How to share campaign notes with your players without spoiling anything

Every DM who has tried to share their notes has hit the same wall. The notes are genuinely useful to the players — names, places, what happened when — and they also contain the answers. So you make a second document with the safe parts in it, and for about a month you keep the two in sync.

Then you stop. And once the shared document is three sessions out of date, the players stop opening it, and you have both the maintenance cost and none of the benefit.

The two-document problem

The failure is structural, not a lack of discipline. Splitting by document forces you to decide, at the moment of writing, which file a piece of information belongs in — and most information does not split cleanly. The description of a location and the reason it matters are one thought. Writing them into two files means writing the same thing twice and updating it in two places forever.

It also puts the decision at the wrong altitude. What you actually want to control is not "which document" but "who can read this particular sentence, today". A tavern's floor plan is shareable. The innkeeper's real name is not — until the session where it is.

Visibility belongs on the note

The arrangement that works is one campaign where every note carries its own visibility setting: shared with the table, private to you, DM-only, or shared with specific named people.

That collapses the two documents back into one. You write the note about the innkeeper once. The parts the players have earned are shared; the note explaining who he really works for is DM-only, sitting next to it, linked to the same places, invisible until you flip one setting.

Two properties matter for this to be trustworthy:

Filtering has to happen on the server. If the hidden content is sent to the browser and merely not displayed, it is one inspector panel or one shared screen away from being visible. In Dungeon Ledger a player's browser never receives the content of a note they aren't permitted to read, so there is nothing to leak.

Reading and editing have to be separate. These are genuinely different questions, and tools that conflate them force bad compromises. A note can be readable by the whole table but editable only by its author; another can be open for everyone to edit.

Let the players write too

The part most DMs skip: sharing notes is not only about what you show them. It is also about what they contribute.

Players remember different things than you do, and usually more accurately — the exact wording of a bargain, how much gold is left, which guard they bribed. A campaign where the table can write into the shared record is better documented than one where a single person types everything, and it costs you nothing but the decision to allow it.

Practical division that works well:

• Shared, everyone edits: party inventory, quest log, the running list of NPCs met
• Shared, author edits: individual character notes and backstories
• Shared, DM edits: locations, factions, anything canonical about the world
• DM only: motives, secrets, what is actually going on
• Private: a player's own scheming, which they may not want the party reading either

That last one matters more than it seems. Players want somewhere to think out loud too, and a tool that only models "DM secrets" misses half of what a table needs.

Reveal deliberately

The point of keeping secrets in the same structure rather than a separate file is that revealing one becomes a single deliberate action, taken at the moment it lands, rather than a copy-paste into another document you then have to remember to do.

It also means the reveal arrives with its context intact — already linked to the location, the NPC, the session where the party first heard the name. That is the version of a shared campaign record that stays worth reading, and it is most of what turns a set of notes into a campaign wiki the players actually use.