Post by tetramorph on Mar 12, 2017 11:45:04 GMT -5
Guys, how do you keep your campaigns organized without going into OCD overkill?
I have limited time and energy but I want to provide a coherent campaign for my players.
The only other major exposure to serious old school gaming I have is through a very creative referee who nevertheless is very loose about campaign coherence. He keeps no time lines. He allows players to instantly "teleport" their characters to wherever the action currently is. He has elaborate maps with terrain, climate, cities, gods, etc., but he does not keep account of the way modules are integrated into these setting nor how character adventures affect the world as a whole, so that information winds up remaining largely irrelevant to us -- even to those of us running modules within his world.
I would like to do those things, and not neglect them, but without going crazy.
In one campaign I've kept a good solid time-line. I have a map and I have a list of major points on the map. I keep track of when I place a module (my own or published) in a certain place. Recently I've answered a bunch of questions I came up with (they're on my blog, if curious) and that has helped create interesting connections across my campaign map.
But as I opened up a file to make a document for all this I found I had to repeat a bunch of information in different places.
So how do you organize your campaign, quite literally?
What does your notebook look like? Files? Manilla folders? How do you keep your maps? Index cards?
Do you alphabetize? Go by map number?
What get's organized? NPCs? Places? Artifacts? Swords? Are NPCs organized by their links to certain places, or vice versa? Or do you do both and double the information?
I am late GenX, so I do some things on computer and some things on paper and I probably will till I die. What is the computer best for? What is paper and pencil best for?
Help!
[Note: I cross posted this over at ODD74 as well. There are different folks over there and I wanted as much input as I could get. I am looking for kind and helpful feedback from folks with experience.]
I have limited time and energy but I want to provide a coherent campaign for my players.
The only other major exposure to serious old school gaming I have is through a very creative referee who nevertheless is very loose about campaign coherence. He keeps no time lines. He allows players to instantly "teleport" their characters to wherever the action currently is. He has elaborate maps with terrain, climate, cities, gods, etc., but he does not keep account of the way modules are integrated into these setting nor how character adventures affect the world as a whole, so that information winds up remaining largely irrelevant to us -- even to those of us running modules within his world.
I would like to do those things, and not neglect them, but without going crazy.
In one campaign I've kept a good solid time-line. I have a map and I have a list of major points on the map. I keep track of when I place a module (my own or published) in a certain place. Recently I've answered a bunch of questions I came up with (they're on my blog, if curious) and that has helped create interesting connections across my campaign map.
But as I opened up a file to make a document for all this I found I had to repeat a bunch of information in different places.
So how do you organize your campaign, quite literally?
What does your notebook look like? Files? Manilla folders? How do you keep your maps? Index cards?
Do you alphabetize? Go by map number?
What get's organized? NPCs? Places? Artifacts? Swords? Are NPCs organized by their links to certain places, or vice versa? Or do you do both and double the information?
I am late GenX, so I do some things on computer and some things on paper and I probably will till I die. What is the computer best for? What is paper and pencil best for?
Help!
[Note: I cross posted this over at ODD74 as well. There are different folks over there and I wanted as much input as I could get. I am looking for kind and helpful feedback from folks with experience.]