I’m in the middle of the first book. So far there are plenty of differences to keep me interested and the show only covered about half of the first book. I do like the way the show made everything feel more tense, bit the book goes about things a bit differently.
I wish I could have this. Two of my players take notes, but only one takes them in enough detail to piece things together. I recently gave a the not-so-great note taker a dream (full text was provided in a message) with a bunch of bread crumbs for their character to follow. It was to encourage them to talk with the other player characters and try to solve this mystery together by utilizing connections that the other players have. In this dream, I gave them:
The response I got back from the player was “Yeah… i don’t know what i need to pull from this”. This is from the player that keeps contacting me after the game saying that they want to interact more with the world and do more RP. When pressed with “well you could ask one of the other characters for help” I got a “nah, I want to do this on my own”.
Please send help…
If you use obsidian, like I do, you can use ttrpg-convert to pull down the 5etools data and convert it to markdown for storage in your vault.
Many podcast that I listen to offer and free RSS feeds when backing them directly (patreon or w.e). You can pop that feed into your favorite podcast app or script something quick. I have a similar setup to what you want that downloads webcomics I enjoy by checking the RSS feeds for new posts.