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First, some failures: I found Obsidian Portal incredibly frustrating. Navigating between PCs, NPCs, wiki pages, and so on, was so obnoxious that I finally gave up. I hope it gets better, but it just wasn't worth the frustration it caused me. After that, I set up a Wagn wiki, which was a great success right until I asked players to start contributing and ...

So far I've had the most success simply by using Google docs. I create a 'folder' for the campaign and then sub-folders for each adventure within the campaign. At the campaign level I have a 'Campaign Journal' which I've made available to my players and I keep this updated with relevant information for the group. This folder also contains 'campaign level' ...

Obsidian Portal is a very useful site for tracking various aspects of your campaign. It has wiki-like format and you can make information hidden or not as you see fit. A map of some place you're not ready to show the characters yet? Make it hidden, then when the time comes just edit it to not hidden. There is also a section for the players' characters. ...

Kind of surprised it hasn't been mentioned, but Masterplan is a pretty nice free tool. It's built to be specific to D&D 4E, but it a pretty useful tool that can be used for general plot points, encyclopedia like entries, campaign notes, etc.

You're looking for Obsidian Portal. Obsidian Portal is specifically designed to allow tabletop RPG groups to build their own internal wikis. The privacy options are apparently undergoing an upgrade right now, but if nothing else you can set the whole campaign as private, so that nothing is viewable to anyone except people you invite.

Evernote is definitely my preferred method of organizing. I can write up encounters, link to d20pfsrd.com pages for encounters, and tag information. I will also lay out dungeon tile maps while planning, put photographs of them into Evernote, and then use the maps from Evernote to make sure I lay them out the same way again. Since Evernote runs from multiple ...

I use a large hard backed notebook and I note by scribbling pictures, diagrams and ideas rather than long text. A pictorial reference I find easier to track what happened. I also use spider diagrams (aka Mind Maps) to track relationships. I do drawings on the right hand side of the open book and important information (such as NPCs invented on the fly) on the ...

My wife made me a storage solution for Christmas out of stackable ornament boxes with egg-crate foam added to the bottom of each compartment. She also pulled the dividers out, but you could go either way on that. It's pretty freaking awesome, especially because it's easily expandable and cheap. You can also just fill up one compartment with minis you know ...

One of the things I do is to keep track of generic professorial skills and a real world descriptive of how skilful said NPC is in that skill. The skill could be such as soldier, cleric, terrorist, spy, mathematician. The descriptives can range from poor to legendary. If during game play you need to add more skills, or refine one of them then a quick note ...

I use a variety of boxes. The black/yellow ones I purchase at Harbor Freight Tools ($8). It has removable boxes that I can mix and match between cases. The clear ones I purchase at Big Lots ($12). They have removable trays and I can mix and match the top four I want to bring to a game. The top also is a great place to stage minis, hold dice and ...

I use a bunch of IKEA Krus boxes. I leave the separators in for small and medium minis, and pull them out for a couple of boxes of larger minis. Right now, I have a box for undead, one for humanoids, one for elementals, and so on. They stack nicely and don't take up too much room.

I use the loose-leaf folder as well, as well as: my player's memories / notes! If none of my players have memories of it, none of them have notes on it, and I don't remember it myself or have it in my notes - I can make up whatever is needed right at the moment. Don't know this method: it'll save you lots of work. Be honest about it with your players ...

It's not exactly a wiki, but we've used Google Docs to similar effect. I'm not 100% sure how we pulled it off, but I think we had a wiki earlier and actually migrated its data into Google docs. That particular group was all programmers, so someone could have done something fancy or someone could have had a copy/paste-fest while watching TV. From our POV ...

Mainly, my own memory and a large notebook. It's the content of the notebook that makes the game. In label marked pages are: a table of premade names to give to NPCs or cities, if needed a collection of monsters, with their brief stats a collection of small random encounter tables. any other quick useful information On the remaining pages, I write the ...

If they are not too thick you could try accordion folders. That way you can separate them by type (muddy, rocky, crypt... whatever). Edit: For ease of seeing them without pulling them out. A Three Ring Binder and sheet protectors would work.

