BettaGeorge
2021-03-09, 10:43 AM
There are going to be multiple questions here, but let me first describe what my group does.
I exclusively play in homebrew worlds. Sick of keeping an ever-growing stack of post-it notes, I set up a MediaWiki (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki) accessible to me and my players.
Every named NPC, city, historical war, you-name-it has an entry in this wiki. The players themselves can edit any page to keep the information they have gathered up-to-date.
Every page also has a DM-only section only readable by me. This is where I keep everything the players do not know. My entire campaign plan, encounters, everything can be found there; I only need access to any computer.
What is great about this is that everything is linked: if an NPC's entry states they are "often seen with Allessandro", I do not have to search my notes for someone named Allessandro – I simply click on Allessandro's name and I'm there.
While that is kind of nice, I did not stop there. I also added the capabilities of Semantic Mediawiki (https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki), which allows you to easily add semantic data in a machine-readable format. In layhuman's terms, this upgrades a wiki's search capabilities from "searching for text" to "searching for facts": With one click, I can generate a list of "all cities with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants", of "all NPCs above level 3 who worship Menelmacar", or even "all NPCs who died in the last year, but not of natural causes".
By extension, I also never have to keep manual lists again: the article "city watch" automatically lists all NPCs who have the tag "city watch" in their article, and I can even sort NPCs by where they live.
There is also an auto-generated timeline of events, and of course this makes it much easier to keep pictures (mostly stolen from the internet) associated with places or people.
Finally, there is a countdown to the next session on the front page, because that seemed like fun :-)
Has anyone else done something similar, and would you like to share tips and tricks? I minored in computer science, but this is still the first time I ever tried to set up a wiki. Maybe someone has cool ideas for additional features?
On the other hand, to the people who haven't tried something like this: would you like to? Should I post some kind of tutorial? Or do you maybe have an even better way of tracking your campaign that you would like to share?
PS: I should have mentioned, I always have a laptop on the table to provide music, so having my campaign notes online was no additional hassle (in fact, it really cleaned up the space behind my DM screen). If you play completely electronics-less, this might not be for you.
I exclusively play in homebrew worlds. Sick of keeping an ever-growing stack of post-it notes, I set up a MediaWiki (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki) accessible to me and my players.
Every named NPC, city, historical war, you-name-it has an entry in this wiki. The players themselves can edit any page to keep the information they have gathered up-to-date.
Every page also has a DM-only section only readable by me. This is where I keep everything the players do not know. My entire campaign plan, encounters, everything can be found there; I only need access to any computer.
What is great about this is that everything is linked: if an NPC's entry states they are "often seen with Allessandro", I do not have to search my notes for someone named Allessandro – I simply click on Allessandro's name and I'm there.
While that is kind of nice, I did not stop there. I also added the capabilities of Semantic Mediawiki (https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki), which allows you to easily add semantic data in a machine-readable format. In layhuman's terms, this upgrades a wiki's search capabilities from "searching for text" to "searching for facts": With one click, I can generate a list of "all cities with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants", of "all NPCs above level 3 who worship Menelmacar", or even "all NPCs who died in the last year, but not of natural causes".
By extension, I also never have to keep manual lists again: the article "city watch" automatically lists all NPCs who have the tag "city watch" in their article, and I can even sort NPCs by where they live.
There is also an auto-generated timeline of events, and of course this makes it much easier to keep pictures (mostly stolen from the internet) associated with places or people.
Finally, there is a countdown to the next session on the front page, because that seemed like fun :-)
Has anyone else done something similar, and would you like to share tips and tricks? I minored in computer science, but this is still the first time I ever tried to set up a wiki. Maybe someone has cool ideas for additional features?
On the other hand, to the people who haven't tried something like this: would you like to? Should I post some kind of tutorial? Or do you maybe have an even better way of tracking your campaign that you would like to share?
PS: I should have mentioned, I always have a laptop on the table to provide music, so having my campaign notes online was no additional hassle (in fact, it really cleaned up the space behind my DM screen). If you play completely electronics-less, this might not be for you.