Using Notion for Lazy D&D Campaign Prep #dnd #lazydm

hey it's your pal mike shay from sly flourish with a special video in which i'm going to talk about using notion for lazy dungeon mastering i did a video on this before but it was kind of long and and meandered all over the place and i thought it'd be more useful if i had a video that was very specifically talking about how to use the tool notion for lazy dungeon mastering how to use the sly flourish lazy dungeon master template this show like all of the work of sly flourish is brought to you by the patrons of sly flourish you too can become a patron of sci flourish by going to patreon.comflourish patrons help support shows like this they help pay for all of the bandwidth and all the tools and all of the other things that i need in order to keep this lifeless empire alive so if you are a patron of sly flourish i highly appreciate your support so notion is a tool a lot like microsoft onenote if you're familiar with microsoft onenote you will be somewhat familiar with notion it is a it is a notebook app i'm not going to get too much into notion itself i'm not going to give a tutorial of it instead if you are not used to notion what i recommend is uh signing up for an account it's very easy to do it's a free tool it doesn't require you don't there's a there's a paid version but we don't really need the paid version for what we're using uh for what we're doing here and uh in the lower right hand corner is a question mark that is always there and you can click this question mark and you can go to the help and support guide and the help and support guide has all kinds of tutorials both in text and in video they have a whole series of youtube videos that talk all about how to use all of the different functions of notion the lazy template itself there are links to this template is is public so you can actually go click on the link copy it into your own notion notebook so that's what i recommend so uh the link for this notion notebook is available in the show notes below so when you click on the template you will have the option to actually duplicate it and what i recommend is you duplicate it into your own notebook and then customize it however you want change it however you like and then make another duplicate copy and that way you have sort of a fresh copy that you can use for every campaign that you want to do what we'll do is we will we'll make a fake one right now we'll click on that duplicate one and it makes a copy and then we'll click into the copy and we'll say what will we call this new campaign so now i've got a new campaign template you'll see you know it's sitting right there right next to my other one and the first thing i'll do so i put a lot of instructions into the template to help you walk through all the steps so hopefully the template is relatively self-explanatory it has a lot of topics about how to use this i also have like a change log down here that tells you about things that i've updated in the template i don't update it often but every so often i'll find something like wow this is really useful i want to add this to the template and i add it into the the change log so if you ever want to see if things have changed since the last time you used my template maybe you're between campaigns again you can go to the original template again look at the change log see if anything changed and i'll show a couple of things that have changed recently so since i have a new campaign i don't need to keep all of these uh notes here right i have all this extra stuff that i don't really need so i'm gonna immediately grab this and delete it i'm just hitting the delete key to delete it and uh get rid of all these notes as well because really this is what i need right so i'm now all set with this i also don't need this example session notes this is an example of what your session notes look like but i'm going to be creating a new one so i'm going to i'm going to delete that one as well so now i've got all of my all of my steps here so at the top you see this plus sign and it says generate session planning template this is a single this is actually a button that you can click and when you do that it creates a new session notes template and here's where i typically say i'm going to make a one one december uh well we'll call this a tuesday dnd so you give it a unique name for that session and and this page that has been created is a session notes page so if i go back to my top menu you'll see that i now have a 1 december 2020 tuesday d those are my notes for the game that i'm going to be running next so one of the things you'll want to do is customize your session planning template so we have this button up here this is the one that you click in order to generate a new session planning template and when you do so it creates one but you probably want to customize that so instead of customizing your session template every time you create it instead you can go to this generate session planning template click on the little gear and it shows you what the button you know it's a configure template button you don't worry about that this generate session planning template that's what it's called and then in here it says template right and this is the template that it's that it's copying when it makes a new one so we click into this session notes template area and this is the template that we're editing here what i'm going to do is get rid of some of these extra notes in here because i don't want those showing up every time i create a new one and we can go in here and we can change things up so maybe you don't like the review npc section we get rid of that we don't need this instruction in here because we know what's going on uh we don't need lac in there because lack doesn't show up in every session that's just really an example so we get rid of that right and so now and maybe for our for this stuff like you guys don't need the avare you don't use avray you can get rid of that uh and session notes we can we can get rid of the first one so now we've cleaned it up so that we don't have a bunch of you know same thing with length of locations let's get rid of this so we have a bullet there but we we don't want to fill it up with a bunch of default text that we have to delete every single time we use it maybe you actually want to link to your characters so we go here and you at and character and we have characters for the new new campaign we click that and now we have a link in here so it says review the characters we click that and it goes right to the characters right so that's in our template