5E INITIATIVE TRACKER
Encounter Runner
Initiative order, hit points, conditions, factions and mid-combat spawning, all held in one screen that updates the moment you touch it. No index cards. No whiteboard. No spreadsheet with a column you forgot to scroll to.
TRY IT WITHOUT SIGNING UP
Round three. One very annoyed Owlbear.
Damage an enemy, heal it back, end a few turns. The buttons below are wired up. The real thing behaves like this, with rather more of them.
ENCOUNTER RUNNER · LIVE
This isn't a screenshot.
It's the actual runner.
Initiative, HP, conditions, factions and mid-combat spawning, and your players never see a loading spinner. Go on, knock something out:
↓ Yes, the buttons work. We're not animals.
The Sunless Citadel · Room 8
Round3
THE ACTUAL PROBLEM
Combat is four spreadsheets in a trenchcoat.
Nobody struggles to run a fight. What breaks is everything around it: whose turn it is, what the Owlbear is down to, whether the Rogue is still Hidden, whether the Cleric's Concentration survived that hit, and which of the three goblins is the one that's bloodied.
Every one of those is trivial on its own. Together, at speed, in front of five people who are waiting, they're what turns a nine-minute encounter into a twenty-five-minute one, and what makes you say "…actually, hang on" out loud four times a session.
The Encounter Runner takes the bookkeeping. It does not take the decisions. Whether that Owlbear kills anyone is still entirely between you and the dice.
What it holds so you don't have to
Initiative
Type the number your player just shouted, or let the runner roll for the monsters. Order sorts itself; the current turn glows.
Hit points
Damage and healing in one tap, per combatant. Bloodied and downed states are obvious from across the table.
Conditions
Every 5e condition from a picker, plus whatever your house rules invented. They ride along on the combatant until you clear them.
Factions
Combatants belong to sides. The cultists know who the cultists are, so a three-way fight stays a three-way fight.
Legendary actions
Any stat block that declares them gets a counter, capped at three a round the way the rules say. Spend them and watch it tick down.
Lair actions
Flag the lair's owner and initiative count 20 stops being the thing you forget every single time.
Mid-combat spawning
Reinforcements arrive on round four because you decided so. Drop them in; they slot straight into the order.
Turn timer
Optional, and quietly devastating. The player who takes four minutes will discover this about themselves.
Player-side panels
Attacks, spells, conditions and wildshape forms for each PC, so "what's my spell save DC again?" has an answer that isn't a shrug.
BOSS FIGHTS, SPECIFICALLY
Legendary actions you'll actually remember to spend.
The reason a solo boss falls over in two rounds is almost never the stat block. It's that its legendary actions were on page three of a PDF you weren't looking at, and its lair actions happened on a count you sailed past.
Flag the lair owner when you build the encounter. Any monster whose stat block declares legendary actions gets a counter primed to three a round. Both then sit in the runner, in your eyeline, refusing to be forgotten. Your boss gets to be a boss.
A MAP, IF YOU WANT ONE
Fog of war without a virtual tabletop underneath it.
Any running encounter can open a battle map view: tokens for everyone in the initiative order, and a fog layer you paint back as the party explores. Paint the map yourself inCartographer, or drop in an image you already own.
This is the part where most tools ask you to move your whole game online. We're not asking. The map is a screen you can turn toward the table when position matters, and ignore when it doesn't. Nobody has to install anything. Nobody has to make an account. Nobody has to be on webcam.
THE SHAPE OF A SESSION
Before, during, and the bit afterwards nobody plans for.
Before. Build the encounter from your bestiary, or don't. Grimoire will rate it against your actual party (the one in your campaign, at their current levels), so "medium" means medium for them. Attach the loot and the quest it advances while you're there.
During. Initiative up, damage in, conditions on, turn ended. The Wizard asks what the goblin's AC is and you say a number instead of flipping pages. Round four, the reinforcements you always intended arrive from the spawn panel.
Afterwards. The party retreats at half health and you close the laptop. Three weeks later they come back for the rest of it, and the encounter is exactly where it was: round eleven, one goblin down, the Owlbear still on eight hit points and still furious.
Questions a DM would actually ask
Is this a VTT?
No. There's a battle map with fog of war if you want one, but nothing here assumes your players are squares on a grid in separate houses. The runner is built to sit in front of you, at a table, while everyone else looks at each other.
Do I have to build the encounter in advance?
It helps, and the encounter builder will tell you how deadly it is before you commit. But you can also open a blank runner, drop in three goblins and a name, and start. Prep is a convenience here, not a toll gate.
What about legendary and lair actions?
Both are first-class. Monsters whose stat block declares legendary actions get a per-round counter, three by default, per the rules. Lair actions are wired to whichever combatant owns the lair, and surface on initiative count 20.
Can I add a monster in the middle of a round?
Yes, that's the spawn panel. Pick the creature, give it an initiative, and it joins the order immediately. Ambushes, summons, the wandering monster you rolled up on the spot: all fine.
Does the party see any of this?
Only what you choose to show. Grimoire has a Prep mode and a Play mode; in Play mode, revealing something broadcasts it to the party. In Prep mode you can poke at anything in silence. Enemy hit points are never leaked by accident.
What happens to the encounter when we stop mid-fight?
It stays exactly as you left it: same initiative, same HP, same conditions, same round number. Come back next session, or next month, and hit continue. The Owlbear does not heal out of spite.
Where do the monsters come from?
Open5e's SRD bestiary ships with it, and you can build your own in the Bestiary or import from a stat block you've already written. Custom monsters run in the tracker exactly like the built-in ones.
Is the initiative tracker free?
Yes. The free DM tier includes five encounters, which is more than enough to find out whether you like it. Pro lifts the cap. Your players never pay for anything.
Your next fight can be the last one you run on index cards.
Five encounters on the free tier, no card, no waitlist. Build one tonight and see whether the bookkeeping misses you.
Open your grimoire for freeNo card. No beta waitlist. Always free for your players.
IN THE SAME GRIMOIRE
Card Forge
Printable trading-card and tarot-sized cards for NPCs, monsters, items and spells. Hand your players something real.
Scriptorium
A homebrew editor styled like the 2024 PHB, with the stat blocks and page furniture already built.
Soundboard
A full ambience-and-effects board with Spotify integration, ready inside the campaign you already run.