In this post I’m going to look at the apps I’m using to prep for the D&D campaign.

SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign. You may want to avoid this post and join me in a future one.

My main device for anything is my iPad Pro. I can’t remember when I last fired up a desktop or laptop at home. The nearest I’ve come is using a Raspberry Pi a couple of times. Apart from coding and some fringe cases I can do everything I need to on an iPad.

When it comes to preparing for the campaign I’m using three main apps. Well I say three but in reality you could argue that it is really two.

I’m including the rather good WordPress app in this workflow because I’m including this post, and my other posts about my progress and such as part of my prep for the campaign.

Yes this blog is a diary. It’s not incite full, it doesn’t look deep into the human condition. It fails as a boardgaming blog. There are not reviews on here, when I play a new game I talk about what I liked and didn’t like about it. But what I say is no way as in-depth as the reviews others put out. These days I talk about Magic the Gathering, D&D and other RPGs, and gaming sessions. Stuff that interests me.

I use the prep posts particularly as notes, reminders, even just thinking aloud, milling over ideas. Which I think is an important thing to do. Hopefully some-one will find my sharing, seeing my thought process helpful. It is for me.

Ok onto the next app in my workflow.

That app is Scrivener.

Scrivener is aimed at people who write a lot of manuscripts, particularly screen writes, authors, etc. It has none of the bells and whistles of like Word. It aims to help writers focus on the writing without the distractions.

I’m using Scrivener to write the session notes. Stuff like room and character descriptions, encounters notes, etc.

I particularly like the cork board view. It allows me to play around with the structure of a session. It has some other nice features too, like keeping research notes with the project.

The nice thing for me also is I can control what gets generated as the final version of the adventure for the session.

The final app in the workflow is Good Notes.

Good Notes is a note taking app. A digital note book.

There are a lot of notebook apps for the iPad. It’s a natural thing for it to be used for. Especially with an Apple Pencil.

I particularly like this app. It has a presentation mode (useful for my day job). Plus I like being able to have custom page templates. So my notebooks in the app can be made up from several different page types. For example graph paper for some, plain for others, A3 pages instead of A4, landscape and even character sheets.

I’m using Good Notes as a digital DM’s folder. Which will be holding more than my actual DM’s folder. The physical version will have some of the pages printed, like maps, encounter stats. Basically stuff I need for the session.

In previous posts about the campaign pitch and the player sheet that introduces the campaign I did use a couple of other apps that fall under the honourable mention section if I were to have one. For the two documents just mentioned I used Word on the iPad. Word I don’t think needs any explanation. Plus the images used in those documents I edited in my go to image editor on the iPad Pixelmator.

I do intend to at the end of each session write a reflective blog post about how I thought the session went. And with those posts include the current version of the DM’s folder, and the adventure session notes.