now that the template is saved right it's it's all set and now when we generate a new one uh it opens it up and you'll see like that link is there and all of the craft is gone right so we've now modified the template so anytime we click that button we have a new version of the template that is exactly the way we want it so these notes are broken out in the eight steps of return of the lazy dungeon master if you're familiar with the st with the steps from return of the lazy dungeon master these are all going to be familiar to you and of course as the guy who wrote return of the lazy dungeon master i've designed the template to fit that model so my hope is that it helps people who are used to that style use that model however one of the big things that i talk about in return to the lazy dungeon master is making it your own you might not like those eight steps you might have steps that you don't use modify the template you go in you change the template you add the things you want you remove the things you don't and you build it around the style that you like so we have the eight steps here uh we have the characters we have review the characters you really this is a checkbox of hey take do your first step go take a look at the characters see who they are learn about their backgrounds and all sorts of things like that we have a strong start which is just a text field you put in uh we are the characters get attacked by fire giants right so we have a strong start nothing like a strong start of like getting attacked by fire giants uh so we have uh scenes now if you're familiar with return you'll know that the scenes is really one of the steps that we might not always do i tend to go through the process anyway because i've got the eight steps i just want to make sure so you might say fire giant attack surveil the fort surveil the giant fort face the fire giant king right so we we add just a few scenes and let's just say that that's going to be the scenes that we've got then we have secrets and clues the fire giants are actually under orders from raleigh van the red dragon so you add your 10 secrets and clues and we have check boxes for these so as you reveal them during your game you can check them off and say okay i've given that secret and clue away handy handy way to keep your secrets and clues uh fantastic locations i'm probably going to link to a location page here uh we also have npcs and you can link to any npc pages here or you can just type in notes about any npcs that are really only going to show up for this for this function list of monsters these are the monsters that are likely to show up so we might have a fire giant we might have a fire giant dreadnought uh and we have a adult red dragon right and the nice thing is you can do here is you can go into your dnd beyond to fire giant and we can grab a fire giant page and grab that and we can go back to our template over here and we highlight that and you paste it with control v and now it's linked so now if i click on fire giant i get my fire giant page right i can do i could do the same thing for the fire giant dreadnought i can do the same thing for the adult red dragon now i have like links to the monsters uh same thing you can list out your treasure uh what treasure you have there and um link it to actual treasure records and d andy beyond uh i don't really store treasure as like a card i might do it for a special item i might have a separate page for a piece of treasure but generally speaking i'm just listing the treasure out that i think i'm going to give away and so those are the eight steps right we've got our review the characters the strong start scenes secrets and clues fantastic locations npcs monsters and treasure uh the last thing i have in here is a scratch pad and i've been using this primarily because i've been playing online this is just a place to store any basic text that you have i use it to track the hit points of monsters or the damage that monsters have taken i use it to create a macro for avre when i'm running in discord so that i can do initiative with like a single a single macro avray command i also use it for my text based battle maps so i'll put i'll put my text-based battle maps in here or even things like initiative order any raw text that i've got i can throw into this scratch pad and it's and it's saved there so that is the uh that's probably the the primary page that i use in notion is this session planning page and this is the one that i'm going to generally refer to when i'm actually running a game so let me go through the other pages that we have here the lazydm notion template is really built from two kinds of pages one are regular pages and two are database databases and uh there are actually a few different kinds of databases but you'll see them as i go into here so session zero notes are actually a page right and in here this is if you're starting a brand new campaign these are all the questions i like to uh ask when i'm generating a new campaign again this all comes from return of the lazy dungeon master if you're familiar with the book you can see it here so we have the campaign elevator pitch like what's this campaign about and it could be like stop the ancient red dragon uh it could be kill tiamat it could be killstrad whatever your campaign elevator pitch is for your campaign you can put it in here it's the main driver for your campaign then we have the six truths now six is arbitrary it could be four right but what are the things that makes this campaign different from the eyes of the player these are the things you're going to tell your player this is what makes this campaign different these are these are specific things about the world or the the creatures in the world or uh current big events that are going on these are things that the players are going to learn things that their characters already know about the way the campaign goes and again this is all in return of the lazy dungeon master you can list out your villains and for each villain we're going to create a villain card and the nice thing about the villain cards is you can then link them into your npcs and you can do you can do other things so that's actually something we're going to put in the campaign database we have character options and house rules you can list them out here we have patrons and factions i like to use group patrons this is sort of a new feature of d d that they've included in eberron rising the last war and natasha's cauldron of everything which is the idea of who is the primary patron of all of the characters it's a really handy way to