I’m wondering what digital tools people like to use to help keep campaign info straight?
I was using AirTable heavily, and still like it as a database for equipment, special abilities, faction claims, etc. I built a large database to hold faction and NPC info… but have found that to be much less useful. My players never touch it and it is too cumbersome to use mid-game.
So for the past month I’ve been experimenting with www.roamresearch.com and am really liking it. It’s lightweight UI means I can add info and search for info so fast that I can do it while GMing. I can also include session notes in it and share direct links to those notes to my players without them needing to create an account for something - and so they actually read the notes :).
Anyone else try Roam for this use? People using other things they like? Notion? Wikis? Google Sheets?
I haven’t shared notes with players, but for personal use I use Twine, which is a program meant for making text-based games, but it allows you to set up a bunch of separate pieces of information in their own boxes and then connect them. This makes it easy to link between factions as long as they’ve interacted in some way or at least have strong feelings about each other.
I tried Roam Research and Notion for my notes, but in the end, I settled on a Zettel in VS Code synced back to Github for my GM notes. For my campaign player facing notes, I’ve been alternating between Scabard and World Anvil, trying to decide between the two.
I’ve been using tiddlywiki for quite some time now. It’s a self contained wiki in a single HTML file. Open the file in your browser, edit the page, click save and overwrite the previous version of the file. Take the file with you in a USB stick, or in a dropbox, or whatever.
You can create notes (text, image, drawings and whatnot), give them tags, create links between them. There is a macro syntax that allows more advanced stuff if you want to.
There are quite a lot of plugins for many things such as visualizing links between notes. For example, https://tiddlyroam.org/ is a heavily customized version of tiddlywiki.
I use a tool called Campaign Logger for all the campaigns I run. It’s web-based and built for cross-referencing the kinds of info needed for a complex game world. It’s subscription based; I run enough different games that it’s well worth it for me.
For my personal notes I use Goodnotes on iPad with pencil - sometimes sharing pages with players.
I really do like that I can combine my writings with screenshot of the rulebook or pictures. (I am very happy with goodnotes for RPG use,bc I can use PDF-sheets and write on them.)
Here is the fraction/interaction page, numbers circled in green are the scores of the Black Sashes (my group of bravos.
