How to make good Dungeons and Dragons notes with LegendKeeper

Note-taking while running a Dungeons & Dragons game is challenging. It’s hard to apply your concentration, time, and effort to multiple activities at once, especially when one of those activities is being a Dungeon Master. Nevertheless, D&D session notes are an essential DMing resource, as they provide important creative direction for your world and campaign. Whether you’re looking for storylines in player choices, or for player feedback on worldbuilding elements that you want to develop further.

How do you make good DnD notes while still being a good DM to your players in the moment? Using a digital platform like LegendKeeper can help you to better juggle these dual responsibilities, as well as developing these notes into more substantial worldbuilding elements later on. Here’s how you can use LegendKeeper to make useful Dungeons and Dragons session notes, whilst still being able to run your games like a pro.

Taking notes during your D&D sessions, can help to provide a clear creative direction for your campaign. Image: *Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro*

Run LegendKeeper alongside all your other apps

LegendKeeper is a worldbuilding app that you can access online in a browser, alongside all the other apps you might need to run your DnD game like D&D Beyond, Discord, Roll20, etc… This means that you can have LegendKeeper right there whenever you need it, so you can switch to the app to make your notes when you have the time during your game session, and then switch back to whatever tool you need when running your game. This should help make taking notes whilst in-game a lot easier on both your time and attention.

Track essential player stats and information while in-game

LegendKeeper has tools that allow you easily track essential player stats whilst in-game. The meters tools enable you to quickly edit key information in the moment, such as health points, inspiration points, or spell slots, for your players’ character sheets. This can help you to manage information that you need to keep track of when being a DM, hopefully lightening your D&D note-taking load and letting you focus more of your attention on roleplaying with your players.

You never know when a bright thought will jump into your head whilst in game, which is why LegendKeeper's Board's function is so useful. Image: *Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro*

Jot down quick notes and drawings using LegendKeeper’s Boards function

The boards function in LegendKeeper is the perfect place to dump down any immediate thoughts you might have during gameplay. It’s essentially a digital notebook where you can use notepads to jot down ideas, place lines and arrows to connect related thoughts, and even use the pen tool to draw quick illustrations or diagrams. This last tool is especially useful whenever you need to make a quick map for your players during sessions. You can then take these immediate notes and develop them into worldbuilding elements like quest pages or detailed maps using LegendKeeper later on.

Make useful worldbuilding and campaign resources using LegendKeeper's creative tools

When not running your sessions, you can turn your short hand campaign notes into some incredibly useful worldbuilding and campaign resources using LegendKeeper. Wiki pages will allow you to turn your notes into clean and well organized villain pages; lore sheets; plot hook summaries; and more, thanks to their varied collection of formatting tools like tables, bullet points, and table of contents. You can also use your notes to create other key resources like maps of newly discovered locations and timelines of the last session’s events. These resources will make planning your future sessions and running your game a much smoother experience as a result.

Maps, timelines, character pages, and other key resources act as the foundation for your DnD campaign, so it's important that you'll able to make them great. Image: *Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro*

Organize important information and find it easily using LegendKeeper’s tagging and searching tools

Once you’ve created your worldbuilding and campaign resources, you can make your pages more searchable and easier for you to find whatever information you need from them later on, by utilizing LegendKeeper’s tagging tools. Adding the appropriate tags to your resources - like key characters or storylines - will allow you to collect related pages together, making it easier for you to scan for information on certain topics. Pages will also form autolinks whenever you use words that match page titles. For example, if you have a page for a character called Charles, then any mention of Charles will link back to that page. LegendKeeper also has a general search tool that you can use to find any mention of specific terms across your resources. Tags and general search will allow you to quickly reference whatever details you need when planning your sessions or building more worldbuilding elements, thereby saving you precious time and effort.

You can try using LegendKeeper to make notes during your own D&D sessions right now with our 14-day free trial, and learn how to DM smarter, not harder.