get all your characters together under a single group and you can write about it here uh safety tools what are the safety tools that you use for your game lines and veils x cards uh what what is the what is like the movie rating for your for your campaign i tend to like campaigns that are set at sort of a pg-13 level uh and then i references a an excellent guide called consenting gaming by money cook games it's free that can talk all about this sort of thing so the main thing is you want to make sure that all the players that are in your game are comfortable with the material that they are going to be exposed to during the game both by you and by the other players there and then this is an idea i really liked which is what what inspires the campaign what movies what books what tv shows what fiction what art what are the things that inspire you to go along the campaign's themes and you can link them here link movie titles link books throw actual artwork in here this is sort of a catch-all to to get you uh inspired by all this sort of stuff so i'm gonna skip down now we have a bunch of other pages characters npcs locations villains items stars and wishes old session notes and campaign but i'm going to talk about the campaign database so aside from pages like our session planning document our session planning page almost everything else is kept inside of this thing known as the campaign database right and the campaign database holds a variety of different things but it holds npcs villains items and locations and the idea with these um with the with the database is that you can store uh all kinds of different things so you have like rose point manner and you can throw a map directly in here uh you can have any any information about a location you can put in here one thing i like to do is make sure that every one of the records inside the campaign database has an image and that way you can view it as a thumbnail so i have this character named indethere we have this information about the npc into there we have a nice picture of endotherm here and you'll see that we have tags and the tags are what define what kind of what kind of entry this particular page is now the difference between like a database card and a page is actually pretty small the only real difference is that a database entry has fields that you can put in so you'll see this particularly with the character database which i'll get to in a second uh for most everything else i only have them as tags so that you can say something is both an npc and a villain or you could actually have a villain and an item so all of that is stored in the campaign database most of the time you're not dealing directly with the campaign database you're going to be going to one of these other views of the database so an example are npcs if you go to the npc card you see all of the npcs that are inside the campaign database this is a filtered view right so you see it has like the little filtered tag here and we're saying we've only shown objects that have a tag of npc so that way the npc's are always viewed view tags if you have a new npc when you create you you create new and you say my new mpc you put whatever information in here you want it's already tagged and then you put an image in and then it will show up as an icon so you'll see it doesn't show up with an icon because i didn't bother to throw a piece of art in there yet so i'm going to delete that so that's how you can create a new npc and also how to view your npcs and as you saw before so we had an npc named endother right yeah so if i go back into my campaign notes i can go down to npcs and i can type at i do the at sign and i'm going to type like in ind and i have endother and you see this into their new campaign is in there so now i have a link in my npc section and it goes straight to the endother link and this is this is really where the power comes in that if every object is sort of a card and i can click to any of those cards by using the at sign and making a link and then in my in my actual game notes i have i have links to all this so i have another one called lack lack is actually a villain and an item it's a it's a sentient magic orb uh and i have a card for lac that has all of the information about lack and a picture of lack but i can link to it in my uh in my notes very handy tool so i have the same thing for locations this shows all of the locations that i have in here i have the same thing for villains if i want to see all of the villains that i have these are all filters they're all views that are filtering the campaign database based on the tags that fit that view so in case i have a villain tag and then i have an item tag black is the only item both a villain and an item so uh but let's go back up to characters so characters is actually its own database uh it's its own page and my reason for that is i have a lot of other fields for characters what i wanted to have here is the equivalent i'm actually going to shrink my my side window here uh is that i have a i wanted to have sort of a dm screen of character information so i have the name of the character uh i have the the skills that a a character is trained in i have their passive perception their passive investigation their passive insight uh i have a link to their d and d beyond character sheet really handy and then i have this is something new that i've added what languages they're they're trained in so uh now i can i can look at it and very easily see uh who's trained in arcana and i know quinfer and both quinn ferenodel are trained in arcana uh does anybody speak um infernal and i can look and say ah yes quinn for speaks infernal so i can i can review that without having to ask them hey what languages do you know i can say quinfer because you speak infernal you can hear x right and having this kind of information on hand at a quick reference is really really handy so i really like this and if i want to add a new character again i just go down to new and it actually can create a record in here or i can open it as a page and i can fill in new character and it already has the skills so i can say they're trained in this and this and this i can give their you know their passive insight perception and everything like that i can go down the languages i also have all the default languages in here but i can always add a new one so if there's a lot of weird languages and sometimes a character will learn a weird language i can always add one in so like quarry right a character might learn query now when i add that tag now quarry is one of the options right so really handy