In his first post, new forum member Berwick asked a good question: What should go in your GM notebook?
xcorvis responded with a link to GMing resource I hadn’t seen before: Nightcloak’s GM Notebook (274 kb PDF). Thanks, xcorvis!
This free PDF clocks in at 62 pages, and in addition to presenting a section-by-section approach to building a GM notebook, it goes the extra mile by including blank forms and plenty of examples. It’s geared towards fantasy, but should be easy enough to generalize to other genres.
(You might also enjoy the comments on Do You Use a GM Binder? here on TT, and Roleplaying Tips #69, which is also all about creating a GM notebook.)
Awesome, I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time. Thanks!
I downloaded it fromthe link in the original post. Wow! It’s chock full of good organizational ideas that can be adapted to just about any campaign.
i keep everything on my laptop computer, but there’s some good ideas here. some of the organization tables should fit right into a website or twiki.
I’m using my laptop for pretty much everything in my game.
For character sheets and management I’ve got RPGXplorer. Since the characters are pretty trivial to produce this way, my “named” NPCs can get full workups.
For my homebrew world, I have a wiki at Schtuff.com which my players and I work together to keep up. One of the players is a primary author for the campaign setting so he has a special “author” permission on the site. All the players can edit their own character’s pages and have the world documents to reference and there’s Dungeon Master permissions on some specific documents.
At the table, I’m adopting a stronger “winging it” ethic. I have a TreeDBNotes setup with session notes that get transcribed to the wiki as necessary. I’m also jotting down a bunch of “bangs” and Adventure Funnels in reserve here to spring on players as appropriate.
Keeping in mind that no plot will survive contact with the PCs, I’m giving up the idea of telling “The Story” and telling “a story” instead. It’s sort of experimental but it should be fun anyway.
I’m using InspirationPad for my random generators, if I pre-type my tables then I can sort of steer the “randomness” towards my campaign’s flavor without having to do too much wasted pre-writing the players will foul up for me.
Having WiFi at the table, I can quickie Google my way out of a bind.
Yunt said: I’m giving up the idea of telling “The Story†and telling “a story†instead. It’s sort of experimental but it should be fun anyway.
That is the best way to GM I think. Trying to keep the loose framework intact, even if the main story gets shredded. I used to make a joke and give all the PC’s a skill in plot deconstruction.
The laptop is great for gaming, and I’m a HUGE proponent of it. The one major benefit of it is having all your notes there and handy, but also being able to queue up music, reference pics, and even use IM for private note sending. Doesn’t mean you can’t use a GM notebook though. I’ve always used Excel to make an electronic GM notebook with all of my reference information easily available. Then I just go from tab to tab. A lot of the stuff in Nightcloak’s GM Notebook, is stuff I’ve incorporated into my own.
On a side note, a great device for GMing, out of a laptop, would be some kind of mini screen, attached to a fairly long USB cable, that you could send text messages to from the computer it was attached to. I can think of multiple ways to do this, just none cheap.
drow, Yunt, John or anyone else who uses a laptop when they GM: If you’re interested in writing a guest post for TT about how to make this work well, I’d love to publish it here. It’s a great topic, and I’ve never used a laptop for gaming myself.
If you’re interested, drop me a line!
Wow.. that was really well written! Also, it is a major help to me as I’m beginning to feel overwhelmed by my campaign. Thanks! -Jill