Plan Your Next Campaign with a Wiki

You have this huge idea for a campaign. You’ve spent countless hours jotting down notes, fleshing out NPCs and now you’ve begun play. Your players love it and stories and characters flow forth mightily. You are filling countless notebooks with ideas and stories!

Now how do you keep track of this mess of paper? What if you want to share some notes with another gamemaster to get their feedback? How could your players contribute to the notes that you’ve created? Better yet, how could they contribute to the world you’ve been building?

Create a wiki.

With a wiki you can gather all of your notes, characters, locations, and world building and make whatever you need available to the players for easy reference.

It’ll be a place for all your notes. Personally I have a terrible time keeping track of notebooks. I can usually hang on to one long enough to finish a game session, but then it’s misplaced. Using a wiki, I can bring my laptop to the table and make a reference to all notes on the campaign.
It’ll be a place for their notes. If your players love to write back-stories for their characters, this will be an excellent place for them to put it. It will allow other players to read it at their leisure and allow you to have a source of inspiration for tailoring adventures to their needs. Plus, it allows a place to keep a character backup.
It allows the players to add to the world. As great of a GM as you are (since you are reading our blog, it’s a given) you can’t think of everything. The best way to expand the world you’ve created is to allow your players to add to it. You are going to be surprised with what your players can come up with.
It creates one place for all your house rules. Whether as a player or gamemaster, we are forgetful. The question, “How did we decide to run X rule again?”, comes up in every game I play that has house rules. Creating one place to put all your house rules makes dealing with these questions a snap.
Webservers are cheap. For a couple of bucks a month you can have your own wiki out there for your players to add to between gaming sessions. And really, isn’t that worth it? If it’s not in your budget you can try setting one up on your personal PC. Lifehacker has a great article on how to get one setup on your personal computer. The draw back to this is that some ISPs do not allow you to run home servers, so you’ll need to check the terms of service for your ISP before setting it up. If that’s the case you can run the server locally, but it does take away the players ability to post to the wiki without being on your personal network. Additionally, you can use a site like WikiSpaces, which will host your wiki for you.

Which wiki software you use is up to you. At Apathy Games we use MediaWiki which works great for us, but if sharing your wiki isn’t important, you may also consider WikidPad, which is open source personal wiki software.

Call to Action: Do you have a favorite program you use to organize your campagin? Got experience using this medium? Let us know in the comments!

Aloysius

I use treepad. I had to pay for it, because the free version does not support hyperlinking. I used it instead of a wiki because I found ti easier to navigate in almost all respects. Plus adding pictures and stuff is easy. Having used the wiki for Time Cops development however, I might use that in the future now that I know how to use it. The multiuser treepad is expensive, and not worth it.
Aloysius

I use treepad. I had to pay for it, because the free version does not support hyperlinking. I used it instead of a wiki because I found ti easier to navigate in almost all respects. Plus adding pictures and stuff is easy. Having used the wiki for Time Cops development however, I might use that in the future now that I know how to use it. The multiuser treepad is expensive, and not worth it.
Greg

sometimes the most brilliant ideas are the simplest ones. yes i stole that quote from who no clue.

but i wish i would have thought of using my computer to track all of my RPG information sooner.
Greg

sometimes the most brilliant ideas are the simplest ones. yes i stole that quote from who no clue.

but i wish i would have thought of using my computer to track all of my RPG information sooner.
http://www.geekydomains.com/ Tyson J. Hayes

@Greg It’s something I never thought about until I started designing games. Then it became a must to write everything digitally. The natural extension of it would be to use a wiki or wave to collaboratively work on the games.
http://www.geekydomains.com Tyson J. Hayes

@Greg It’s something I never thought about until I started designing games. Then it became a must to write everything digitally. The natural extension of it would be to use a wiki or wave to collaboratively work on the games.
Sam

I <3 Obsidian Portal. It helps me stay at least semi-organized as a DM, and that's a pretty huge accomplishment for me.
Sam

I <3 Obsidian Portal. It helps me stay at least semi-organized as a DM, and that's a pretty huge accomplishment for me.
Sam

I <3 Obsidian Portal. Enough said.
Sam

I <3 Obsidian Portal. Enough said.
http://www.myspace.com/spyderzt Spyder Z

I’ve actually become rather fond of Freemind ( http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page ) when I want to throw ideas out. I’ve never tried to track a Campaign with it, but the functionality is there, on a smaller scale than a Wiki Obviously. ;P

http://www.apathygames.com Tyson J. Hayes

I’ve been thinking about doing some development on a smaller scale, I’d like something where I could wall off access to some articles and not others, some thing mediawiki (what I currently use) does not do easily.

http://www.myspace.com/spyderzt Spyder Z

I’ve actually become rather fond of Freemind ( http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page ) when I want to throw ideas out. I’ve never tried to track a Campaign with it, but the functionality is there, on a smaller scale than a Wiki Obviously. ;P