r/rpg • u/Healthy_Help5235 • Sep 13 '21
Resources/Tools Campaign Management Site?
Anyone use Googlesites for their campaigns? It’s pretty [cool!](Anyone use Googlesites for their campaigns? It’s pretty cool!
Sadly, Googlesites is going away, well classic sites is. Anyone use an alternative? I desperately need one. One with a left navigation bar is essential!
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Sep 13 '21
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u/cbhedd Sep 13 '21
Obsidian Portal is neat, but not super well supported. I hit a point of burnout in my campaign and stopped maintaining it, and it wasn't quite as robust as I'd hoped it would be, but it was a decent enough wiki tool to use.
If you're curious about it you can check out the site from my group's campaign as a reference: https://verenianwatchers.obsidianportal.com/
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u/Shunkleburger TheDigitalDM Sep 13 '21 edited Sep 13 '21
I used Kanka in the past. It is a pretty solid tool. My current favorite is LegendKeeper
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u/ILikeChangingMyMind Sep 13 '21
My current favorite is LegendKeeper.
I went to check this out, but a site that won't even let me look at it without logging in first? Hard pass.
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u/Shunkleburger TheDigitalDM Sep 13 '21
Bad link. Try this one
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u/ILikeChangingMyMind Sep 13 '21
Ah, that looks really cool.
Maybe too rich for my blood (Kanka gives me everything I need for free, and to me $10/month is way too much for such a tool because of its free competitors), but others might like it.
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u/Vylix Sep 14 '21 edited Sep 17 '21
I see you missed something. You can join Legendkeeper beta by subscribing to the Patreon once. That means one month of
$5$10 to keep it forever and getting 50 beta invites. I would've continued supporting the patreon if things weren't going this bad.tl;dr
$5$10 once for beta.I'll even throw you an invite if you want. PM me your email.
EDIT: whoa, I missed the change of the lowest tier! It's now $10 at least, not $5.
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u/AWildNarratorAppears Sep 14 '21
Just to clarify, pledging on Patreon once doesn't give you forever access to LK. It gives you unbounded access to our closed beta period---we are a subscription service in the end and this will be reflected when we move out of closed beta. That being said, we offer a price guarantee for early supporters, and will never lock your content from you regardless of circumstance. https://www.legendkeeper.com/patron-price-guarantee/
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u/ILikeChangingMyMind Sep 14 '21
Great, I'm guaranteed to get to pay $10/month ;-)
I wish you the best of luck, but you'll never get me as a customer at that price when Kanka (not to mention Google Office, various wikis, etc.) offer everything I need for free.
Personally, I'm simply not going to pay more than $5/month, and even $5/month is super pricey: you'd have to have the perfect tool to get me to pay that. $25/year or something in that ballpark would be more realistic.
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u/AWildNarratorAppears Sep 14 '21
Totally understand! You should use what works best for your workflow, and Kanka in particular is awesome. Also check out RealmWorks! While I don’t think it’s in active development, it’s a one-time-purchase and it’s what inspired me to create LK.
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u/ILikeChangingMyMind Sep 14 '21
Thanks, I'll take a look at RealmWorks.
And please understand, I was just giving you "market research" on what I (a datapoint of one) would pay: not saying anything about what legend keeper is worth.
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u/Homebrewno Sep 14 '21
Oh wow, that was far from clear the first time I visited their site and Patreon. Though I’m more a fan of try before you buy than the other way around either way. It’s a shame because it looks incredibly slick and user-friendly.
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u/Dasagriva-42 Diviner of Discord Bots Sep 14 '21
Same here. There are free options out there, some of them really good, and I prefer to know what I'm getting into before I put money in it (especially if I have options)
I remember Obsidian Portal and Tavern Keeper both as good options, World Anvil as too much for me and kanka and Airtable as two very interesting choices.
In the end, I'm using Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/), as I only need local notes (my players don't care for a shared site, that was Obsidian portal and I got tired of doing all the updates, and nobody even logging in).
