Scrivener

I originally had these grand idea of printing out items and making sending stones and books and OMG this would be a perfect marriage of writing and crafting. And then if someone got an item I could just hand it to them and we could see they had it and not forget.

And then we decided to do it online. And suddenly anything like that needed to be digital.

Fine, I can work with that. All of the pictures were going to be from online anyway because I have less than zero drawing skills.

I began to gather pictures of rings, swords, potions, and people to add to my already far, far too large collection of maps. 

And now I had an organization problem.

I use Scrivener as my primary word processor and am a huge fan of it's system for note-taking. You can drop in photos, PDFs, and do all kinds of things that a standard word processor won't. I can have my reference material split screened with what I'm writing, or if I write something I like I can put it in its own document and drag it into any other part of the manuscript with ease.

It is not intended for D&D.

BUT IT IS PERFECT FOR IT.

From left to right I have:

All of my files and folders relating to this game.

A map of the dwarven lands.

The stats for a Black Bear

A picture of a black bear

Using screenshots and data from online (mostly Fantasy World Generator, that site is a godsend), I can pull them into Scrivener and have them available when I want them. If I make a dungeon I can copy the creature stats into that dungeon so they're convenient.

I also even went overboard and changed all of the icon to emoji that resemble what the thing is. So visually it's easy to find what I need rather than a column of folder icons. I can also assign specific NPCs to things by dropping their character sheet into that thing - or keep a reserve ready for when I need one.

Like this dwarf armorer:

Where does he work out of? I don't know! But he's ready for when I need to throw an armory into a city somewhere.

It also means I can put items with a character when they find it - and keep notes on the side about interactions. Did they insult Arnog? Did they give away the ring? 

If the person doesn't need a full character sheet I can just add a photo under synopsis of the Inn, store, or city itself as reference. I'm very visual so this helps when describing the person to player.

Here, I used Fantasy World Generator to  create an Inn and a Menu and threw it into a basic inn template. I'll go back and edit the patrons to give rumors about nearby quests. This inn exists nowhere so I haven't touched it past the generator. Other inns have been subnested within their city.

I'm trying not to show anything here that gives away anything in the game - so these are all characters and maps that are unfinished.

I may be going overboard here but it's so nice to have this all organized and since I'm not making any determination of where the game will go I need to have a lot of things stored and ready. I don't think I could run a game like that without this kind of database. And it's just the things I want for my campaign. Rather than a website of EVERYTHING. Or multiple websites.

Scrivener. Not just for law school.

Note: Dwarf armorer picture from http://dndspeak.com/2018/02/100-dwarven-clan-names/ .  Dwarf server from https://i.pinimg.com/originals/88/6b/b4/886bb4a25d4fabb5c628413628e83bb1.png 

Unfortunately neither credit the artist. 

I don't remember where the bear came from, since this is all personal use I wasn't being careful about noting sources for the art. I'm going to make a note to do better at that in the future. If that's your art let me know.