Canon is invented live at the table, but GMs cannot capture or retrieve it without halting play — so improvised lore and campaign state silently rot

Summary

GMs running reactive, improvisation-heavy campaigns create canon in real time: an NPC pulled 'out of my butt,' a home-brewed mechanic for a blinded PC who sees through her blink dog, a centuries-old political tension revealed in dialogue. The pain is twofold and unaddressed. First, capture: writing any of it down means 'pausing the flow of the game to chicken scratch,' and the GM has 'a big girl job' with no time to 'write a compendium of information for each session.' Second, retrieval at scale: once a campaign has 'too many connections,' even a 35-year forever-GM who built his own Obsidian plugin cannot say 'which clues the players had found and which secrets were still buried.' The consequence is severe and self-reinforcing — forgotten improvisations become contradictions the players remember and the GM does not ('if I say it, and forget it, they will know and ruin the magic'), prep balloons into unmanageable 'if/then' trees, and the only workaround is railroading the players out of the sandbox they love. Existing tools are the wrong shape: note apps and heavy wiki/campaign managers require manual linking and post-session data entry, generic AI writers generate content instead of bookkeeping what was already said, and nothing passively captures in-session canon and answers 'what has been established, who knows it, and what is still hidden?' This is a high-intensity, paying niche (TTRPG GMs, live worldbuilders) whose entire creative payoff depends on continuity the current toolchain cannot preserve.