Apathy Games

Plan Your Next Campaign with a Wiki

You have this huge idea for a campaign. You’ve spent countless hours jotting down notes and 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!