This is a guest post by Laura Heilman (Collegia Obscura on the Treasure Tables Forums), who brought up this excellent idea in our thread on organizing campaign ideas.
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Organizing your campaign ideas can be a challenge. This is especially true when the ideas have not entirely gelled into a cohesive whole.
Try using 3×5 index cards and a cork board to easily organize and reorganize your ideas in flux.
The bigger the cork board, the better! Pin up cards with the features you want to use in the order you want to use them. Use string to connect ideas if planning becomes too complex.
Using different colored cards will allow you to include magic, treasure and NPCs with ease, and move them around with very little effort if you change your mind about their placement.
This card and cork board technique can also be useful for keeping track of histories when building settings. Royal families or political intrigues are much easier to handle, as are plots that involve multiple viewpoints of a single event.
You can also organize climate, major geographical features and even cultures using this method. Try arranging the cards to match climatic zones to get a solid impression of how the world will fit together.
If you are less concerned with the tactile, or do not have the space to accommodate a cork board, you can use the same techniques in electronic format by building organization charts in many computer applications.
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Thanks, Laura! I love this idea — it’s simple but versatile, and it makes use of one of my favorite GMing tools: Index cards (handy for tracking initiative, among other things).
If a cork board is not available, post-its make a magnificent alternative. Harder to stack after the fact, but easier to move around, and requires less hardware for your planning phase.
Of course, if you really wanna go nuts, they now make Post-it Index cards…..
Also, there is a whole school of software planning theory built up around using those techniques. If the idea really floats your boat, might want to look into some of those theories.
Those techniques are especially useful when you have a handful of people trying to brainstorm or design at once. Get everyone in a room and put one person in charge of recording what everyone says. (Maybe rotate who this person is over the course of the session.)
Thanks for writing this. I was excited about it when i saw it on he forums, and even more excited when I saw Martin’s request to make it into a gues feature. Neat stuff!
“…you can use the same techniques in electronic format by building organization charts in many computer applications”
I’ve recently started using this technique to create my maps. And just as it can be used to come up with a logical physical layout I can really see its usefulness in ‘mapping’ the plot. Thanks!
Index cards and post-it notes together make a lethally efficient combination for hassle-free DMing. I endorse both whole-heartedly.
The cork board is a really neat innovation.
Like CJ, I also thought of software planning when I first read this — but apart from knowing that people build software this way, I have no idea how it works, if there are any codified approaches, etc.
Does anyone have so more background on this?