Turn a Play-by-Post Campaign Into an Audio Drama

Play-by-post campaigns live as text from day one. A thread on a forum, a channel in Discord, a shared doc that fills up turn by turn over months. That is exactly the kind of material that turns into listenable audio well, because the writing is already done. This guide walks through turning a play-by-post campaign into an audio drama with AI voices: deciding which posts become script, cleaning up the table talk, giving each character a distinct voice, adding sound, and exporting a finished MP3.

Why play-by-post is a good fit for audio

Unlike a recorded live session, a play-by-post game has no microphones, no crosstalk, and no "wait, whose turn is it." Every in-character line was written deliberately, usually in a consistent voice, and the out-of-character chatter is already visually separated (brackets, spoiler tags, a separate OOC channel). You are adapting prose, not transcribing a recording, which makes the script step far shorter than it is for a recorded actual play podcast.

Pick the posts that become your script

A campaign log is long and uneven. You do not narrate all of it. Read through one story arc and mark the posts that carry it:

• Keep in-character dialogue and the GM's scene-setting narration.
• Cut out-of-character notes, rules questions, dice results, and scheduling.
• Collapse repeated back-and-forth ("I roll perception" / "you see a door") into the one line that actually moves the scene.
• Pick a natural stopping point, usually the end of a session or an arc, so the episode has a shape.

One arc is usually one episode. Keeping episodes to a single arc also keeps the export simple, which matters at the end.

Rewrite forum posts into a script

Play-by-post prose mixes narration and dialogue inside a single post, often in second person or present tense. For audio you want a clean script: a narrator line for description, and a separate line for each spoken piece of dialogue attributed to the character who said it. Turn "Thorne draws his blade and growls, 'Stay back'" into a narrator line for the action and a Thorne line for the words. This is the same cleanup you would do for an AI roleplay chat log, just starting from multiple human writers instead of one.

Cast a voice for each character

This is where a play-by-post campaign pays off. You already know every character's personality from months of posts, so casting is easy. Give the party, the GM's narrator, and the recurring NPCs each a distinct voice, and keep that casting consistent across episodes so returning listeners recognize who is speaking. If you are not sure which voice fits a character, our guide to choosing AI voices for characters covers how to audition and match.

Add sound, then export one file

A little sound goes a long way: a music bed under the GM's intro, ambience for a tavern or a dungeon, a sting when a fight breaks out. Keep it light so the dialogue stays clear. When the episode is ready, export it. The export unit is one chapter to one file, so each episode comes out as a single finished MP3 you can upload wherever you host your show. AudioProducer.ai does not host or distribute audio and there is no engine plugin to install, so that MP3 is yours to publish anywhere.

Where play-by-post fits with other RPG audio

Play-by-post is one of several ways tabletop groups turn their games into audio. If your campaign happened at a live table and you took written session notes instead of a recording, see turning a D&D campaign into an audio drama. If you ran a solo game, there is a guide for turning an AI Dungeon adventure into audio. And if you want to voice a published rulebook rather than a campaign, see turning a TTRPG sourcebook into audio. Browse the full library on all articles.

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