So my ill-fated AD&D campaign continues in its bountiful nowhereness.
I’m now up to 100 or so pages of campaign background materials. But I’ve put so much time into it that it no longer feels like gaming prep, it’s now more like some big disjointed world history…
One thing that I am always contending with is organization. I’ve got two main parts: the area of the world where the campaign was intended to take place, and the rest of the world, and I have the same organization issues with both. Initially, the materials started out as a series of seperate documents for each area. For example, for the campaign area there were documents for the following themes: Area introduction, history, gazetteer of places and roads, money and taxation, religion, law and the military, key npcs, stories for some of those key npcs, detailed documents for key areas, documents on random NPC generation, details on how the political system works, and a number of documents I used to figure out the demographics of the area.
I realized that these were getting muddled… Military npcs could end up in both the law documents and the NPC’s document, the paladins of the church would be in the military section, the npc section, and the religion section… And as it is a living document, I could change the info on someone, something, or some place, in one or two documents, but forget about it in a third… So I tried putting it all together into one single document, but that came with it’s own issues. To have it feel like a document one could read, I omitted a bunch of the boring details (which get more and more expansive daily), but they still had to be somewhere so the initial documents would remain, and then get out of accuracy again.
I looked at the Greyhawk book, but that just didn’t have the right feel. Then, a friend loaned me The Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. I liked a lot of how that was organized, but, again, all my little details would muddle the works. Now I’m thinking of a main document that alludes to everything and then says, for each section, “for more details see…” and then list the relevant external document.
I’ve also thought about HTML. Maybe switching from what I’m using (local .odt files) and moving to a webpage setup with hyperlinks and all, would make it easier to organization.
Anyway, I don’t know.
Leave a Reply