How Do You Organise Long-haul Campaigns?

[Imaculata]

My pirate campaign has been running for several years, and I've gathered all my lore in 4 books. I have a chapter dedicated to the setting in general, describing factions, regions and certain islands. Then I have a chapter every big location. Every one of these starts with a basic description, before listing every sub location, and describing them. For example, each capital city has a list of important locations, which also lists the npc's that are there. And each of these locations has a short description as well. I also keep one big list of npc's, a list of the names of the months and seasons. A list for all the types of currency. A list of all the deities, etc.

Then there's a book with every map of every city, dungeon, or other location I've ever made a map for.

Then I have a book with all the monsters, including custom ones.

Lastly a book of custom equipment. My campaign features a lot of firearms, that are homebrew additions. Also upgrades for ships, armaments for ships, and gadgets from other expansion books. Each faction has their own shopping list of equipment.

It seemed like the only way to keep a campaign of this size organized.

 

[John Dallman]

I keep everything in local documents (currently Libre Office, formerly Microsoft Office) on the laptop I use for online play. I generally start with a campaign concept document, where I argue with myself about the key ideas until they make sense. Then I'll split several documents out of that: one about character generation, and one with scenario ideas are constants, but others depend on the form of the campaign.

For my current occult WWII in India campaign, there are documents about NPCs and custom magic systems. For a space navy game, there was one about the ship the PCs crewed, and its relationship to other ships in the same squadron and levels of command above their captain.

When I ran games face-to-face, I aimed to have a single sheet of printout with the information I needed for each session. I'd make notes on that and transcribe them back into the document between sessions. Nowadays, I rarely print anything and make notes directly into the documents.

 

[Gilladian]

I write everything either in my wiki or as a text document. After every adventure I transcribe any necessary info into the wiki. Since I run about 80% of my campaigns in my own world, this means I am always growing my world lore and history. After 30 years, there is a lot of content! PB wiki has made it doable.

 

[AnotherGuy]

I have a multi-party same-player long haul campaign going, which spans over 7 years. I predominantly use published material WoTC and DM's guild so it is relatively easier than having to create constant content and the information is already organised for me in the respective modules and APs. I obviously do create additional content and that is usually typed up on word/excel files.

I then take what I need from the material and my docs and organise it on our Obsidian Portal site.
It is NOT up to date (never is), but I attempt to upload wiki pages between sessions. It is a constant work-in-progress and an effort from me lately. I haven't uploaded anything from January 2022 so I have plenty of homework.

I don't do session write-ups as I find that extremely tedious and I would never be able to recall everything. I use the format found in one of the chapters of Storm King's Thunder where it has an alphabetical mini-wiki of the North.
So I have created a (1) similar alphabetical wiki providing locations, people, organisations, items and the like. Then for ease of reference I then have a guide (1) which gathers similar entries together (i.e. Artifacts, Dragons, Personalities) and lastly (3) I have chapters, broken down into episodes which lists the relevant wiki entries.
Beyond that (4) I have an admin page which reflects which wiki pages I have added or amended in a specific month.

Below is the Alphabetical Wiki


Wiki Guide


Chapters and Episodes (and relevant wiki entries)


Amended and Uploaded pages