Getting your campaign material in order
It’s been a topic of discussion here more than once and if you get even just a couple of GMs together it’s bound to come up – how to best organize your campaign materials.
Jackson Malloy over and Sword and Scoundrel (got to love that name!) brought up this topic with his post Organizing Campaign Materials.
Jackson, like many of us, is looking to the GM community at large to help out with this. He does a really good job at explaining the amount of material that we typically need at hand to run things smoothly, it might be preaching to the choir, but for anyone who hasn’t sat behind the GM screen it would definitely be an eye opener.
He then goes on to share what GMs have done in years past, the massive notebook, which was the topic of the RPGA Blog Carnival back in April of 2014 – The Game Master’s Binder. During the carnival a number of GMs shared what they have used in the past (a lot of pen and paper notebooks) and what they use now (a number of electronic systems), and Jackson it making that move as well.
He mentions Evernote but isn’t exactly excited about using it as a GM notebook, something I did for a while with some success. Jackson points to the organizational drawbacks of Evernote and a number of them I was able to alleviate by making the change to OneNote as my GM binder. Of course no one tool is perfect for everyone, or is there?
Jackson finishes off his post with, Malloy’s Ultimate DM Client, a rather extensive list of things he would like to see in the tool. I have to admit, he hits a lot of hot buttons I think would be on any GM’s list (name generator, dice rollers, cross referencing, for a few), you should definitely give it a read.
May your dice roll well.
Organizing Campaign Materials via Sword and Scoundrel.