D&D shared notes

A shared document seems like the obvious answer until the first time you need to write something the players shouldn’t read. From then on you are maintaining two files, and the moment they drift apart the shared one stops being trustworthy.

The other common failure is structure. A single long document works for three sessions and becomes unusable by session twelve, because there is no way to ask it who the party met in the port city two months ago or what they promised the harbourmaster.

What a group actually needs is one place, with permissions built into each note rather than bolted on, and links between notes so the campaign gains structure as you write instead of needing to be reorganised later.

Each note has its own visibility setting: shared with the table, private to you, DM-only, or shared with named people. A player who opens the campaign sees the notes they wrote, the notes shared with everyone, and the notes shared specifically with them — nothing else.

That filtering happens on the server before anything is sent. A player’s browser never receives the content of a note they aren’t allowed to read, so there is no hidden element to inspect and nothing to accidentally reveal by sharing a screen.

Editing is a separate setting from reading. A note can be readable by the whole table but editable only by its author, or opened up to everyone, or handed to two specific players — useful for a party inventory the group maintains together.

Typing [[ starts a link to another note. Mention an NPC in a session log and the link is there next session when you need to remember who they were. Over a campaign this builds a wiki of your world without a separate step where you sit down and organise anything.

The graph view draws those links as a map: characters, locations, quests and sessions as connected nodes, colour-coded by type. Clicking a node opens the note. It is the fastest way to answer "how does this connect to anything?" three months into a campaign.

Notes come in seven types — player, NPC, location, quest, session, secret and plain — so the structure is legible at a glance rather than depending on everyone naming things consistently.

Everything syncs live, so a note written during the session is on every screen at the table as it is typed. It installs to a phone as an app, which matters more than it sounds when half your players are looking things up between turns.

Around the notes there is the rest of what a D&D group keeps in other tabs: an SRD compendium of monsters, spells, races and classes; session scheduling with RSVPs; maps with pins linked to the notes describing them; a dice roller; and a shared soundboard the DM drives for everyone at once.