for keeping track of all that sort of stuff but i'm not going to worry about that so we're going to delete that record so characters is a separate database from the campaign database that's one change i've made since i started this whole thing and that's because characters have so much more information that's really that's really useful to track with them so i've talked about npcs and locations villains and items those are the four views into the campaign database so if i want to see what npcs are going on i have them so these could get very large so i'll give an example here is my eberron uh this is the campaign notebook that i use for my eberron games which has now been going on for about nine months and if i go into the npc section here you'll see i've got dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of npcs so i'm not likely to go um i'm not likely to sort through here to find npcs every so often i will my i sort this based on most recently created so that the newest npcs are at the top because the newest one you create are likely the ones you're going to be referring to most often so you can see how this how these databases can get big locations same thing lots and lots and lots of locations every one of them i try to put either a map or an image of some sort for any location i've got but as your campaigns go on these notebooks are going to get bigger and bigger which is cool right and it's great to have like this reference of all the old stuff that you had it's a really fun way to kind of have your campaign get bigger and bigger you know wider and wider so i have an optional page in here called stars and wishes this is actually another database it's actually a table that's stored in here and the idea here is that you can ask your group every so often you probably don't want to hit them every session but maybe every couple of you know every four or five sessions you might say so let's talk about our stars and wishes and a star is anything that the player has really enjoyed uh that has happened in the game or happened with their character or that they've enjoyed from another character and a wish is anything that they're hoping to have happen in the campaign or happen with their character or anything like that and so you ask each player like what is one thing that you really liked from the campaign so far what's one thing that really got your attention and what one thing would you really like to see happen and you can record it in here right you can you can put in a date for when you get it which player asked it star and wish and then what the feedback was and you can sort of just keep track of that as you go uh so when i have that so i have this old session notes section and this is actually empty to begin with but the idea is once your session is complete you can take the session that you run and you drag it down to old session notes and that's sort of your archive right and now you can archive all of your old session notes in one place going once again back to my eberron campaign notes i have the old adventures section and in here you can see i have every one of the session notes that i've had and i can go reference and i've done this like what happened in the wednesday game back in october right and i can click and see here are my session notes here are the secrets and clues that i had here's the locations oh yeah that's right this is when they were back at the dam of galifarian kings what monster they face like sometimes they have weird monsters that they faced and it's really nice to um it's really nice to be able to look back and see what happened in previous sessions so that is pretty much everything uh that exists in the campaign notebook there are a couple of other things that i wanted to talk about one is the the value of art so i've included a bunch of artwork that uh comes from other books that i've written so the lazy dungeon master the lazy dungeon masters workbook return of the lazy dungeon master fantastic locations fantastic adventures and runes of the grendel root so like when you click on these you'll see artwork this is some artwork from fantastic adventures i have artwork from here's one from um ruins of the grendel root and you can change all of these so you can decide you know like for items i want to have something a little bit different or like we'll go down to villains right and you say this is my villain but if i if you you can change it based on your campaign that you're running so i'll show an example here's my descent into averness campaign and i went through and put all kinds of avernus artwork behind here so my npcs you know i've got pictures there's mad maggie right in the back um if i go to my villains you know i've got some nice artwork here i really want to make the campaign notebook feel right for the campaign it helps get my head in the game when i'm uh running them so you know for my characters i have the lulu and the characters all in a boat so um the nice thing is if you're using like dnd beyond you can grab the artwork from debbie on and put it into your nozzle notebook for your own personal use right not not something that you can broadcast everywhere but for your own use it's a really nice way to sort of get your head into the campaign i'm just starting to think about my rhyme of the frost mating campaign but i've already gone through and added in a bunch of rhyme of the frost maiden artwork in here that kind of you know shows me what i'm running and if you're running multiple campaigns it's really nice to have different very different artwork for the campaigns you're running customize the artwork to fit it and like i described before customize the notebook to fit the style that you like there are going to be things you want to track that i'm not tracking in here they're going to be things that i'm tracking in here that aren't really that useful to you so what i recommend is downloading the template modify the template to fit the style that you use to fit the the prep style that you use and then keep that one as your template and then make a copy and i would also uh ask you to drop into the sly flourish discord channel the links are in the note belo the notes below and tell me what you changed because some of the things that i've changed in here i got from other players and other dms who have said it would be really handy if i had this here uh the whole idea of adding languages to the characters came from one of the people that had been using notion before and i was like man that's an outstanding idea and i want to add that in so that's been that's been very very helpful