Dungeon Master notes

The unit is the note, not the session document. The innkeeper is an NPC note. The port is a location note. Tuesday’s prep links to both by typing [[, which means that when the party goes somewhere you did not expect, what you wrote about it is one click away rather than somewhere in a scroll.

This also survives the thing that kills linear prep: the party skipping it. Content written as connected entities keeps its value when it lands three sessions later than planned, because it was never tied to a particular evening.

Notes have types, so a glance tells you whether you are looking at a person, a place, a quest or a session — and the search covers bodies, not just titles, with tag:foo if you tag as you go.

DM-only and private notes sit in the same campaign as everything else. You are not maintaining a hidden file alongside a visible one, which is the arrangement that eventually goes wrong — usually by drifting out of sync, occasionally by being shared on the wrong screen.

Filtering happens on the server. A player’s browser never receives a note they are not permitted to read, so there is no hidden element in the page and nothing recoverable by anyone curious enough to look.

There is a secret note type as well, which is DM-only by nature and marked as such in the list, so the distinction is visible at a glance rather than something you have to remember you set.

When the party learns something, change the note’s visibility. What was DM-only becomes shared, and it arrives with its context intact — already linked to the location, the NPC, the session where they first heard the name. That is the reveal that would otherwise be a paragraph retyped into a different document with half the connections lost.

Because the notes were linked while you wrote them, the players end up with a genuine reference rather than a list of things you remembered to tell them. It builds itself as a side effect of prep you were doing anyway.

Version history covers the other direction: every note keeps its previous versions, so a note a player overwrites is recoverable rather than gone.

The graph view is the fastest answer to "what is this connected to?" — nodes by type, filterable, clickable through to the note. Three months in, that is a question you ask more often than you expect.

A DM toolkit fills the gaps the party opens: generate an NPC, a tavern, a quest hook or a balanced encounter when they walk somewhere you have nothing written. The Living Book answers questions about your own campaign from your own notes, which is faster than searching when you cannot remember what you called someone.

Around it: maps with pins, a dice roller, a shared inventory and kill counter, playable puzzles, and a soundboard the whole table follows on one clock.