Hello fellow DMs!!!!

I am looking for information regarding world building.  When you are building a world for a campaign, you obviously need to take notes and manage your information, but how do you do it?  Pen and paper?  Digitally?

If you manage your worlds digitally, how do you manage it?  What sort of tools do you look for?  If there was an application you could use to manage your world, what sort of features/capabilities would you like to see it have?

Thanks!

Digitally. A lot of cross-referenced notes.

I've experimented with doing it as a web site; there's a lot of overhead in that - it's just a digital form of the cross-referenced text documents.

I think the ideal here would be Wiki software. Wikis are built around automated page creation, and east cross-referencing.

Sadly, a MediaWiki is a complex little cluster of software running on a server. Other Wiki software is simpler, and requires less infrastructure, but also lack a lot of the MediaWiki features.

You can absolutely get a hosted Wiki - but they're typically either expensive, overloaded with advertising, or claim the intellectual property rights of material hosted there.

Wiki software isn't completely ideal, however - they're not built around fine-grained access and editing controls by account. It's hard to grant your players the rights to edit some areas, and not others - and I haven't found an easy way to hide sections of pages from player accounts.

Thank you for the reply.  Your insight is greatly appreciated.

So for your world building, you would prefer it be something that can be used in game as a digital gaming space as well?  Do you find any value in a system that would be used by the GM to manage notes and world building without player access?  Would you find any value in a system that helped guide the world building process (i.e. you create a city and it provides prompts such as population, defining features, capabilities to link to another page to distinguish city location, etc.)?

I absolutely see the value of a wiki system, but understand there are probably some problems with it as well.  What sort of "fine-grained access and editing controls" do you find wiki systems to lack?

Thanks again for your comments.

I don't have a particular need for a digital gaming space integrated with the world building notes. By keeping the world and campaign notes platform agnostic - I can use them tabletop, or roll20, or discord.

By fine-grained access and editing controls, I mean being able to control what anonymous readers, and even logged in user accounts, can see: some pages might not be available to players; some pages might only be visible to some players; some pages might be visible to all players, but not all sections of the page might be visible, etc.

That pretty much covers off the ability to create DM notes ( as wiki pages ) and control what the players can see.

I don't think creation prompting systems as a core feature is of particular use, as people have vastly different approaches to how much detail they want to flush out, and how they flesh it out. At best, you might build such a system with a modular plug-in system, which allows optional plugins, or templates, that might allow this. 

I've recently moved my campaign from OneNote into https://kanka.io/ which is designed for and perfectly suited to worldbuilding and campaign management. It's free to use and I highly recommend checking it out.

I've tried using OneNote, and it suffices, but I wouldn't call it perfect. I know it's very popular for that purpose.

But like most products it lacks that fine access control - I believe that access is controlled on a page level ( ideally I'd like control on a section or paragraph level ), and it has a pretty clunky interface.

I'm not familiar with Kanka at all ( although I'll check it out, thanks! ), but I have to ask what their policy is for monetizing your site ( I know some hosted Wiki sites reserve the right to run ads on your pages, something you can't opt out of at a non-paying level ), and I'd be wary about their user policy regarding intellectual property. As I said, there's at least one Wiki host that claims IP rights to anything hosted on their site.

It could be that Kanka has no issues there, but it's something to check.

I made a map, keep notes via email and a note keeping app but actually keep mini notebooks for each town including who of note is in the town, plot points that exist within the town and etc so all I need do is grab the appopriate book, flip it open and off to the races. 

Thanks for the reply.  Would you find a digital version of this easier to use?  Maybe separate pages for each town, and instead of flipping through a book, you could just click the appropriate link for what you are looking for within that town?  Or is it more of just the feeling of having physical notebooks for each town, knowing that it is secure and won't be lost due to a system crash or server issue?

Thanks again.

If I had more digital equipment I might go that route, I just like having things in my hands and it is more secure this way, plus I have little books I can hand off to other gm friends that need help with their campaigns. 

And just nice to look at everything and say "I did this"

Plus writing can be therapeutic

I don't have insane levels of description either, I basically make mini modules per town I guess, listing the shop keeps, names, affiliations, anything I think that the players might inquire about. But this way I have an endless supplies of towns I can just slap down wherever I need them as well and give the players a sense of exploration as sometimes they will just point to the map and want to travel to a certain area to see what is there 

www.obsidianportal.com lets you build a campaign wiki with pretty good features. It has user access control included,  for instance pages can have DM viewable only content. Has a characters section, can upload images, link internal and external sites, etc.

I use it but lately I've more often just been keeping notes in google drive docs,  it's just easier for me and i found my players hardly ever use the site.

Thanks for the feedback.  Would you ever consider using a personal application that maybe had the same capabilities of google drive, but instead of having to open up different documents for each "sheet"/file/whatever, it could just easily be linked up?  Maybe like a wiki, but structured to be more organized?

It really sounds like you're doing market research and trying to create system requirements :p

I have no idea what you are talking about.... ;P

Quote from Vedexent >>

 

I'm not familiar with Kanka at all ( although I'll check it out, thanks! ), but I have to ask what their policy is for monetizing your site ( I know some hosted Wiki sites reserve the right to run ads on your pages, something you can't opt out of at a non-paying level ), and I'd be wary about their user policy regarding intellectual property. As I said, there's at least one Wiki host that claims IP rights to anything hosted on their site.

