If you were alive during the initial years of the internet, or if you were an early adopter of digital cameras, then you probably have a good idea of where the core of this conversation is coming from. There are almost no pictures that remain of me from my college years, most of them were taken in photo formats that are no longer used, and even if you could see them the quality of the photos were so bad that there is very little that you could do with them. Since it was my college years, that was probably a good thing. However, I do have some of my original Dungeons and Dragons games. They are something of a piece of nostalgia for me. There is something about opening the red spiral-bound notebook (which is no longer spiral anymore, and I’m not 100% sure that was the time in storage). There are notes from combats that have long passed, as well as notes from games both as a player and as a Dungeon Master.

One of the things that I have realized in working my job is that nothing is permanent, especially in technology. The only reason that I have some of the early gaming materials is explicitly because they were on paper. This is what makes some of the challenges that are in place with the tools and tooling that we are getting to.

## Making the past remain

One of the things that I have come to understand in the last couple of years is that I am approaching things in a different manner than I did while I was in my teens (which, hopefully, everyone is). The key point is that if this is something that I love and something that I am dumping hundreds of hours into, I want to make sure that there are artifacts that remain when the work is done. Not because I want to publish them (there are some that I am looking at putting together), but because if this is something that I love, I want to do it with all of my heart and have something that I can point to and say that I made that. To be able to say that I made a thing and it gave people joy is something that I find deeply satisfying.

For some of the older generations, the retention and transference of that knowledge would take place in zines that were published by various groups trying to figure out how to share the awesome times that they had with friends. I can’t help but read some of the original articles from Ed Greenwood and think about what it must have been like sitting at the table the first time that they came in contact with Elminster. But now even most of the zines have transitioned from print to digital.

## How do you track a year-plus campaign?

This is one of the core problems that I have been working through for the last couple of months, and I would love to tell you that I have a solution for it. But at this point, all I can do is explain the issues that I have with the choices I’ve made and the complications that I have encountered, and hopefully, someone else has a solution that I haven’t tried or maybe some insight into something.

But the entirety of the problem comes down to this: how do you track and maintain a record of the games that you play and the adventures that you go on? I have been switching between three different solutions going to each of them, then realizing the failings of each and running into other issues. Then retuning to them only to remember why I left.

## My Love / Hate Relationship with WorldAnvil

There are SO many issues that I have with World Anvil, from the interface that, even after a redesign, is still impossibly complicated to use. Each time that I go through the process of trying to get information into it, I run into an issue that I was doing something wrong. Now, I have to backtrack the entire process to get it back. Additionally, at the end of the day, I want to own my materials. World Anvil does have an export feature, and it is better than nothing but the resulting hodgepodge of html is not something that would be easy to recover into a format that would be easy to use.

The tool is massive, and just about everything you need to track can be tracked in the system. From a software development perspective, I really have to tip my hat to them. It had to be a MASSIVE effort to track all of that data and build an interface that is that flexible, but for me that’s where a lot of the problem lies. The platform is so flexible that I could spend all of my time rearranging things that I am dissuaded from actually writing and building my campaign world.

Here’s the thing. I am still using it, and I will more than likely renew my membership to it when it comes due again.

## My Love / Hate Relationship with FoundryVTT

There have been a couple of different tools that I have utilized when working through this but none of them have generated a higher level of hate than this one tool. But the reality is that I keep coming back to it because it’s the best tool for what it does. The tool is clunky, the learning curve is immensely high, and its base functionality is limiting, and the expandability is a double-edged sword. There are now several quality-of-life extensions that I have relied on that are painful because you have to walk a tightrope of which versions are compatible and which are completely borked. A great example of this is when I used Lava Flow to import my articles, and it created a new folder instead of retaining the folder structure. The level of dependence that you end up with as soon as you start adding extended functionality is something that is PAINFUL, to say the least.

My final point on this is that at the end of the day, the information that is included with the tool is all there, I have the option not to update, and I can keep it in stasis for as long as I need to. As much as I hate using the tool, I have two licenses, one for my working machine and one that I use for the server.

## My Love / Hate Relationship with Obsidian

Lastly, Obsidian, I really shouldn’t say that this is a love-hate relationship because I love the tool. But in a lot of ways, it has the same issues as the other two applications that are listed above. The power of the tool comes from its expandability. Still, as soon as you learn a new trick with it you are now implementing all of the changes through all of your documents, and you end up in a cycle where you are adding tags to files instead of writing the game material that you set out to write.

## The End and the Future

For some people who are in this place, I am going to try to do my best to include notes here on how I have been organizing things in the hopes that this can help other people. This is the beginning of a conversation absolutely not the end.

But the main thing that I have come to after all of this is that if there isn’t a paper record of the work that you are doing, Nothing exists. You are one platform failure, one change up from all of it being gone. So, as someone who is in this place, if you aren’t pushing your material to get to paper, you are running yourself into a place where the information is going to disappear. It doesn’t matter what platform you use; bit rot comes for us all.