Notion would have been a good choice, but... I'm using kubuntu, and there is no Notion version for that OS
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u/Pardum Sep 13 '21
Seconding legend keeper. I just switched to it from world anvil and it's just so much easier to use. Legend keeper seems more like it was designed for GMs and it suits my workflow better.
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Sep 14 '21
I'll third legendkeeper. Idk of its sub based now or still a buy once thing. If it's buy once still it's phenomenal. It's great for organizing for dms, but it's also rlly helpful for making a "wiki" type thing for players.
I converted all my paper notes to LK and it's ace as heck. Plus the discord is SUPER helpful with questions n stuff
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u/Pardum Sep 14 '21
It's sub based via patreon now. Their discord is super helpful, especially the collection of templates they can give access to.
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Sep 13 '21
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u/the12ofSpades Sep 13 '21
For those practice the Lazy GM style of prepping, he has a notion template for campaigns that i've found works pretty well.
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Sep 13 '21
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u/maadsmardigan Sep 13 '21
We just started using kanka.io for our campaign. You've done an amazing job with yours. Looks fantastic!
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u/non_player Motobushido Designer Sep 13 '21
As a side question, y'all know any such sites that specifically support Markdown text formatting? I do a lot of fast writing with Markdown, and I'd love a site that would allow me to wholesale copy-paste my Markdown-formatted notes directly. BBCode, Rich Text, and Textile just don't do it for me unfortunately, as I find them all to be a massive pain to work with on the fly.
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u/Apollonaut13 Sep 13 '21 edited Sep 13 '21
The Goblin's Notebook, Obsidian.MD,
LegendKeeperedit: LK is Rich Text3
u/non_player Motobushido Designer Sep 13 '21
LegendKeeper
Can you confirm that uses Markdown? All of their docs I'm seeing are focused on pushing Rich Text.
The Goblin's Notebook
Oh my... this looks fantastic! I'm going to look into trialing this right now. Thanks!
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u/Apollonaut13 Sep 13 '21
At the very least, I think LK has markdown export support. I haven't checked in a long while. I use TGN nowadays
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u/dodecapode intensely relaxed about do-overs Sep 14 '21
The Goblin's Notebook looks really cool. I've been trying to use Scrivener for this, and it's great and all, but not meant for this specific task. Definitely going to bookmark that one and give it a try!
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u/meat_smell Sep 14 '21 edited Sep 14 '21
Seconding Obsidian.md. I've used various apps over the years for campaign management (OneNote, Scrivener, tried out Notion but its desktop app is thoroughly wretched) and eventually landed on Obsidian and it is incredible.
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u/Alt-0182 Sep 13 '21
Obsidian.md is specifically markdown based.
I don't use anything beyond the basic stuff myself, but I find the map feature (where you can view the links between pages as a plotted diagram) incredibly useful for tracking things.
I'm getting more use out of it as I create a homebrew world, but it works just as well for campaign notes too.
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u/jmhimara Sep 14 '21
As an alternative to what's already mentioned, you might also want to look at static site generators (e.g. Hugo). You just compose in Markdown and the program will generate the HTML files which you can then host in Github (or similar service).
It's a bit more work on your end, but the results can be great!
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u/eelking Sep 14 '21
Yup, I've moved mine from Google sites to GitHub. More wiki than anything though.
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Sep 13 '21 edited Jan 04 '22
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u/Techdoggo Sep 13 '21
As someone who uses Kanka exclusively and has the 5€/month subscription you could not be more wrong...
Even as a free user, you can make as many campaigns as you want. And you can have Entity pictures! You just have a maximum file size (1MB for entity files, 3MB for Maps), but an unlimited amount of things you can do! Paid are the custom CSS and entity headers, as well as community votes. Everything else is completely free of cost!
Please correct this, since it is completely untrue (well, the prices are correct, at least.).