I use a combination of physical, "dead-tree" documents (primarily for maps, lists, tables and PC stats) and electronic files (for dungeon keys, rules, and other things I want to be able to search quickly). As often as possible, I create the electronic files as simple .txt files, since they load quickly and with little fuss, though searchable .pdf documents ...

I find using author/scriptwriter tools to keep track of a novel's plot, npcs, and locations works better than flow or process control charts. The main difference is that an author will be using that to develop a story from while for a RPG referee it is a bag of stuff to use to adjudicate the results of players actions. The initial plot is what would happen ...

We have a large group so we've grappled with this as well. And it gets worse as you level and options begin opening up with new spells and feats coming into play. We've done two things that can help. First, I'm a fan of Paizo's Condition Cards. Whenever I'm hit with a condition, I take the time to dig out the card. Beyond just having the rules handy so I ...

I am a huge fan of John Kirk's Design Patterns of Successful Role-Playing Games (available at no cost as a ZIPped file at the bottom of this page). His Design Patterns book describes a notation for RPG components and techniques. The notation uses what John calls "gauge diagrams" to indicate how information flows between different mechanical constructs ...

I use a collection of physical folders, with dividers in them and paper notes. I find paper much easier to use as i can include diagrams and doodles in amongst the written notes. I have folders for Campaign History, PCs, NPCs, Monsters, Campaign plan and The World. These folders all have dividers in them to seperate different sections of the notes. This ...

Right now I've settled on my basic pen and paper for brainstorming and outlining ideas, and a blogger to give those ideas form. Blogger can work just like a wiki, hell it works just like obsidian portal really now that they have the pages function. The trick is to work entirely in html, the auto formatting sucks and will only lead to frustration. Tags are ...

Doku Wiki Open source wiki project that has built-in user access control. This option requires that you have server space. All content is stored in text files instead of a database. https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki Page creation is very intuitive, and the resulting layout is very simple/minimal.

On my computer I have a folder called MyWritings and have a series of subfolders labeled by Game system or Campaign Setting. Under various game system I have more subfolders that I use to organize material I buy or download for the game. The exact makeup depends on the game. For example in my Traveller folder I have a PDF folder, a vehicle folder, and a ...

I have my campaign folder (I mean physical one) will all the stuff I use in my campaign - characters, maps, ideas, etc. Since I play rather freeform campaigns that are character focused, I use it as a reference, inspiration and for quick access to a certain information (for example moster stats). Everything is in one place, including older ideas, to inspire ...

I usually build a Wiki for any new campaign, I can put backstory up there, lists of places, NPCs, famous quotes from sessions, maps etc. I give players access so they can fill out and edit pages as well, make notes on NPCs they've met, flesh out locations and NPCs from their backgrounds and the like. Players often keep session jornals on the wiki as well. ...

To avoid railroading, I recommend only include main plot points essential that your PC's must hit. The connecting lines should signify the order in which they can be achieved. Using this method, you can be careful to not force them into nearly anything, and you can keep organized those crucial points in the campaign, this way, no matter what path they choose ...

First off, as you noticed the numbering is worthless sadly although from all the different companies I've seen this seems to be common! This is how I organize my D&D books: I separate Wizards products from all the others. That way if I want (or have a DM) who only allows core D&D material it's easily identified on the bookshelf. I then break down ...

I've found several different modes for flow charts in games... Mode 1: standard Information Processing Rectangle: Do something. 1 step per box. Diamond: make a decision Circle: Start, end, and goto circles This mode is excellent for combat flowcharts, especially when the dice pools are detailed in the rectangles. Not so good for adventures Mode 2: ...

I think what you're looking for here is Robin Law's "Hamlet's Hit Points", a book about deconstructing and diagramming fundamental narrative and pacing structures to the ends of building better stories in RPGs. He invented a diagrammatic format and everything.

For a similar problem I went with a simple NPC generator I wrote for my PC, and had it print out simplified character sheet with scores and a couple of randomly generated traits, like odd hobby, or knowledge of a foreign language and so on. I also added a sort of "personality traits" list inspired by Pendragon, so I could roll for how much thrifty or ...