Amaril, author of the brand-new blog The Immaterial Plane, emailed me about Enhancing Your RPG Games with Google, his post about the many ways you can manage, organize, plan out and otherwise spruce up your campaign with Google’s free tools (thanks, Amaril!).
You can get some of these same benefits by blogging your game sessions or using a wiki to manage your campaign (see the free PDF Using a GMing Wiki: It Slices, It Dices for lots of ideas), but before reading this post I’d never considered just how many game-related tasks you can handle using Google alone.
This post is a quick read full of good ideas, and the synthesis is impressive. I hope to see more great GMing content on The Immaterial Plane in the future.
Thanks, Martin! It was one of those ideas that arose out of private brainstorming session to address different needs in our group. I hope that others see these tools as valuable alternatives to conventional gaming practices as I do. At some time, I might expand on it a bit to illustrate how some of these options are better than those conventions (e.g. – depending on a single player to accurately track the party treasure and money).
Warhoon, I dig your blog. Who in your gaming group posts, player or GM? I’m thinking of asking one of my players to keep an in-character, third-person journal. He has a strong imagination for creative writing, and might be the perfect person to take on that role.
Sometimes, however, I think it might be better if a GM keeps the journal because it can greatly add to the “feel” of the campaign and set up the mood for the next session.
As an aside, I was thinking about other Google tools that can be used, specifically Google Pages. Creating sites in Google Pages seems a bit clunky, and I’m not sure what it would have to offer that pages and files in a Google Group or Google Docs couldn’t handle. The only thing it might be good for is creating a single location on the web where players can access everything associated with the campaign.
If you expand or follow up on your post, Amaril, I’d love to hear about it. 🙂
I’ve updated the entry with a link to a printer-friendly copy in Google Docs & Spreadsheets. I also included a note about subscribing to the Blogger feed using iGoogle rather than a Google Reader gadget.
I thought some more about Google Page Creator for creating a site, but honestly, iGoogle is the best option since it allows customization of the presentation.
Look for more ideas regarding distribution of illustrations, maps, and other handouts in the near future.