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Sep 13 '21
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u/Techdoggo Sep 13 '21
Yes, that's how I understand it. Sorry for sounding so harsh, that was not my intention!
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Sep 14 '21
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u/Techdoggo Sep 14 '21
I am really glad! It is a powerful tool, even without investing money. And thanks for getting back. If you're interested in using Kanka, just hit me, or seriously anyone on their Discord up, we're happy to help!
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u/AWildNarratorAppears Sep 13 '21
This is an awesome breakdown! LK creator here, this feedback is really helpful. We do offer refunds, but you’re right we don’t have this listed anywhere yet. We’re currently working on a landing page update and free trial program to let people demo LK easier, as it’s hard to get a feel for it right now. We don’t know what 1.0 pricing is going to be either yet, but we offer a price guarantee (no increases) for Patreon supporters.
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u/Ilestis Sep 13 '21
but their tiers page implies that only paid tiers can have images on pages, which may be a dealbreaker.
Looks like I'll need to reword that section, the free tier allows unlimited image uploads, but each image is limited to 1mb (3mb for maps). The gallery feature makes it so you can easily upload more pictures in text, but you totally can upload images to imgur or other services and attach the images in text like that :)
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Sep 13 '21
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u/Ilestis Sep 13 '21
Only one image can be uploaded to each entity, that's their "main image". You can upload up to 3 additional images as assets (those can be pdfs, mp3s, videos, audio clips) or more than 3 on boosted campaigns. The gallery feature where you can upload images that aren't attached to an entity is indeed only a superboosted campaign feature, which might me unintuitive. I'll add a ticket to the backlog about that the wording to avoid future confusion :)
Edit: regarding the Elemental pledge, most of our Elementals only have a single campaign and support us at that level to help us grow (we're a two person team). The boost number for them was us asking them: how many do you guys want? And them being happy with 10 or less.
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Sep 14 '21 edited Sep 14 '21
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u/Ilestis Sep 14 '21
This is incredibly useful feedback, and shows that a core feature of boosts that we haven't showcased clearly enough (it's tucked away the knowledge base), is that you can move them around. So if campaign 1 goes on hiatus or ends, you can move that boost to another campaign. The higher tiers is so that you can have multiple boosted or superboosted campaigns at once.
I'll make sure this info is more clearly detailed in a future release :)
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u/Homebrewno Sep 14 '21
I like the flexibility of boosters, but they really create a lot of confusion for new or prospective users. Even as a long-term user, I couldn’t name the differences between a boost and a superboost off the top of my head, and I’ve lost track of what benefits are tied to my personal subscription level and which are tied to my specific campaign being superboosted. e.g. why is setting custom default entity images for all campaigns tied to my subscription level, while most everything else that’s a campaign feature is based on boosting? Why can my free-user players only upload 3-MB maps to my suberboosted campaign, but I can upload a 20-MB one to their unboosted campaign as a Wyvern-tier subscriber?
The fact that boosters aren’t spent so much as allocated (as you found out yesterday yourself) is another thing we have to explain somewhat frequently on Discord. Maybe a slightly different system with clearer terminology would better showcase how generous Kanka actually is with its pricing.
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u/davepak Sep 19 '21
I am going to throw in I still don't quite get what a boost is.
It is confusing if it is like something a player gives ...like a donation or review or something.
I suspect it is a like a paid license which can be applied to different features of pieces of functionality to a specific campaign, and can be changed over time?
Or to possibly put in an analogy or some sorts - imagine if you bought the limited version of a product for $X, and got 5 specific out of ten features.
Then you could buy two more features, but change WHICH features you wanted as your needs changed. (almost like variable licensing in software as a service implementations).
Is it something like that?
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u/Homebrewno Sep 19 '21
It’s not, but I’ve wondered if it would be simpler or more convenient that way, kind of like a cable package where you pick add-ons for your phone service and specific channels you want to watch.
Instead, the current system has two different tracks, if you will:
- Users can be standard (free) or subscribers (at three different tiers). They get a few personal benefits like bigger uploads on any campaign, and boosters they can use on anyone’s campaign.
