Organizing your campaign for free or cheap

May 22, 7:58 AMChicago RPG ExaminerMichael Shorten

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If you've been following along in my "free or cheap" series, you've gotten yourself a game, a collection of adventures, maybe some maps and other resources and you've found players - or you've found a game to play in!

As a Dungeon Master, you probably have quite a few pages of notes, maps and other information that you might want to organize for your benefit or for the benefit of others to use. You might also want to provide tools for your players to communicate with, or to give them access to information that they might find interesting or need.

There are many tools available for free (or cheap) on the Internet that allow you to do just that. They range from simple tools to more complex setups, but all are geared towards allowing you to better organize your information and your games.

Google tools

Google is certainly one of the largest names in "free tools" and it's easy to take advantage of those tools for your campaign. Google Groups provides a ready-made email list service, allowing your campaign to have a private email list. You can also use Google Docs to edit and share game related documents like rules or setting information. You can also have a free campaign website from Google's Sites, or use Sites to host files that you want to make available for people to download.

Your own wiki

Wikis are collections of pages that you create using wiki software. The pages allow you to organize information that is easily categorized and linked together. Obviously, Wikipedia is proof that the idea works well. Wikipedia is driven by the freely available mediawiki software.

By creating a wiki, you can easily organize your information by any format you wish, as well as allowing only your game players (or those you choose) to make updates. The downside to having your own wiki is that you need your own hosting service and site. Alternatively, if you like the idea of controlling your own wiki, you can utilize a free wiki service like Wikidot to provide a complete wiki for you, hosted and installed.

If trying to learn the mediawiki software sounds daunting, you might want to consider a much simpler wiki software. TiddlyWiki provides the same ability for linking/categorizing as it's bigger brother, but is done via one page and simple commands. It's very easy to edit and upload to your existing website, if you have one. It also provides the ability to use "plug-ins" to make it more powerful, all still in one page.

Obsidian Portal

If all this talk about editing and managing and uploading just doesn't seem to be your thing, but the idea of a linkable, manageable set of pages is, Obsidian Portal is your place to go. This site provides free campaign resource management, in the form of campaign pages/wikis, online character sheets, forums, places to upload your maps (and tag them like Google Maps to links within your campaign wiki) and more. Some of the options, like forums and multiple maps, are free, but the vast majority of the site's usefulness is free and it's very good. I've been using Obsidian Portal for awhile now, and I'm very pleased with it, even with just having the freebies. My favorite part is the ability to allow the players to edit information, but have DM-Only sections to the page/information that they can't see!

NOTE: Obsidian Portal has agreed to give any of my readers a free one month subscription to the paid services when they sign up for new accounts! (if you sign up as a free or paid user, you still get the one month free paid subscription) Wow! Use the promo code of examiner-free-cheap - Thank you, Obsidian Portal!

Campaign Builders Guild

You might be looking for tools or places to go to help you imagine and create a campaign as well as manage it - the Campaign Builders Guild is an excellent resource to check out. There are many homebrew examples as well as people who are willing to help you plan (and manage) your campaign.

DungeonMastering.com Tools

If 4E is your game, then DungeonMastering.com Tools should be on your list of sites to help you manage the creation of your monsters, encounters, traps, treasure and more, then export them to your blog, Obsidian Portal (there are direct links between the two sites) or download them for printing for your game. You can save them on the site for later use. The site is free, although there are some caps to how many cards you can create. Paying the fee removes those caps.

D&D Insider - Campaign Tools

There has been a lot of grumbling from Wizards of the Coast's D&D Insider (DDI) customers that there are no campaign management tools - but this note from DDI indicates that they may be coming soon.

Do you know any tools that I should have mentioned? Let me know in a comment!

For more info: Dungeons and Dragons for free or cheap, Adventures and supplements for free or cheap, Maps and mapping tools for free, Finding games for free