How to take session notes

Most campaign notes fail the same way. They are written fast, never reread, and by session twelve nobody can find the name of the innkeeper who owes the party a favour.

Good notes are not about writing more. They come from writing the right few things down at the table, then spending ten minutes afterwards turning them into something the rest of the group will actually read. This guide covers both halves.

Decide who takes notes

There are three common setups, and each one works if the table agrees on it.

• One scribe. A single player keeps the notes every week. You get one consistent voice, but the scribe plays a little less, and the notes stop when they miss a session.
• Rotate each session. The job moves around the table. Nobody burns out and everyone gets a turn at deciding what mattered. This works best with a shared format, such as the session recap template.
• Everyone jots, one person tidies. Each player writes down what their character noticed, and one person merges it afterwards. You get the best coverage, at the cost of a little more work after the game.

Try not to leave it all to the GM. They are busy running the game, and their notes tend to be about what is coming next rather than what just happened. The campaign's record is better kept by the people who lived it.

What to write down at the table

Write down the things that are hard to reconstruct later. Everything else can wait, or be left out.

• Names, spelled the way you heard them. "Innkeeper, Bram? Brom?" is fine. You can check the spelling after the game.
• Promises and debts. Who owes the party, who the party owes, and what was agreed.
• Decisions, and the reason for them. "We let the smuggler go because he knew about the letter" is worth more than "we let the smuggler go".
• Loot, money, and who is carrying it.
• Clues and questions the party has not answered yet.
• Where you stopped. The exact scene, so the next session can start in it.
• A line or two worth keeping. People reread notes for the jokes as much as the plot.

What to skip: round-by-round combat, rules arguments, and the full text of every description. Write down the outcome of a fight, not the fight.

A shorthand that keeps up

You will not keep up in full sentences, and you should not try. A handful of marks at the start of a line lets you write fast and still sort it out later.

Here is what an evening of that looks like:

S14 - Gullhaven docks
@ The Leaky Lantern. Innkeeper Bram? Brom? scared of the harbourmaster
! harbourmaster takes a cut of every smuggled crate
$ 40 gp from Brom to keep his name out of it. Tess holds it
? who sent the letter with the blue seal
robed figures meeting the night ferry
"I'm not saying it's a cult. I'm saying it has robes." - Wren
> watch the north pier tonight
ooc Sam away next week
ended: hiding under the north pier, boat with no lights coming in

Nobody else could read that yet, and that is fine. It only has to survive until the next step.

The ten minutes afterwards

This is the step that decides whether notes are useful. Do it the same evening or the next day, while you still remember what the marks meant.

1. Fix the names. Check spellings with the GM or the group chat.
2. Put things in order. Notes taken at the table jump around. Sort them into what happened first, next and last.
3. Turn the shorthand into sentences someone else can read. Short ones are fine.
4. Pull out the open threads. Unanswered questions and unkept promises go in their own list at the end. This is the part the GM will thank you for.
5. Share it wherever the group will see it before the next game.

You are not writing a novel. Aim for something a player who missed the session could read in two minutes and know where things stand. If you want a structure to fill in, the session recap template picks up exactly where these notes leave off.

Keep every session in one place

Notes scattered across a group chat, a notebook and three phones are notes nobody will find again. Pick one home for the campaign and give each session its own note with a number and a date, such as "Session 14, 12 October". Numbered sessions make it easy to say "that was back in session 9" and find it.

Once you have a dozen sessions, the same names start coming back. That is when a shared campaign wiki starts paying for itself.

Paper, laptop or recording

• Paper is the least distracting at the table and works well with the shorthand above. Type it up during the ten minutes afterwards.
• A laptop or tablet is faster to tidy up later, but it is easy to drift into other tabs. Keep only the notes open.
• A phone is good for quick lines and for a photo of the GM's map or handout.
• Recording the session is a useful backup, but almost nobody listens back to four hours of audio. Treat it as a way to check a particular moment or quote, not as a replacement for notes.

Mistakes to avoid

• Writing everything. If you are writing more than you are playing, you are taking minutes, not notes.
• Writing nothing until the end. By then the names are gone.
• Mixing what happened with what you guessed. Mark theories with a ? so a guess does not turn into canon three sessions later.
• Notes only you can read. Shorthand is for the table. What you share should make sense to someone else.
• Never sharing them. Notes kept in one notebook help one person. Shared notes help the whole table remember the same story.

If you use RealmBinder

We built RealmBinder because our own notes kept ending up like the example above, and the ten minutes afterwards kept not happening. You can paste rough notes like these and it writes them up as a session note, in order, with your original kept word for word next to it. The characters, places and items in the note become entries the whole group can look up, and if a name might be someone you have already met, it asks rather than guessing.

The method in this guide is still the important part. Whatever you keep your notes in, writing down names, decisions and open threads at the table is what makes the story possible to remember.