At the start of any campaign, there’s a buzz of excitement as you and your players look forward to creating a new world together—one full of adventure and promise. Every game session is a chance for you to show off more of the campaign setting and deepen your players’ investment in it.
If your campaign lasts for months or years, sustaining that high level of excitement—yours as well as your players’—takes effort. An important tool to help you keep interest in the campaign high is a campaign journal, a collection of notes from past sessions. Use your journal to refresh your memory on events that transpired early in the campaign and bring closure to unresolved conflicts and mysteries.
A campaign journal documents the progression of your campaign, from the first game session to the last. Your journal can take whatever form works best for you. It might be a physical notebook; a binder of loose notes, maps, and tracking sheets; a wiki; or a collection of files on your computer. Journal entries are best organized by date or game session. (Some DMs prefer the term “episode” to “game session,” but the terms are interchangeable.)
A sample Campaign Journal page is provided. Make copies of it, or use it as inspiration for your own journal pages.
Use your journal to plan out your next game session (see “Preparing a Session” in chapter 1). Then, when the game session is over, use the journal to capture anything else of importance that might have bearing on future sessions, such as the name of an NPC you created on the fly or a critical piece of information the characters learned.
During a game session, you can use your campaign journal to quickly recall a piece of information you’ve forgotten (such as the name of a character’s mule) or to jot down things you want to remember later (such as the name of a tavern). In this way, the journal becomes a living chronicle of the campaign in flight.
Foreshadowing is a storytelling technique that never goes out of style. Players love it when something happens in a game session that hearkens to some event from an earlier session.
Foreshadowing is about planting seeds early so you can reap the rewards later. Having an up-to-date campaign journal makes foreshadowing easier because you can reread your notes from earlier game sessions and identify things that could resurface in upcoming sessions, giving past events greater weight or a bigger payoff. Consider the following example.
The characters find the dead body of an unidentified halfling adventurer. A search of the body yields a cameo necklace containing the portrait of another halfling. A character decides to keep the cameo, which was intended as a bit of embellishment. You make a note of it in your journal. Months later, while planning a future session, you flip through the journal and are reminded of the cameo. It inspires you to plan a chance encounter with another halfling, whom the characters might recognize as the one depicted in the cameo. What happens if the characters return the cameo to this halfling? This halfling could be tied to a bigger plot or have information that could help the characters resolve some conflict. Suddenly, a minor trinket foreshadows bigger events to come.
Besides tracking each session of your campaign, keep a list of adventure ideas. Even if you don’t end up using every adventure idea, having a stockpile will keep you ready for whatever your players throw at you, and you can even borrow pieces of various ideas to incorporate into future adventures. Not every adventure needs to build on earlier plots; a good stand-alone adventure tucked in the middle of a serialized campaign can be a welcome change of pace for you and your players.