Most campaign wikis start strong and go quiet around session six. The first week brings forty pages, half of them about places the party never visits. A month later nobody has updated anything, and the group is back to asking the GM who that merchant was.
The tool is rarely the problem. What keeps a wiki alive is starting small, writing down only what the table knows, and a short routine after every session. This guide covers all three.
Start with a few kinds of page
You do not need a page for everything. Most campaigns are well served by six kinds:
- Characters: the party, and the people they meet.
- Places: towns, dungeons, taverns, ships.
- Factions: guilds, cults, noble houses, anyone with an agenda.
- Quests: the jobs, mysteries and promises the party is chasing.
- Items: anything with a name, a history, or a reason to come back.
- Sessions: one recap per game, numbered. The session recap template works well here.
Make a page on the second mention. A name that comes up once is a detail in a recap. A name that comes up twice is part of the story, and deserves a page. This one rule stops the wiki filling up with pages nobody will open.
Write what the table knows
A shared wiki is the party's record of the story, not the GM's world bible. Write down what the characters have seen, heard and been told, in the words the table uses.
That keeps the wiki safe for everyone to read and edit, and it keeps it honest. If the party believes the duke is a traitor, the wiki can say so, marked as a belief. When the truth comes out at the table, update the page, and that update becomes part of the story too.
Rumours, theories and guesses are worth keeping, as long as they are labelled. "Rumoured to be a vampire (Wren's theory)" is useful. "Is a vampire" is a spoiler or a mistake.
A page template
Keep every page short, and give them all the same shape so they are quick to write and easy to scan.
# [Name]
[One sentence: who or what this is, and why the party cares.]
Also called: [nicknames, titles, other spellings]
Status: [alive, missing, dead, destroyed, completed, unknown]
First seen: [Session 3]
## What we know
- [Facts the party has learned]
- [Rumours, marked as rumours]
## Our history with them
- Session 3: [what happened]
- Session 9: [what happened]
## Open questions
- [What the party still wants to find out]
The first sentence matters most. Most people will read it and nothing else, so make it the line that answers "wait, who was that again?"
Status is the line that goes stale fastest, and the one that matters most when it does. A quest marked open after the party finished it, or a villain still listed as alive, will cause more confusion than a missing page.
Our history with them links each page back to the sessions it appeared in. That turns the wiki into an index of the recaps, and the recaps into the timeline behind the wiki.
Naming and linking
- Name a page the way the table says it. If everyone calls her "the Grey Lady", that is the page title, with her real name under "Also called".
- Tell similar names apart in the title itself: "Brom (innkeeper)" and "Brom (dockhand)".
- Link the first mention of a name on each page or recap. Linking every mention makes pages harder to read.
- Fix spellings everywhere once the GM confirms one. Two pages for the same person, spelled two ways, is the most common way a wiki falls apart.
Organise by kind, not by session
Sessions are the timeline. The other pages are the index. Resist writing the story into the character pages. Write it once, in the session recap, and have each page carry a single line that points back to it. When someone wants to know what happened, they read the recap. When they want to know who someone is, they read the page.
A routine that keeps it alive
The wiki stays useful if someone spends ten or fifteen minutes on it after each session. Rotate the job, or tie it to whoever wrote the recap.
- Post the session recap.
- Go through the names in it. For each one with a page, add a line under "Our history with them". For each one without a page, make one only if this is the second time it has come up.
- Update every status that changed. Quests finished, characters dead, places burned down.
- Move answered questions out of "Open questions" and into "What we know".
It also helps to share ownership. Each player looks after their own character's page and one other corner of the wiki, such as the faction from their backstory or the town they grew up in. People keep pages up to date when the pages feel like theirs.
Choosing a tool
Most groups end up with one of three kinds of tool:
- A shared document. Easy to start and everyone already has it, but it becomes one very long page with no links between the parts.
- A general wiki or notes app. Flexible, with links and search, but you build every template and page structure yourself.
- A tool made for tabletop campaigns. The kinds of page above come built in, usually with linking between them, at the cost of learning a new app.
Whatever you pick, check four things. Can everyone at the table read and edit it, including on a phone? Can you search it? Can pages link to each other? And can you export everything, so the campaign's story is not stuck in one app? The best tool is still the one your group will actually open between sessions.
If you use RealmBinder
RealmBinder was built so the routine above mostly happens by itself. When a session note is saved, the characters, adversaries, places, items and factions in it become entries, each linked to the sessions it appears in, with a summary written from them. When a note says a quest is done or a character died, it suggests the change, and nothing is updated until someone applies or dismisses it. You can also write lore pages about your world, and the campaign's owner can download the whole campaign as Markdown files at any time.
The principles still apply. Write down what the table knows, keep names consistent, and keep the session notes coming. A wiki is only as good as the story that goes into it.