A campaignthat fitsyour week.

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

The hardest job in Dungeons & Dragons is not being a player. It is being the person who says yes, fine, I’ll run it again this week, prepares four hours for the session, and watches half the party cancel by Friday afternoon. The job is too large for one volunteer. The hobby has said so for fifty years.

mimicdm is a Dungeon Master that runs the table for you — in voice, in character, under the Fifth Edition rules, on your own machine. It narrates the scene out loud. It plays the NPCs. When a player cannot make Saturday, it runs their character until they log back in. It does not flinch at horror or refuse the scene you planned. It is not a chatbot with dice; it is a DM that holds the table together.

What follows is the argument for why a voice-native, uncensored, local-first Dungeon Master is the tool your group chat has been waiting for without knowing how to ask.

A SPECIMEN OF PLAY

What does it sound like?

A short transcript from session three of a wood-elf rogue, alone in the Vimtree Hills. Spoken aloud at conversational pace. The dice are real; the math is shown.

DM — narration

The path opens into a clearing. A stone well sits at its center, half-swallowed by ivy. The bucket on its rope is rotted through, and the water at the bottom is too still. From the treeline behind you, something flutters — once, twice — then stops.

YOU — Mira, rogue lvl 3

I want to drop low and listen — see if I can place the sound. Stealth check.

DM — call

Stealth, then perception. You’re not hiding from anyone yet, but you’d rather not be the loudest thing in the clearing. d20 + 5 stealth · d20 + 3 perception

YOU — rolled

17 stealth, 14 perception.

DM — narration

You move like a held breath. The sound resolves: not a bird. A small, leathery wing — a scout-imp, perched eight feet up the oak behind you. It hasn’t seen you. Yet. You have a round, maybe two, before it does.

PLATE I  ·  THE SHELF

Each campaign is a bound volume.

Not a save file. A cartridge — printed, dated, dog-eared. The shelf shows what’s open, what’s archived, and what’s waiting to be cracked. Pick one up and the candle lights from where you left off.

The mimicdm cartridges shelf — Volume Three, with Ashes of Hollowmere in progress and an empty slot inviting a new cartridge.
Fig. 02The shelf at rest. Ashes of Hollowmere at chapter three; the second slot empty, waiting.
THE METHOD

How it works

Three things happen in every session. None of them are setup. None of them are lookup tables.

i.
step the first

Host a campaign.

Open the mimicdm app. Choose a narrator from the nine personas — the dry Chronicler, the cruel Magistrate, the cheerfully unhinged Pilgrim, others. Drop in a one-line premise or a full module. Point it at LM Studio or OpenRouter.

→ nine personas · LM Studio or OpenRouter · 5e SRD baseline

ii.
step the second

Invite your friends.

Share a session link. Friends join from a browser — phone, laptop, tablet — no download, no account. Each player picks up a PC or rolls a new one in the 5e builder. Push-to-talk for voice or type if the room is quiet.

→ play.mimicdm.com · per-character PTT · live transcript

iii.
step the third

The DM runs the table.

You speak. The DM answers in character, out loud. It rolls behind the screen. It tracks initiative and hit points. When the conversation drifts off-rails — as every session does — it improvises. When a player leaves for an hour, it runs their character politely and does not steal their spotlight moments.

→ d20 + mod · DC stated · advantage rendered as 2d20kh1

PLATE II  ·  THE FORGE

Before play, a soul.

Five steps — origin, calling, abilities, past, name & seal — and you’ve forged someone you’ll have feelings about. The DM reads what you wrote and never forgets it.

The mimicdm character forge — Step 1 of 5, Origin. A left-rail summary card for Chad the Mad (Human Berserker) sits beside a peoples picker on the right with Human, Elf, Half-orc, Halfling, Dwarf, Tiefling, Dragonborn and Gnome.
Fig. 03Chad the Mad taking shape — origin chosen, calling pending. The card on the left fills in as you go.
PLATE III  ·  THE TABLE

The whole table, at a glance.

