Having write ups of a game session is helpful to keep track of when the party was where, and whom they met, and what they did.

I first experienced session summaries, as an official thing players can do to earn XP, in the AD&D [Affiliate Link] campaign, Graveyard of Empires, of over four years of Wednesday nights. I’ve written about it many times. The DM gives 150 XP per level, so at 7th level, I’m earning 1,050 XP per session. John, the DM, wants at least one player to do an “official” summary, but each player can participate. We used a G+ group for this.

For the AD&D campaign, John made us pay for training. After awhile, he modified the Session Summary award for virtual GP equal to our XP awards that could be used to pay for training, and could be shared with others.

John carried on with that in the two year Stars Without Number [Affiliate Link] campaign, and now the follow-up to the original campaign, called After The Fall, using OSE [Affiliate Link]. The Stars Without Number game was posted to a Discord server. For After The Fall we are using a wiki software called MediaWiki that the GM hosts on his website.

My Campaigns

I use session summaries that I write as GM for my games, to ensure I don’t lose track of anything. I write them for the players, as I know what the GM needs to know, but also sprinkle in some things they didn’t necessarily know to reward them for reading it. I used the free Campaign Wiki site. It requires manual formatting, but is simple, and one can export it to text or HTML.

I first did this with my AD&D [Affiliate Link] campaign, The Broken Lands, and then the Delving Deeper campaign, Delver’s Deep. With Delver’s Deep I also put it into the Markdown editor Joplin. Joplin has a desktop and an Android and iPhone app and it can be synced vie Dropdown or similar service.

It may seem like a lot of work, but the information is built over time. the most amount of work is getting the starting information the players need, and to cross-link things as they begin interacting with the world. After 10, 20, 30, and now 43 sessions, The Broken Lands wiki looks quite impressive.

For the most part I try to do the summaries right after the session so it is more complete. I do this for both the Wednesday night campaigns and my campaigns.

The Benefits

There are several benefits for a campaign wiki:

• The GM has a handy cross-linked reference to minimize forgetting what the players know and keep track of multiple threads of information.
• Diligent players can keep up with things, and also have a reference.
• New players or players that miss a session can more easily get up to speed with what is going on.
• It could be the basis for a novel or short stories, or help create modules based on the campaign.

My First Experience With Campaign Summaries

Campaign summaries are nothing new to me. Back in the day when I first played Griswald, the namesake of Follow Me, And Die! i wrote up a personal summary of what Griswald did. I maintained that for every session for a few years of real time, and over ten years of game time. I did this because my brother Robert, my first and favorite DM, has a very rich campaign world. It is about 36 years old. Now his wife and kids and spouses play in it.

I still have it somewhere, and at one point when I had a decent enough computer, I typed up those notes.

One funny thing is I used the dating system of my brother Robert and I have Griswald at one year ahead of where Robert said I was. He said he was DM and he was right, so I accepted it.

What is your experience with campaign summaries whether back in the day, or more recently?