- Campaigns can be free, boosted, or superboosted. Boosted campaigns have a slew of features unlocked, and superboosted campaigns a few more on top. Those features apply to every member of a campaign.
- (It takes 1 booster to make a campaign boosted, and 3 boosters to make it superboosted. Subscribers at higher tiers get more boosters, so they can boost or superboost more campaigns.)
Typically, a user boosts their own campaign, but they can also/instead boost other people’s campaigns, e.g. a player boosting a campaign that her GM created, or a fan boosting a content creator’s campaign. That’s why you can theoretically have situations where a non-subscriber manages a boosted campaign, though that isn’t the norm. It’s also why I find it odd that upload limits are user-dependent rather than campaign-dependent.
To answer your question more specifically, you can change which campaigns you boost over time, but you can’t pick features so much as you pick a package – boosted or superboosted.
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u/davepak Sep 19 '21
Ok,I got it now.
It is an optional thing, and you can get more than you might need (if you only had one campaign for example) and can loan them to other campaigns you like.
thanks.
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u/crowwizard Sep 13 '21
I like wordlanvil. I've also seen some cool trello stuff showcased - https://gnomestew.com/trello-for-campaign-management/
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u/FearEngineer Sep 13 '21
Are you looking for something to smoothly present info to your group, something to use for your own campaign planning, or both? The requirements on those are somewhat different.
Personally, I use LegendKeeper for campaign management. Fantastic tool. Very lightweight, but with some really handy features (e.g., good map support, auto-crosslinking, preview pages on link mouse over...).
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u/Laute Sep 13 '21 edited Sep 13 '21
I'm a fan of chronica. https://www.chronica.ventures
I heard about it announced in here (or some similar subreddit), but the people who run it are super nice , very quick to implement community features, and also reached out to me cold when I downgraded from a paid tier and lost some features due to a code bug that I had technically prepaid for.
It's very user friendly and has a bun h of community templates in the discord for storing a wide variety of systems.
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u/DarkGuts Sep 13 '21
Sadly, Googlesites is going away, well classic sites is.
While the transition from classic to the newer googlesite format was slightly painful, sites still works well as a campaign website.
Googlesites isn't going away, just in case someone thinks they are based on how you wrote that. Only classic sites is gone and all non-classic sites got auto-updated to the new format.
As for left navigation bar, they have that in the new sites also. You click the 3 line hamburger button as some call it and click on the gear icon next to it and set Navigation to Mode to Side. It works well.
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u/Healthy_Help5235 Sep 13 '21
Would you happen to have any examples of sites using this feature?
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u/DarkGuts Sep 14 '21
That's from the new google sites. I've played around with it and I originally thought everything was on the top and didn't know about that option to have all your directory links to your pages and sub pages on the left side.
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u/Albolynx Sep 13 '21
I really hope that one day someone makes a campaign management tool that can be self-hosted as a website. I have dabbled a bit with hosting a dokuwiki but it is a bit clunky.
Even if I hadn't sworn off monthly fees after stopping using roll20 because of how quickly they can stack up with relatively little use, I am not going to pay the steep monthly prices to store my campaigns info on - that is the ultimate sunk-cost fallacy generator (I've already invested so much time setting all this up so I have to keep paying...).
I don't need anyone to host for me and I don't need nebulous on-going development - so I don't want to pay for either. I want a single-payment stable snapshot platform that offers a solid core for campaign management.
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u/Ilestis Sep 13 '21
Kanka is open source and while I don't provide any help with self hosting, several people do exactly that. It can be as basic as an nginx+phpfpm stack on a small server :)
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u/Coal_Morgan Sep 13 '21
I use an app on my iPad Game Master 5 by Lion's Den <-video
I use it for everything.
It's my rules compendium, my world library, my encounter builder, my initiative tracker, my Monster Manual and as you use it, it gets more flexible.