Story in the centre. Party and known NPCs on the right. Cartridges and the narrator’s voice on the left. No tabs to remember, no panels to summon — everything you need to play is already in front of you.

The mimicdm desktop session — left rail with campaigns and narrator voice; central column with the DM’s narration about The Crooked Tankard; right rail with the party and known NPCs.
Fig. 04Mid-scene at The Crooked Tankard. The DM holds the room; Henk’s shoulder is bleeding.
“A solo D&D session that actually feels like one. The first time the DM remembered my horse’s name from two weeks ago, I sat down on the kitchen floor.”— C.M., playtest cohort II

Specimen · Persona 03 of 09

Every DM has a voice. Yours has nine.

Nine narrators, each with their own cadence, appetite, and tolerance for player nonsense. Pick one for the campaign. Or let the one who fits the story choose itself.

The clip below is a thirty-second cold open from The Chronicler — a dry, patient narrator, partial to long descriptions and short mercies.

Persona
The Chronicler
Voice model
Piper · en_GB-alan-low
Temperament
Patient · observational · occasionally cruel
Sample transcript
“You push the chapel door. It resists — then yields, with a sound like a tired man exhaling. The air inside tastes of brass and old rain. At the far end of the nave, something kneels at the altar. It has not noticed you. Yet.”

0:30 · sample rendered by Piper TTS, running locally on the host’s machine.

QUESTIONS HONESTLY ANSWERED

The interrogation scene.

Is this actually Dungeons & Dragons?
It plays by 5e rules — attacks of opportunity, advantage and disadvantage, saving throws, death saves, the Fifth Edition spell list. Character sheets are full 5e. The product is not affiliated with Wizards of the Coast; the rules it runs on are the open 5e SRD plus the rulings a reasonable DM makes at the table.
Do I need a gaming PC?
If you want to run the language model locally, a machine with a recent Apple Silicon chip or a discrete GPU with 12 GB of VRAM will run a capable model comfortably. If your laptop is lighter than that, point mimicdm at OpenRouter instead — it costs cents per session and needs nothing but a network connection. The voice side (Piper TTS, whisper.cpp for transcription) runs fine on almost any modern machine.
What about my content — is it private?
Your campaign lives on your machine. Saves, transcripts, voice audio — all on disk, under your control. When you run a local model there is no outbound request at all during play. When you use OpenRouter, only the prompt text for that turn leaves the host computer; we store nothing on a mimicdm server, because there is no mimicdm server in the loop.
How does it work when my friends aren’t online?
The DM runs absent players’ characters as NPCs — cautiously, in character, and with respect for what those players have done before. When Marcus logs back in on Tuesday, his PC still has the right loot and the right grudge. You can also pause the session; nothing is lost.
Can I use my own model?
Yes. mimicdm is built on LM Studio and talks to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Swap in your preferred model — whatever is on Hugging Face, whatever you hosted yourself, whatever OpenRouter exposes. The persona prompts are yours to edit too.
Why "uncensored" — is this going to be gross?
A dungeon is a dungeon. Real 5e at a human table handles horror, violence, moral rot, betrayal. Mainstream assistants refuse half of that and flinch at the rest, which makes them unusable as a DM. mimicdm runs on models that will actually narrate the scene you planned. It is not a shock tool; it is a DM that does not flinch.
When does the multiplayer version ship?
Soon — and the waitlist gets in first, in small rounds, so the backend does not crumple. The single-player Electron build is usable today and plays well as a solo campaign. Waitlist members get a week of early access before a public opening.
Does it work on iPhone?
Not yet. The host machine is a laptop or desktop. Friends can join any session from a web browser on any device — phones included — and an iOS app for players is in the build queue behind the web version.
Ex Libris · The Waitlist

Get the first invite.

Multiplayer rolls out in small rounds — fifty seats at a time. Each cohort gets a private session log, a Discord, and a real seat at the table while we shape what's next.

no spam, no decks, no ‘following up.’