July 11, 2026
How to keep track of a D&D campaign (without a wiki you'll abandon)
The short answer: write five messy lines within an hour of the session ending, track entities(who/where/what) instead of events, and open the next session with a 60-second “previously on.” The timing is the whole trick: notes written while the session is hot take five minutes; notes reconstructed two weeks later take an hour and get details wrong. Everything below works with paper and zero tools.
1. Five messy lines, right after the session
Not prose. Not complete sentences. “Party met the Saint of Ash in the Sunken Keep - agreed to clear the Crows' debt - made an enemy of the Gilded Crows - Wren pocketed the ledger.” Quality doesn't matter; recency does. If you record your sessions or take live notes, even better, but the five-line version is the floor that keeps the system alive on busy weeks.
2. Track entities, not events
The question at the table is never “what happened in session 9?” It's “who is this noble and what did we promise him?” So organize notes around the people, places, factions, quests, and items: a running entry per entity, even a crude one. Every “wait, who was that?” becomes a lookup instead of an argument.
3. Open with a 60-second recap
Players retain a story told in one minute far better than a ten-minute rehash. Three beats: where you were, what you promised, what's unresolved. Write it from your five lines, not from memory.
Tools, if you want one
- Paper or one shared doc: genuinely fine if you keep the entity habit. The failure mode is search, around month three.
- Notion / Obsidian / a wiki (World Anvil, Kanka): powerful if someone at the table enjoys maintaining it. Be honest about whether that person exists.
- Lorevia: full disclosure, this is the tool we make, and we built it because step 2 is the part everyone abandons: it turns your five messy lines (or a transcript, or a recording) into those per-entity entries and the recap automatically, and you review what it found. There's a free plan, and the habit above works even if you never use it.