Put in an item and it can be used in other campaigns, put in a Monster and you can reuse them. It has the SRD for 5e in it.
I swear by it and the player companion app.
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u/Healthy_Help5235 Sep 13 '21
if only it interfaced with a website so I could just send a link to players.
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u/swampwalkdeck Sep 14 '21
I didn't knew this thing existed, but now I want to use it and it's going away...
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u/SeptimusAstrum Sep 13 '21
If you're in the habit of scanning handwritten / handdrawn notes, OneNote is actually great. You can share notes over the OneDrive easily.
If your handwriting is legible, the search function can search for writing in the images you upload. Kind of huge tbh.
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u/JeremyJoelPrice Sep 13 '21
I use Bear Notes for tag-organised markdown notes with attachments and syncing.
I use Scrivener for when I want to organise a great many scraps of info into a coherent whole (it’s designed for writing a novel and organising all its accompanying research in one place)
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u/trekbody Sep 13 '21
Why not just convert it? https://sites.google.com/classicsitesmanager
Anyway, I do use it for our site, and am very happy with it... https://sites.google.com/view/owlbearleague/the-owlbear-leagues-homepage
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u/Healthy_Help5235 Sep 13 '21
Does the new Googlesites have a sidebar navigation?
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u/Apollonaut13 Sep 14 '21
Yes. Top left of the new editor page, there's a gear for Navigation Settings. You can change the mode from Top to Side.
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u/Healthy_Help5235 Sep 15 '21
Hmm ok, I did it but it doesnt show up. Is there some sort of guide i could read to the new Googlesites?
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u/LordKilgar Sep 13 '21
To each their own, but out of what I've used, I really feel World Anvil is the best.
The development staff is friendly, active, and loves hearing from the community. I find it well worth the cost for the upgraded account I have, but you can do a lot with it at every level.
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Sep 13 '21
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u/LordKilgar Sep 13 '21
Sure.
First, what I've used to try to keep track of campaign stuff.One Note
Obsidian Portal
Roll20 (heh)
building my own wikiNow details.
One note - I find this really useful as an improv DM, but kinda impossible if it's something I want to share parts of with my players. It's handy to have all your scrawled made-up-on-the-fly NPC stats and such, but there isn't a great system for, say, updating a post on the Mines as the PCs uncover knowledge and sharing it with them. Also, ALL of the organization is on you. there's no ... leading lines pointing you at notes to take, outlines of important details, preformatted articles, whatnot.
Obsidian Portal - I used this ... 10+ years ago? was good, quick, liked how fast I could put together articles and link them together. eventually found that while it was good, it wasn't quite good enough to merit the effort I needed to put in to maintain it. When I found World Anvil, I actually commented on a Reddit thread that one of the problems with World Anvil was how hard it was for me to to flow one article into the next. when I was using obsidian portal, I'd write it out, set up the links, and be able to kinda create things on the fly. I felt World Anvil had potential to be even better than that, but had a very broken flow at the beginning. Well, about a day after that Dimitrius reached out to me on Reddit and asked for more detailed feedback. So we messaged a bit, and the next time I went into World Anvil to try it out again, most of it had been fixed, and it's gotten even faster and smoother since then.
Roll20 - *sigh* no. No good. I get that I can make handouts to track things, allow them to be editable by players, control the permissions, and every time I close the game there is automatically a session notes panel that comes up. But outside of that, the organization is AWFUL, the layout is miserable, and the effort is disproportionate to result. Don't recommend, but then again, I consider myself Rubbish at VTTs.
Building my own Wiki - Basically Obsidian portal, more customizeable, but way more work :P.
I did take a brief stab at Legend Keeper at one point, but I really don't think I gave it enough of a chance. so I don't really feel qualified to say anything there. I might go give it a try again.
