Test Driving a Campaign Status Document

I’m maintaining a Campaign Status Document. (Sidenote: In Emacs 📖 of course. ) . I learned of the Campaign Status Document in Justin Alexander’s So You Want to be a Game Master 📖 .

I have the following top-level headlines:

• Persona Gratis: Player Characters (PCs 📖) and Non-Player Characters (NPCs 📖) .
• Sessions: Notes for each session.
• Procedures: Random encounters and local phenomenon by region.
• Clocks: Events in motion.
• Scenario Updates: Tracking changes to any published material.
• Timeline Bangs: Things that could come into play; often with questions.
• Background Events: Notes on things that have happened; often with questions about what it means.

I’ve written up session reports. (Sidenote: Which I enjoy writing. ) But these are not as useful for sustaining long-term campaigns; the long-term information remains scattered across many documents. The status document provides a framework; a framework that jolted me out of my previous patterns for role-playing game note taking.

Which is a bit of a tangent, but highlights a trapping of routine. Namely, I’ve run lots of games, taking notes on many of them; writing session reports on some of them. Reading So You Want to be a Game Master helped me introspect on my approach; one that was partially informed by How to Take Smart Notes. (Sidenote: The Campaign Status Document is a verbose index document. Critical to it’s utility is updating and archiving it. )

Diving into the Document

The above is an expansion of the original, but it is working for me; in part because of the different views and actions I can take.

• Outline
• Random dice roller
• Jump to PDFs or URLs
• Overview of Characters

Outline

I use Org-Mode 📖 for my writing. When I’m on a headline, I can “tab” through opening and closing headlines: show only top-level, show all headlines, show all content.

I also make use of the imenu package; I can have a second panel open showing me a navigable overview.

I can also type a hot key to bring up a searchable menu of headlines, select one and go there.

In other words, I can quickly move around a growing document.

Random Dice Roller

I have written up a random-table.el an “Emacs package to provide means of registering and rolling on random tables.” This means I have quick access in my note taking utility to roll up and insert randomly generated content.

After Howard Abrams’s How I play TTRPGs in Emacs presentation at EmacsConf 2023 I’m exploring switching to his emacs-rpgdm package. I’ve done some preliminary work, but need to prioritize exploring that. Why? Because his solution for random tables is a bit more robust (though I know I have some edge-cases that are not implemented).

Jump to PDFs or URLs

I have a general text editor function where I can add a line of “metadata” to my Org-Mode document. Namely the path to a resource and it’s label. In this way, my campaign status document has always available links to Errant 📖 ’s rules book and Game Master (GM 📖) screen, a link to the PDF 📖 I’m running, and a link to my Errant Encumbrance, Speed, and Movement Dice Calculator.

This functionality is part of my Emacs project package.

Overview of Characters

I am keeping notes about each PC and NPC ; some more detailed than others. Along with the notes, each character has the following metadata:

• Name
• Pronouns
• Background
• Demeanor

I can then run a command to quickly show me a tabular view of all characters and those four fields of metadata. What this means is that I can easily transform how I’m looking at the document; from a “book” type format in which I’m looking at long-form notes into a tabular overview of information.

Conclusion

Prior to running online games I never used a computer at my game table. But since adopting Emacs and running sessions online I’ve come around to having a computer behind my GM screen.

Now my “note-taking” page is a high utility multi-functional multi-modal document; an anchor for moving between the myriad of information forms that I reference. But I don’t sit behind the computer. I prefer to stand while running games; when I need the information or want a break from standing I sit down and then reference my computer.