Campaign Wiki

[BluWolf]

I have started creating 2. One for my homebrew of 20 years and another one for a very short lived Realms group here in Florida.

Since I am not actively gaming right now, they are not getting much use or update. For the short time I was working on them I saw a substantial benefit in managing a campaign world with one.

I used PB Wiki. Links in my sig

Sir Brennen, I don't know how you did it on yours but that campaign world wiki you have is VERY professional looking. Very impressive. Good work.

 

[reanjr]

Most of my players are technilogically impaired (read: do not have internet). My Wiki is primarily for DM use, but I also have a special tag I use to make sensitive info not immediately visible so if players do go on there, it's not a big deal. I have one player who reads stuff pretty often. No one adds to it.

Wikis are phenomenal to just jot down ideas, though. I used to use a blog for it, but that just didn't work out for me. Kept getting disorganized. I personally use MediaWiki. You can't really go wrong with the software Wikipedia uses...

 

[IronWolf]

We find message boards are the thing to have. We are able to cover a lot of things on our groups message boards. For our past campaign which was a homebrew, we did use a Wiki for campaign world information. The DM (Crothian) had tons of information tucked away in notebooks. We convinced him (more I, I guess) to put some of that in a Wiki so we could all see it and have a place to reference it. I think it worked out well.

We used MediaWiki for the wiki software.

 

[Thanatos]

I do have a forum -- I am a proud owner of vBulletin and have used it since the beginning. We find the forum is helpful for discussions, but stickys at the top eventually clutter it too much. It's not as helpful for static pages, unless you use a single stickied post and edit it with links...so with that, I was thinking a Wiki would probably be a better way to go.

Plus, one of my players tends to write session notes from his own, unique perspective and I thought that would be an awesome way for him to keep a 'journal'.

I'll check out Mediawiki.

I looked at pbwiki and it looks really cool, but I have my own domain and don't really want someone else to host my wiki.

 

[takyris]

I've had a wiki for several of the major campaigns I've run. Some of my players set the first couple up for me -- a nice benefit of playing with computer geeks.

It's definitely handy. I just started one for the pbem campaign I'm running right now. There's not much in it at the moment, but for the very little it's worth, here's the link:

http://hylania.schtuff.com/home

(Really, almost nothing in it -- some very nice organization of the weapons I came up with for the game, and nothing else. If you look at what I'm doing with weapons and assume that I'll be doing that with characters and places and such over the next few weeks, it might give you some sense of how I use it. Lots of searches, basically.)

 

[Toric_Arthendain]

I've been playing around with TiddlyWiki for awhile now for my own homebrew campaign and I think its a great tool for campaign setting notes and such.

Ilium and Sir Brennen, I love how your TiddlyWiki's look! How to I make mine have different colors and fonts than the default TiddlyWiki? I'm an html novice and know next to nothing about stylesheets and CSS.

If either of you would be willing to provide some help or insight, I can be reached by e-mail at ToricArthendain at gmail dot com.

 

[Sir Brennen]

Wow. Thanks for all the compliments on my TiddlyWiki. Just like Ilium, I did most of the changes directly in the TW's StyleSheet tiddler, with a little behind the scenes hacking. It took a lot of tweaking, and I'm considering doing some more.

I've also made use of a number of plugins for TW to get different functionality for the page (and created my own to encrypt the email address link.)

Toric - If you (or anyone else) want to take a look at the code I used for the page, click the 'contents' link on the right hand side of the page, select "[system]" in the listbox, then scroll down and take a look at the tiddlers "Stylesheet", "PageTemplate" and "ViewTemplate" to see how I did everything. I'd be glad to help with any questions.

Thanatos - I forgot that there is a Mediawiki site which I've been contributing to recently that has a number of campaigns on it, as well as other projects (the SRD, plus Homebrews of Races, Classes, Monsters, etc.) Some are well done, some are not so well done. You can check it out here. (My User Page on that site was also designed with a lot of CSS. I go by Oneiros there.) I forgot about it because for some reason I'm having problems accessing it from work lately.

In summary - if you think there will be significant discussion and contribution by your players, go with a full-blown wiki like MediaWiki (pbwiki has too many ads and not enough flexibility for my tastes). If you just want an easy, self-referencing way to present your campaign, go with TiddlyWiki. You could have one TW for your players, and a DM-only one for notes and the like! I actually use a separate TW as a player at the table to take notes and track my resources.

(Note: All links in this post, including sig, look best in Firefox )

 

[Thanatos]

Yes, your style is really great.

I played around with Mediawiki and its pretty full featured. -- But I think that my players might have a bit of trouble getting into it.

I downloaded Tiddlywiki and phptiddlywiki. One that only I can edit for campaign information and to use as a DM wiki and the other which the players can use for themselves...and I'll link them back and forth for ease of navigation. I playd around with that today and they work the same and will seem seamless to my players.

Thanks so much, this has all been so helpful. I'll post a link once I get them set up and a little info in them.

 

[Mavrik]

Hi

We use www.jot.com not the most attractive wiki, but really easy to use and intuitive, we run about 4 campaigns on it and it works really well

Mav

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

I looked at MediaWiki but decided it was overkill. TiddlyWiki on the other hand I picked up two nights ago and have experimented with, and I've got to say I really like it. Makes a nice updateable notepad to collect all my homebrew stuff and the interface is intuitive. A lot easier than trying to put it all straight into PagePlus from my notebooks even with an outline.