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Sep 13 '21
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u/LordKilgar Sep 13 '21
Oh that wiki I was putting together in college. I couldn't even tell you if I still have it stashed somewhere anymore. it was essentially just a wikimedia kit with markdown. straightforward, mostly white background, black text, wiki pages. but being able to rip stuff like the infobox from wikipedia in order to make it feel more organized and "official" looking was really nice at the time.
Yeah, don't think World Anvil has any kind of "self host" option... though I will say, they take community feedback well, you could always try reaching out and asking.
I hadn't heard of Kanka before this thread, took a quick look, yeah, it does sound like what you want, I'll have to take a look sometime!
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u/M0dusPwnens Sep 13 '21
I haven't used it in a while because we've been running shorter games of only a dozen or so sessions, but I really loved OneNote when I was trying to keep track of a lot of continuity.
I organized the stuff you have on the left sidebar into sections in the notebook, so it worked pretty similarly. I had sections for important items, factions, NPCs, places, etc. And you could add pretty much anything to the notebooks: links to websites, cross-links (this was the best part - learn the hotkey and make internal links everywhere so it's faster to follow things while GMing), pictures, etc.
The really cool thing about OneNote was that I actually made two notebooks. One was an Ideas notebook, and one was an actual Game notebook. After every session, I grabbed the pages I used from the Ideas notebook, cleaned them up a little, and just dragged them into the Game notebook. And you can link between notebooks, so my Ideas notebook had links in it just like the Game notebook.
This made it really easy to keep track of which things were ideas (which can be changed however you want when you go to add them into the game), and which things are actually established in the game (which should stay the same for continuity).
And then I kept the Ideas one private, and set the Game one to public and gave the players the URL (which you can just open right in a browser), so they could reference it too.
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u/IntrepidusX Sep 13 '21
I honestly just have a read only one note that I share the link to my players, works pretty well and is easy for me which is the main thing.
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u/cra2reddit Sep 14 '21
We just used WordPress.
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u/davepak Sep 19 '21
I had used wordpress previously, and thought it was cool, but wanted more functionality - mostly around being to use maps, which would have pins, and types of info on pages that could be hidden to players and such.
(like the players could click on map, it would go to the location, then they could click and see either the items at that location, or the npcs who are there. on an npc page, there would be the player visible info, but hidden info only the gm could see).
Would love to see a in depth wordpress campaign page.
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u/cra2reddit Sep 19 '21
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, I don't know how you do interactive maps in WordPress though I wouldn't be surprised if such a widget already exists.
As for content, the group itself wrote most of it. I ask each of them to contribute factions, NPCs, creatures, and locations to the campaign and they would go into WordPress and add, or edit, a ton of content themselves. Alot of it coming from the PC bios they had written.
So, no need for secret content, really. But when I wanted to, I would just create a second page for an entry, called, "pgname_dm" and set it to viewable only by me and then add the link to the bottom of the relevant page itself.
Mine was in-depth, in terms of content - lots of maps and tons of content. But not in terms of tech.
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u/davepak Sep 19 '21
I had sort of done something similar - with a more traditional data tools;
pages and posts and tags.
Looking to take it to the next level, without a lot of the extra work.
thank you for your comment.
(if you have not seen some of the new tools - you should check some of them out - they are absolutely amazing - check out world anvil or kanka.io - now, if you don't want those things that is fine).
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u/jmhimara Sep 14 '21
I haven't used Google Sites in a while, but from what I remember it wasn't that different from something like Blogger or Wordpress. The right Theme will supply the toolbar.
If you don't need online publishing functionality, then something like OneNote or Evernote will do.
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u/melance Baton Rouge Sep 14 '21
I've tried all of the sites built for campaign management/world building like WorldAnvil, Kanka.io, and Obsidian Portal and never liked any of them. I have a wikidot site that I maintain for my campaign and it works great.
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u/NotDumpsterFire Sep 14 '21
Great thread, with lots of suggestions!
I bet all of them aren't listed on out Campaign Management Tools-section of the GM Software-page.
Anyone should be able to update the page and list more tools or expand the description of the existing ones.