What is the best way for a tabletop group to take notes together?

Keep one shared source of truth rather than notes scattered across each player’s own app, link entries to each other so people and places stay connected, and control visibility per note instead of maintaining a separate secret document. Those three things are what stop a campaign record decaying by session twelve.

Does it work for systems other than D&D?

Yes. The shared notes, permissions, linking and graph are system-agnostic, and groups run Pathfinder 2e, Call of Cthulhu and Blades in the Dark campaigns on the same features — see "What this looks like outside D&D" above. The SRD compendium is 5e-specific but entirely optional, and you can add your own homebrew content for any system.

How do players and the GM share notes without spoiling anything?

Each note carries its own visibility: shared with the table, private, GM-only, or shared with specific people. Because the filtering happens server-side, a player never receives the content of a hidden note at all, so there is nothing to accidentally reveal.

Can everyone write at the same time?

Yes. Notes sync live across every device in the campaign, so several people can be writing during a session and everyone sees it as it happens.

Tabletop campaign notes

Group note-taking at a tabletop game is a genuinely awkward problem. Everyone at the table knows different things, some of it deliberately, and the person running the game needs to write down things nobody else can read yet. General-purpose note apps have no concept of that, so groups end up improvising with separate documents and hoping nobody opens the wrong one.

Dungeon Ledger is built for it. One shared campaign, notes that link to each other, and visibility decided per note rather than per document — so the party record and the secrets behind it live in the same place.

Open a campaign notebook See the session template

Free to start, and system-agnostic — nothing here assumes 5e.

Shared, not merged

One campaign, different views of it

Everyone in a campaign opens the same notebook, but nobody sees quite the same thing. Each note is shared with the table, kept private, marked DM-only, or shared with named people, and the server filters before sending — so what a player’s browser receives is only ever what that player is allowed to read.

This is what makes a genuinely shared notebook workable. You are not maintaining a public version and a private version and reconciling them; you are writing one set of notes and choosing, per note, who it is for.

Reading and editing are separate permissions, so the group can co-maintain a shared inventory or a party quest list while the session log stays editable only by whoever writes it.

Structure

Notes that build a map of the campaign

Typing [[ links one note to another. Reference a location in a session log and it connects to the note about that location — so the structure of the campaign accumulates as a by-product of writing it down, rather than requiring a reorganisation session every few months.

Those links render as a knowledge graph: an interactive map of characters, places, quests and sessions, colour-coded by type, where clicking a node opens the note. Long campaigns become navigable instead of archaeological.

Seven note types — player, NPC, location, quest, session, secret and plain — give the campaign a shape that survives a group of people with different naming habits.

Any system

What this looks like outside D&D

Nothing about shared notes, visibility or linking assumes a particular game — the three that come up most when groups ask are worth naming rather than waving at.

Pathfinder 2e groups mostly reuse the same shape 5e groups do — session logs, NPC and location notes, a quest note per storyline — but lean harder on the secret/DM-only split for the three-action economy’s hidden math: a GM tracking a monster’s recall-knowledge DCs or a hazard’s trigger conditions keeps that on a DM-only note linked to the encounter, visible to nobody until it matters.

Call of Cthulhu campaigns use the visibility system for something 5e groups rarely need: sanity and clue tracking that must stay hidden from a player whose character has not made the connection yet. A DM-only note per investigator, linked to the clues they have actually found, does the job a paper Keeper screen used to.

Blades in the Dark groups get the most out of the graph view specifically — a scoundrel campaign accumulates factions, claims and scores faster than a dungeon crawl accumulates NPCs, and the same [[linking]] that connects a 5e session log to an NPC connects a score to the faction it targets and the claim it produces.

None of this is a separate mode to switch on. It is the same seven note types and the same per-note visibility, used the way each system’s own conventions already ask for.

The rest of it

The tabs you currently keep open

Around the notes: session scheduling with a shared calendar, maps you upload and pin, a dice roller, a shared kill counter that ticks live on every screen, playable puzzles, and a soundboard where the GM queues music and every player’s browser follows the same clock.

It installs to a phone as an app and syncs live, so it works at a physical table as well as over a call.

Questions from groups

What is the best way for a tabletop group to take notes together?: Keep one shared source of truth rather than notes scattered across each player’s own app, link entries to each other so people and places stay connected, and control visibility per note instead of maintaining a separate secret document. Those three things are what stop a campaign record decaying by session twelve.
Does it work for systems other than D&D?: Yes. The shared notes, permissions, linking and graph are system-agnostic, and groups run Pathfinder 2e, Call of Cthulhu and Blades in the Dark campaigns on the same features — see "What this looks like outside D&D" above. The SRD compendium is 5e-specific but entirely optional, and you can add your own homebrew content for any system.
How do players and the GM share notes without spoiling anything?: Each note carries its own visibility: shared with the table, private, GM-only, or shared with specific people. Because the filtering happens server-side, a player never receives the content of a hidden note at all, so there is nothing to accidentally reveal.
Can everyone write at the same time?: Yes. Notes sync live across every device in the campaign, so several people can be writing during a session and everyone sees it as it happens.

Where to go next

One notebook the whole table writes in

Start a campaign, send your group the link, and stop reconciling five separate sets of notes after every session.

Open a campaign notebook