Catching up a new or absent player

Sooner or later, every campaign has someone who needs catching up. A new player joins in session twenty. A regular comes back after two months away. Someone missed last week and spends the first hour quietly lost.

The usual fix is a long verbal recap at the start of the game, which bores everyone who was there and still leaves the newcomer confused. There is a better way, and most of it happens before the session.

Send something to read before the game

The goal is that the new or returning player arrives already knowing enough to play. That takes much less than you might think. They do not need the whole campaign; they need the story so far, who matters, and where things stand right now.

Send it a few days ahead, keep it to one page, and make it something they can read on a phone.

A one-page "story so far"

Use the same five parts every time:

1. The premise, in two sentences. What kind of campaign this is and what the party is trying to do.
2. The story so far, in five to eight lines. The big turning points only, oldest first. One line each.
3. The party. Each character's name, one line on who they are, and who plays them.
4. Five people who matter. The patron, the villain, the ally, the rival. Skip everyone else.
5. Right now. Where the party is, what they are about to do, and any open question the table is chasing.

If your table keeps session recaps, most of this page writes itself: the "Previously" line of each recap is a turning point, and the open threads of the latest one are "Right now". If you keep a campaign wiki or an NPC list, link to it for anyone who wants more, but do not make it required reading.

For a brand new player

Someone joining a running campaign needs a little more than the story.

• Talk to them before the session, even briefly. Ask what they want to play and what kind of game they enjoy. Ten minutes on a call saves an hour at the table.
• Give their character a reason to be there. The best entrances tie the new character to something already in the story: a person the party knows, a place they are heading, a question they are chasing. "Brom's cousin, who knows what is in the crates" is easier to join than "a stranger in a tavern".
• Tell them the table's habits. How long sessions run, how the group handles rules questions, what is fine to joke about and what is not. Things every regular knows and nobody thinks to say.
• Pair them with a player. One person at the table who will explain a name or a rule quietly, so the newcomer does not have to stop the game to ask.

For a player who missed a few sessions

Returning players do not need the premise again. Send them the recaps for the sessions they missed, plus one line on where their character was while they were gone. Most tables just say the character was "along for the ride", which works fine, as long as the player knows what their character saw and what they now owe or are owed.

If a recap is missing, ask someone who was there to write three lines. Three lines from a player who was at the table are worth more than an hour of the GM recapping out loud.

At the table

Keep the in-game catch-up short. A minute or two of "Previously" at the start of the session, ideally read out by a player rather than the GM, is enough when the newcomer has already read the page. Then start playing. People learn a campaign much faster by playing in it than by hearing about it.

If you use RealmBinder

In RealmBinder, you can invite a player by email or link, and they can read the campaign's session notes and entries straight away. The campaign's front page shows a short recap of the last session, and hovering a linked name in a note or recap shows who that person is, so a new player can look things up without having to ask.

The page you send is still worth writing. Five turning points, five people and where things stand now are what turn someone new into someone who feels part of the story.