the last thing i'd like to talk about is exporting your notebook notion has one major problem and that is that it doesn't have an offline mode you have to be online to get a hold of your notebooks now i've been running all my games online anyway so if i'm not online i'm not playing d and d anyway and so far i think only about one time in the past six months or so have i had any trouble getting a hold of my notebooks but if you want to have an offline mode there's a way to do it and the way to do it is to download to download your notebook so you can go up to the in the upper right hand corner uh there's that dot dot and you can click that and you can go down to export right and what you want to do is you want to include all your sub pages in here and what i like to do is the html version and that way i can load it into a browser and all the links and everything will work inside of a browser so you go in here and you hit export and it tells you it's going to take a little time especially if you have a lot of pages and i often have a lot of pages going uh for this one it should be relatively small so when you open it up you have a zip file and the zip file will contain all of the html pages in it and you can see now i have an html version of it and i can click like this number one and i have my notes in here now i can't modify them because they're all in html but i have them handy so if you're ever worried about having your notes on hand then when you're done mucking around with your whole campaign and you've got it where you want it you can export it and save it locally and now you've got a local copy of it and what i've what i found is that the html version if i click on lack i've got lac the html version is probably the easiest version to use the one tricky bit is that it doesn't do databases particularly well so if you click on npcs it has everybody in there right so it doesn't do the filtering for those views for npcs locations villains and items the filtering doesn't work in the export it's going to show everything that's there same thing with the campaign database it doesn't show them in that nice card view it shows them as a list but you can click on them and still get everything you want so it means everything's a little bit more complicated but it still is better to have an offline mode than to have nothing at all if you for some reason can't get online there's one other feature that notion has added recently that i just really love it's something i really hoped that they would add and they did and it works really well and that's backlinking so i'm going to go over to my eberron notebook because my eberron notebook has again it's six months worth of campaign stuff in there so i've got things everywhere i've got dozens of npcs and i'm going to show an example of backlinking so if i go in here and i link to something like i'm going to link to lac good old lack and in lac i have this link to lac now if i go to lac i just created a link to go to like i typed at lac i viewed it in the list click it it creates a link that goes internally really really nice and if i click on that i get the lack page but you can see that lac has 24 backlinks right so i can open that up and it shows me every one of the pages that lac was connected to and you can see that i've lacked i've connected to lac there's 14 more well look at all these uh that i've connected to lack in many of my game notes but then there's also like huh i've connected who's chris and vroon and zion and zin sin and thrine and koratash and the emissaries i can click on that and it shows me information about the emissaries of the dreaming dark which black is one of the emissaries so i have all of these links in here if i click on chris has ten backlinks to all of the other five or to all of the other emissaries plus the the emissaries hub page plus all of the notes that i've linked to so anytime you link to a page internally it creates a back link to tell you that this page was linked to by that page it's a really easy way to navigate back and forth between your material and it's a good way to sort of not get lost in your own stuff that once you create a link one way another link is linking back using this this backlinks link so there's there's times where you haven't created an npc uh card yet in your database but you're in the middle of your session notes you don't want to drop all the way out go into the database create a new record so here's a trick for creating an npc inline and then adding it to your campaign database so let's say i have a new uh npc uh called dark ember right so what i'm gonna do is i type the at sign as though i'm gonna link to one and i say dark ember is my npc and now i say there's a new dark member page in right and i'm going to click that and i'm going to add it to my new campaign uh link there and now i've got a page for this for this new npc right but it's the problem is it actually shows up at the bottom of my root level pages it's not a database entry yet but one move i can grab dark ember and copy it into the campaign database boom and now dark ember is a thing here it has the tags i can say it's an npc and i'm done so as you can see i'm a huge fan of notion for lazy dungeon mastering and lazy dm prep i was normally like very much a pen and paper guy i also used like text pages for a long time i used a text editor to do my show notes and i got clued into this a friend of mine my friend juliet told me about it and i tried it out and man it feels great and it's the whole idea of interlinking cards of connecting your npc's in your locations uh it's made it faster and game prep is now easier for me to do and also a lot more fun so i'm i'm a big fan notion is great it's free it's web-based it works on all platforms it's a fantastic tool i really like it so i hope you found this video useful uh if you did and you enjoyed this video you can help support videos like this by going to patreon.comflourish and become a patron thank you very much and have a great day

Channel: Sly Flourish – The Lazy Dungeon Master

Views: 71,523

Keywords: Lazy Dungeon Master, Lazy DM, Sly Flourish, Notion for D&D, Notion.so, Notion, D&D Prep, Lazy D&D Prep, Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, Dungeons & Dragons, DM Prep, Notion D&D Prep, dnd tips, gm prep, rpg game prep, tools of the lazy dungeon master, return of the lazy dungeon master, dungeon master prep, dm tips 5e, dm tips, d&d 5e, d&d prep, dm prep, notion d&d, notion.so tutorial, dnd 5e

Id: 8AfbMNAsyr4

Length: 29min 28sec (1768 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2020