Henchmate doesn’t replace the table. The dice, the voices and the arguments over snacks all stay. What it takes away is the bookkeeping.
Think of Baldur’s Gate. The game only shows you what you need, when you need it, and does the math in the background. Henchmate brings that to a real table.
Because the Dungeon Master is doing five jobs at once. They’re telling the story, voicing every NPC, tracking initiative, doing the math, and keeping secrets. Every bit of attention that goes into managing the world is taken from the reason everyone showed up: a great story, told well. Henchmate gives the DM the tools, and gives the players exactly what the DM wants them to see, when the DM wants them to see it.
What makes it different
Some tabletop apps are about maps: building them and showing them to players. Others are about the campaign’s content, the book itself. Hardly anyone is building for the communication and the relationship between the DM and the players. That’s what Henchmate is for.
- The DM controls the reveal. Characters, letters, documents, items. The DM uploads everything once and reveals each piece when the party actually finds it in the story.
- The DM grants the level. In most apps, players level up whenever they like. Here the DM decides, the same way it works at a real table.
- Secret messages stay in the game. A DM who wants to pass a player a secret usually does it on WhatsApp. So the player picks up their phone, sees three other notifications, and they’re gone. In Henchmate, a whisper goes to one player, nobody else sees it, and the DM knows when it’s been read. The game stays alive, and the metagaming stays out.
Building it
I designed and built it alone, starting with my own Curse of Strahd campaign. The first version ran entirely in the browser to prove one loop: the DM asks for a roll, the player answers, and initiative sorts itself alongside the monsters. Accounts and a real backend came only after that worked. And a secret is only a secret if the server keeps it, so hidden NPCs, private notes and unrevealed handouts are protected by the database, not just hidden by the screen. My group is the only one using it right now. I’m stress-testing it and adding what it needs for a soft launch.