GMs: how do you keep track of big story arcs?

[sev]

What tools or strategies do you use to keep track of the story in long-running campaigns?

I've just embarked on a big campaign that we'll be running over a long period of time. I'm using published adventures gently reskinned to fit together and a BBEG or two who's working behind the scenes at first, slowly revealed. In order to give the campaign some continuity I'm sprinkling mentions of upcoming adventures in earlier adventures. And in order to encourage the players & characters to get invested in defeating the BBEG, I'm sprinkling hints about *that* in early adventures, too.

My question for y'all is: how do you keep track of the details, for yourself? I've got a pair of BBEGs and the godlike/primordial/etc. forces behind each, and the ways in which they are related, both to each other and to the events leading up to them, and the collateral damage they've inflicted on the world which the characters will be encountering over the course of their adventuring and I'm having a *lot* of trouble keeping track of those relationships, who's associated with which plot(s), and so on. I've clearly outgrown my linear plain-text document, and I've also outgrown my spreadsheet. My next stop may be Visio, or I may even give in to my housemate who says she can build me an awesome relational database -- but before I do that, I thought I'd ask: How do *you* do it?

And I know that among the perfectly viable answers there are: Don't make up such complicated plots, and don't plan so much up-front! I'm not rejecting those as answers, but they're not my first choice. I continue to believe that somewhere out there I can find a tool to make sense of the mess in my head!

 

[weem]

Excellent topic.

I am terrible with this, and tend to just store it all in the braincase... which doesn't work out so well at times. It works for the most part, but I have my moments. It really is an aspect of my game that needs work.

I'm looking forward to hearing what others have to say about this

 

[Doug McCrae]

Mind map

 

[Fifth Element]

I store it all in the infallible depths of my mind.

That's why details often change throughout a campaign, though I rarely realize it. And if I don't notice the change, surely the players won't as well, right?

 

[sev]

I store it all in the infallible depths of my mind.

That's why details often change throughout a campaign, though I rarely realize it. And if I don't notice the change, surely the players won't as well, right?

My players notice. It's very embarrassing!

 

[Hand of Evil]

Keeping track of stuff in my games, MS Onenotes.

See: http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/241210-anyone-using-onenote.html

For other programs:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/softwa...lities/81852-programs-organize-campaigns.html

 

[Oryan77]

I use Excel to do almost everything for my campaign. It really is an amazing spreadsheet program to use for D&D if you can get familiar with what is possible in Excel. All of my notes are in Excel and I've never felt that it held me back in any way.

So how are you having problems keeping track of things in your spreadsheet? What is the issue exactly? Just having a hard time navigating your notes in an organized way? If so, and you are using Excel as your spreadsheet program, I might be able to offer some tips to help organize it. There are so many ways to do this in Excel. Hyperlinks, hiding/unhiding rows/columns, tabs, and so on.

My Excel sheet is almost 10 megs due to all the crap I have in it and all of the formulas & code I've used to help me during my D&D sessions. Out of everything I own, Excel has been the most important tool for my D&D game (besides the actual laptop)

 

[Hand of Evil]

Mind map

Doug, you may be interested in this: Main Page - FreeMind - free mind mapping software

 

[Steel_Wind]

I tend to write notes to myself as the game goes on over time. Little slips of paper, often on the back of pink paper from telephone message pads. I lose these or misplace them almost every other day. I will then rewrite those ideas - on similar slips of paper - and promptly lose those too.

Sooner or leter over the course of a few weeks, I'll do the same thing in Word. And sometimes I manage to even lose those, too.

Ultimately, after I've chewed on this stuff and written it down and rewritten it and thought out about it some more -- some refined version of all of this goes in my own design notes for the next session.

Often, those notes finally get written enough for the session and we play it.

After that, a lot of those notes are put into a retrospective summary of the adventure that is sent out to my players in an ongoing cumulative .pdf Campaign Journal. The whole process takes from anywhere between three and seven weeks.

However, lately, I've tried to keep the Campaign Journal stuff to a dull roar so far in my current campaign. In the last homebrewed campaign I ran, I found that preparing the extensive Campaign Journal had me spending spending increasingly too much time looking backwards and not enough time looking forwards to the next session. I'd end up spending 10 or 12 hours on getting the LAST session on paper and properly mapped and documented for mailing out to the players -- while I was spending maybe half that on the adventure I had yet to run.

If that seems ass-backwards to you -- I assure you that it wasn't making a whole lot of sense to me either.

Still - the players really liked getting the Campaign Journal before the next session as it served to focus them on the task at hand and remind them on where they were in the metaplot so far. It was also a nice memento document of the campaign.

My last one went to nearly 90 pages in 12 pt text, two column text, in full colour -- with maps and graphics of the battles fought during the entire campaign. It's an interesting keepsake and one which ten years or more from now will probably be looked upon with great fondness, if not nostalgia.

It's a shame they are so much work to create. *sigh*

 

[sev]

So how are you having problems keeping track of things in your spreadsheet? What is the issue exactly? Just having a hard time navigating your notes in an organized way? If so, and you are using Excel as your spreadsheet program, I might be able to offer some tips to help organize it. There are so many ways to do this in Excel. Hyperlinks, hiding/unhiding rows/columns, tabs, and so on.

My information's nonlinear, and my short-term memory holds three items. Figuring out how four different things interrelate doesn't work for me in excel because I have to remember where I was three clicks ago.