It could be that Kanka has no issues there, but it's something to check.

I've found the kanka.io developer to be super receptive to user feedback and very conscious of monetization concerns. They note that users retain all rights to their data. They've also commented that hiding features behind a paywall isn't something they feel would be the right way to design the platform. https://kanka.io/en/releases/59-patreon-and-the-future-of-kanka

So far I'm on board with their approach to things, and the source code for the current incarnation of the platform is available. Kanka lets me set up nested locations, so that I can navigate to a region, see the cities/settlements in it, list the people in those cities/settlements. I can then go deeper and see the buildings in those cities and which people are located in those. I can map out how those people are related to one another and which organisations they're members of. I've tried out a number of methods of organisation my campaign and haven't found anything as good as this.

I had a look at Kanka.

It's really interesting, but it appears to focused on a particular D&D campaign style, or workflow - with pre-built sections like Families, Organizations, Items, etc. - rather than a general tool. That style is the same a 99% of all campaigns out there, I'm sure, so that's not likely a large issue.

General tools like Wikis and/or Blogs lack those sort of organizational aids ( although you can build the ones you want quite easily, if you start building Wiki templates ), but are more flexible. 

I also checked out Obsidian Portal - and it is more a generalized set of online business tools ( with a few minor RPG specific customizations like "DM Only" sections in the Wiki, searchable wiki-like sections for players, etc ). It is, of course, payware - and I'm not sure to what extent you can customize the appearance of your campaign site without CSS hacking ( which I don't mind, but is beyond what most people are willing to do ). 

Sadly, I don't think there's any simple, powerful, generalized Wiki software out there either. MediaWiki is a collection of PHP scripts running on a server - and many single executable desktop personal WIkis are either cumbersome single HTML/Javascript files, or have a really minimal set of features.

My dream scenario would be something like MediaWiki, that could be installed and configured simply, that I could export as static HTML ( in multiple batches, on with DM information included, one without ). 

This could be done with a local installation of MediaWiki, an export tool, and a cheap VPS server out there - but it requires a lot of tinkering, and MediaWiki is a bit of a pain to set up.

EDIT: Nope! looks like there is no currently functional tool to dump MediaWiki to static HTML.

Quote from robbacon18 >>

Thanks for the feedback.  Would you ever consider using a personal application that maybe had the same capabilities of google drive, but instead of having to open up different documents for each "sheet"/file/whatever, it could just easily be linked up?  Maybe like a wiki, but structured to be more organized?

 For the sake of your possible research... I sure would. 

I use google drive and DDB, and only take paper notes during the session which I then add to Google Drive. I've got a few different things it takes care of for me, that I would look for in another offering:

- The current arc. I keep all of the session prep for an arc in one place. Anything I prepped that they didn't get to stays ahead of the next session intro, anything that's been done gets archived behind it, under the previous session intro. Currently we're onto session 16 of an arc and the doc is sitting around 94 pages. If I had a way to split things out of that single doc while still retaining the ability of a quick table of contents I could quickly quick through, I'd be very interested.

- Lore docs for important people/areas. Integral NPCs have their own document. Integral locations have their own document, which have pages for every minor NPC or location there (such as shops or monuments, points of interest basically). These are all in a folder on my drive. So I'll see (Important NPC) as one doc, (Location) as another, and maybe (Future Plot) as one, and then a big one which contains my (World Info).

- Campaign calendar. I have one for my players, and then a copy for me which marks days where things happen. Sometimes this is an order a PC made at a store being ready, other times its a plot relevant event. Something I can manually track.

- Quest tracker. My current campaign is mostly open world, they have a main quest but it's got a timeline of 7 years so they don't have to rush with it. As such, there's a handful of sidequests they can find, and tracking the progress of quests, or even of NPCs they've interacted with that become important later, is important to me. I use a spreadsheet to keep track of them, with simple headers that I can pop open or hide to see the quest details in one place. Example.

I use a combination of Digital and Physical. If I have an idea I'll often just jot it down in one of my notebooks, and then if I think I want to incorporate that I will work with it and move it to my digital world notes. 

For organization, I have several folders categorizing different information of my world, so if my players do something unexpected and go from lets say the city Dragons Peak to an area of elven controlled forests, I can go through my folders from D&D -> world -> civilizations -> elven -> whatever notes I might need. 

I have started using World Anvil, and I'm still getting used to it and moving some of my information over onto it, and I might use it more in the future. I think Inkarnate is also an AMAZING tool for making a really nice looking worldmap without too much difficulty. 

I use a physical notebook for session notes, initiative tracking, etc. I use a lot of paper materials for general things I might want for running the game, such as a list of names if I need to make up a NPC on the spot. 

OneNote is the greatest. Just spend some time and watch a video on tips and trick when using it. OneNote is like Excel, sure it's easy to use to some degree with no previous information about it. But, if you spend some time learning the ins and outs of the program, it is amazing.

For anyone who a dire-hard Linux geek - I've discovered that Vim with the VimWiki extension works really well - especially if you're using Markdown.

Finding an application which maps Markdown to HTML ( or even PDF ) is very easy.