Episode Details

Dan and Paul dive into the practical problem of keeping notes and records for long-running D&D campaigns.

Paul is gearing up to run a new campaign in the same world and setting he's been developing since 2010, which means digging back through nearly 15 years of old campaign notes, player-generated play reports, maps, and other records. What information is actually useful when you return to a setting years later? And what should we be recording now so that the next version of the campaign has a useful history to draw on?

We'll talk about the process as well as the technology: note-taking systems, three ring binders, wikis and databases, actual play reports, experiments we've tried over the years, what worked, what didn't, and what we've learned about maintaining a campaign's collective memory.

If you're running a campaign that's been going for years - or hoping to make one that lasts that long - this is a look at how to keep its history from disappearing into a pile of forgotten notes.