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My note system for #boatmode

I do have notes (which are especially extensive for the An Echo, Resounding domain/faction game, and for the rumor table) but I rely heavily on two other sources of documentation.

One is our campaign wiki. If I put something on there, that’s the Single Point of Truth—I usually don’t also put it into my own notes. A lot of the market stuff is on there, like how many potions of healing have been sold and how many are avaiable etc.

The other which is really something I rely heavily on is the players and their personal note systems and character sheets. If they find weird items, weird bottles, weird keys, I give them a code that’ll help me find out what it was later.

Before we came up with this solution, it was all “OK, it says on my sheet that I have this weird key that we must’ve picked up sometime ago… does it fit this lock?” or “I drink that that unidentified potion we found earlier, what happens?” and I’m like “….?!?!”

A “good” DM would have extensive records of everything her player finds. But I am, uh, let’s just call it “I work efficiently” instead of being lazy. I hand out a mix of page numbers, room numbers, chapter numbers, book initials, foreign language words… to try to obscure what the item is but still making it something that I as DM can use to retrieve it when necessary.

Also for gems, early on I’d give out gems and objects and being stingy with revealing the values of those gems or objects. These days I use a consistent maptable between gem descriptions and values. It also has some art objects; for art objects that aren’t in there I can either use the code system as described above, or stick a post-it on my description↔maptable page.

When running a huge #blorb campaign it’s great to be able to outsource stuff to the players, especially if they are taking notes or have good memories.

Sticking post-its directly in the modules is great too. “The player characters flipped over the chairs in this room” or “One of the soldiers in this room is dead” (if the soldier followed the noise to the party and got burninated by them).