Anyone else use MediaWiki to keep track of your world? Would you like to?

[BettaGeorge]

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 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, 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.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I don't do all the fancy stuff, but I do have a MediaWiki site for my setting.

I don't have all my notes there, just the public-facing stuff. But since it's a persistent world for multiple groups, the different adventures get written up and the effects added to the world as I go.

Currently at something like 500 articles (with several of those having TODO in parts) and about 400 known ones waiting in the wings. Sigh.

[BettaGeorge]

I don't have all my notes there, just the public-facing stuff. But since it's a persistent world for multiple groups, the different adventures get written up and the effects added to the world as I go.

Oooh, free additional lore for future campaigns! That is a great idea. Out of curiosity, are you running those groups in succession or concurrently?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Oooh, free additional lore for future campaigns! That is a great idea. Out of curiosity, are you running those groups in succession or concurrently?

Yes.

I currently have two games going at the same in-game year. And what they do will affect every following group. And each other. PCs become NPCs once they retire from an active campaign, and other people can interact with them if they're in the right places and times. For example, I had one group interact with a former PC of the other group (switched due to not liking how the character played) and had to deal with some of the fallout of both the group and the character's actions.

So far I'm at 14 groups broken into 5 (I think) "seasons". Generally there's some timeskip small or large between seasons, when I bring everything in and make sure it's all updated. I used to do this with high school club games, so there was a natural season break (end of a school year). Now that I'm no longer a teacher, I'm not sure. I don't want to do any more big timeskips for a while.

[TomaLevine]

I did something like this for two of my campaigns ages ago (early 2000s). It wasn't a wiki type of site of course, but I had all their character sheets up on there, and everything (gear, skills, spells, etc.) was hyperlinked to a page with the full description. It was incredibly useful, and I've wanted to do something like that again using a wiki type setup, but I've never really figured out how.