, why each part earns its place, and a template you can copy.
What a recap is actually for
Be clear about the job before you write one, because it changes what goes in.
A recap has three readers, and they want different things.
You, next session. You need the loose ends. Who is owed a favour, what was promised, which door you never opened. This is the part that saves you an hour of prep.
Your players, between sessions. They want to remember what their own character did, and they want the feeling of momentum. They mostly do not want a full chronology.
Your players, six months from now. Somebody will ask "wasn't there a guy in Neverwinter who owed us money?" A recap is the only searchable record you will have.
If your recap serves the first reader only, it reads like admin. If it serves the second only, it is useless as a reference. The template below covers all three without getting long.
The five things worth writing down
1. One line that says what the session was
Not a summary. A title. "The party burned the toll bridge camp and found out Malgrath was never there."
This is the single highest-value sentence in the whole recap, because it is the one thing people will actually read, and because writing it forces you to decide what the session was about. If you cannot write it, that is worth knowing too.
2. What happened, in order, briefly
Three to six bullets. Events, not commentary. The test for whether a bullet belongs: would its absence make a later event confusing?
Combat gets one line unless something in it changed the story. "They fought six goblins and won" is enough. "They fought six goblins and let one run, and it recognised Ilsa" is a different bullet entirely, because that goblin is coming back.
3. What each character did
This is the part almost everybody skips, and it is the part players care about most.
One line per player. Not a fairness exercise, a memory aid. Grijb held the ridge alone. Ilsa took the bridge before the horn stopped. Digby did nothing and spent the session sulking, which is also worth recording, because next session he is going to do something about it.
4. What changed
Loot, gold, levels, injuries, reputation, anything that is now different on paper. This is the boring section and it is the one you will check most often, because arguments about who has the signet ring are inevitable and unwinnable without a record.
5. What is still open
The threads. The promise made to an NPC, the door not opened, the letter not read, the name somebody dropped that nobody followed up on.
Write these as questions, not statements. "Who is the emissary reporting to?" is more useful next Thursday than "the emissary escaped."
The three things people put in that nobody reads
Full dialogue. Even good dialogue. Nobody re-reads a transcript. One quoted line, if it was genuinely great, and that is the budget.
Every dice roll. Unless a specific number matters later, this is noise.
Your own commentary on how it went. "The players really engaged with this one" is a note to yourself, not part of the record. Keep a separate file for that if you want one; it does not belong in something your table reads.
The template
Copy this. It takes about ten minutes to fill in if you do it the same night, and about forty if you leave it a week, which is the real argument for doing it the same night.
SESSION 12: [one line that says what this session was]
Date played:
WHAT HAPPENED
-
-
-
THE PARTY
- [Character]:
- [Character]:
- [Character]:
WHAT CHANGED
Loot:
Gold:
Levels / injuries:
Standing with:
STILL OPEN
-
-
That is it. Five headings. If your recap is longer than a screen, it is doing something other than its job.
On doing this at all
Here is the honest problem with everything above: it assumes you will sit down after a four hour session and write for ten minutes. Most of us do that for about three weeks and then stop, and the campaign quietly becomes unsearchable.
There are three real answers to that.
Write it during the session. Works, and it costs you the game. If you are DMing, you are already tracking six things at once.
Ask a player to do it. This genuinely works and is under-used. One player, every session, in exchange for inspiration or whatever your table trades in. The recaps will be less complete and more fun to read, which is not a bad trade.
Record the session and have it written up. This is what we build. You upload the recording and get a recap in this shape, plus a separate one for each player about what they did, plus the names of everyone your party met filed where you can find them again. You read it, change anything you want, and send it.
We are obviously not neutral about the third one. But the first two work, and a campaign with a scrappy player-written recap every week is in far better shape than one with perfect notes that stopped in March.
If you want to try ours, one session a month is free, forever, and you can start by uploading a session you have already recorded rather than recording a new one.
The short version
A recap needs a title line, a short chronology, one line per character, a record of what changed, and a list of open questions. It does not need dialogue, dice, or your review of the evening.
And a mediocre recap written every week beats an excellent one written twice.