How do you organise RPG campaign notes?

The problem is retrieval, not storage

Almost nobody loses campaign notes. What fails is finding the right line six weeks later, mid-session, while four people wait. So the useful test for any note-keeping scheme is not how tidy it looks but how fast it answers a question asked out loud.

Session-ordered notes fail that test because the thing you need is never filed under when it happened. A player asks who the harbourmaster's sister was; that fact was mentioned in passing in session 11 and contradicted in session 14, and neither of those is where you would look.

Three layers that do different jobs

Most working systems, however they are built, end up with these. Naming them makes it obvious where a given note goes.

• Entities — durable, one per thing A page for each NPC, location, faction, item and event that matters. Edited in place as the truth changes. This is the layer you actually search during play.
• Session logs — dated, append-only What happened, in order, never rewritten. They are the campaign's history and the source you reconcile from, not the place you look things up.
• Prep — disposable Next session's scenes, stat blocks, and contingencies. Written to be thrown away. Anything from prep that survives contact with the table gets promoted into an entity page; the rest is deleted without guilt.

The discipline that makes it work is the promotion step: after each session, move the handful of facts that became true out of the log and into the entity pages they belong to.

Link instead of filing

The strong temptation is to build a folder hierarchy — Locations / Northern Reach / Cities / Vareth — and it will betray you the first time something belongs in two places. A ship is a location and an item. A guild is a faction and an employer and, once the party burns it down, an event.

Links do not have that problem. Give each entity one page wherever it happens to live, and connect it to the others: this NPC belongs to that faction, is owed a favour by this one, and was last seen in that city. You get the same organisation a hierarchy promises without having to choose the one true parent, and the connections are themselves information — they are frequently the thing you are trying to recall.

Conventions worth fixing early

• One canonical name per thing Pick it and use it everywhere, including in session logs. Aliases go on the entity page, not in your filenames.
• Mark what the players know Secrets and public facts on the same page, visibly separated. Otherwise you will either spoil something or forget you already revealed it.
• Date anything that can change Prices, alliances, who holds a title. "Currently" is a trap in a campaign that runs for two years.
• Keep a plain-text format Markdown files you own will outlive any specific tool. Campaign notes routinely need to survive a decade and three app migrations.

The ten-minute post-session pass

This is the whole system, in practice. Skip it and any structure decays.

• Write the session log while it is fresh, in order, without editing.
• Create a page for anything newly named at the table.
• Promote facts that are now true into their entity pages.
• Add or update the links that changed — new allegiances, new debts, new grudges.
• Note every thread the party left open, in one place.