How to organize campaign notes your players can't spoil

Every game master keeps two versions of one world. The first is everything you know: who lit the fire, what is under the chapel, which friendly innkeeper is on the payroll. The second is what the table has learned so far. Most advice on how to organize campaign notes covers the first version only. The trouble starts where the two meet: a recap that names someone a session early.

This post gives you a way to keep both versions in one set of notes, then shows how Plotra does it. The examples use a small invented campaign, "The Drowned Bell". Three ships have wrecked on the rocks off the harbor town of Harrowmere in one month. The truth: the harbormaster, Odile Vance, pays the lighthouse keeper, Tam Corrin, to douse the lamp when a rich cargo is due, and the Salvagers' Guild sells what washes up. The player characters are Brannoc, Isme and Pell.

Two versions of one world

Every line in your notes has two properties: whether it is true, and whether the table knows it. That gives you three kinds of line.

• Known. Odile Vance is the harbormaster, and she hired the party.
• True, but not known yet. The lamp was dark on the night of each wreck. You plan for this to come out in session 3.
• For you only. When cornered, Vance blames Corrin first. The players will never read this line. They will watch it happen.

The third kind is easy to forget. It is not a secret waiting for its reveal. It is a running instruction, and it should never reach a handout.

The common fix is two documents, a game master copy and a player copy. They drift apart, because every change has to be made twice. Keep one set of notes and mark each line instead.

Organize prep by session

Give every session its own folder or section. The session is the unit of player knowledge: "what do they know" always means "as of which session".

A prep note needs four parts. Here is session 2 of the example.

• Where we left off. The party agreed to watch the lighthouse overnight.
• Likely scenes. The lamp room. The Guild's auction on the quay. Corrin's cottage.
• What can come out. The lamp log has a torn page. The Guild sold cargo from all three wrecks.
• For you only. Corrin will lie about the log once, badly. If Pell presses him, he breaks.

Keep the world itself outside the session folders. Vance is one page, wherever she appears, and each prep note links to her. After you play, put what happened in the same folder as the prep.

The pages a campaign needs

One page per thing, linked to each other. Six kinds cover most campaigns.

Give each secret a page of its own, so it can carry a list of who knows it and when they found out. It is a story bible with one more column: the table.

Mark what is for your eyes only

Mark paragraphs, not pages. An NPC's page is mostly public, with one or two lines that are not. Here is Vance's page.

In a plain document, a prefix does the job: GM: for never, S3: for held until session 3. Decide when you write the line, not when you are assembling a recap.

Watch what sits outside the paragraphs. A page titled "Vance the wrecker" gives the game away in any index. Keep titles and one-line summaries safe to read aloud, and put the secret in a marked paragraph.

Record what each session revealed

After each session, write a reveal log. It is the second version of the world, written down.

Three rules keep the log useful.

1. Write the recap from the log, not from memory. A recap of session 2 uses rows 1 and 2 and nothing else.
2. Record false beliefs. If the table thinks Corrin is only careless, your recap must not correct them by accident.
3. Record who learned it. If only Pell saw the torn page, that is Pell's knowledge until Pell's player shares it.

Keep a clue list beside the log: what was planted, in which session, and where it pays off. Tracking who knows what is also how you avoid plot holes, the kind where an NPC acts on something nobody told them.

How Plotra keeps both versions in one project

In Plotra, a tabletop project starts close to this shape. Choose A tabletop campaign when you create it and it opens on "Session 1 prep", inside a "Session 1" folder, with folders for "Player characters", "NPCs" and "Places" and a release called "Session 1". The game masters guide covers the setup.

• Sessions are releases. After you play, open the Release roadmap, press Release and set Ships to that session's folder. Everything inside the folder is then revealed by that session, with no further tagging. Reveal an NPC's page in the session where the players first met them, from the Story tab of the inspector.
• Paragraphs carry the marks. Put the cursor in a paragraph, press ⌘⌥T and set Revealed to "Never (the audience isn't told)", or to a later session to hold it until then. See block tags.
• "World as of" is the reveal log. Choose the last session under World as of in the roadmap toolbar. Notes the players haven't reached dim in the binder, game master lines blur in the text, and the Codex, graph and timeline leave out what is unknown. This is the spoiler horizon. It is a way of looking, not a lock: a dimmed note still opens, and search still finds every note.
• Secrets & setups holds who knows what. Track a secret, which characters know it, the scene where they learn it, and whether they hold the truth or a false version. The Setups and payoffs tab has a "Clue" kind, with where it was planted and where it pays off. See who knows what.

The sample campaign, "Ashes at Carrow Ford", has three sessions as releases. The reeve's page is revealed in Session 1, the paragraph about his second ledger is tagged for Session 3, and the notes on how he behaves when cornered are tagged Never.

What to hand the players between sessions

Players need two things between sessions: a recap of last time, and a small wiki of the people and places they have met. Neither should be your working notes.

In Plotra, the wiki comes from the Publish view, which needs the Publishing module switched on. Choose the last session under As of and press Download .zip on the wiki card. You get a folder of plain web pages: one for every revealed character, place and world entry, linked to each other, without the passages tagged for later or Never. For a recap or a handout, an export made at a spoiler horizon holds only the text revealed by that session.

Know the limits before you send anything.

• Sharing the project shows a player everything. A viewer reads every note, and the spoiler horizon is their own setting, not yours.
• The read-only link ignores every reveal. It shows unrevealed notes and passages tagged Never, with nothing to say they were meant to be hidden. See a read-only link.
• Plotra does not host the wiki. It is a zip of static files, a copy from the moment you downloaded it. Upload it to any host that serves plain files, or send the folder as it is. After the next session, download it again and replace the files. See putting it online.
• Titles, aliases, synopses and properties are published whole. Reveal tags hide notes and passages, not fields.
• The wiki is empty until pages are Canon. "Only canon pages and passages" starts ticked and every new note is Draft. Mark the pages as Canon in the Story tab, or untick the box. The full rules are under which pages are published.

The Free plan has every feature described here. See pricing.

Before your next session

Start with the campaign you are running now, not a new one. Open your notes on the NPC the players trust most and mark every paragraph: known, held until a session, or never. Then write the reveal log for the sessions you have already played, one row each. Your next recap can then be written from the log, without checking each line for a twist.