How to Share Your Campaign World

[Great Thrash]

So, if you've noticed, we get paid DM Favor for good wikis and shared worlds. It's one of the reasons I joined the Pantheon and why I'm excited about it - I want to connect my world and I want to hear about yours.

This is a list of ways I know something about. Add your own commentaries to this thread!

These solutions all work for any genre. Some will even work for any novelists or pure storytellers among you.

Twitter
Pros: Accounts are free. You can search Twitter and control who sees your Tweets. You can find people by email account. There is almost no learning curve. This would probably be a good play-by-play style solution.

Cons: Very limited in style and organization. It'd be hard to give detailed stories and almost impossible to have reference materials that can be located when needed. Also, all your entries would be called "Tweets."



Facebook page or group
Pros: Accounts are free. It is more flexible than Twitter. Certainly much easier for people to connect to. You could upload some files like maps and docs. It's very easy to control who sees what. Another advantage of this over Twitter is that you could give admin privileges to players and they could contribute.

Cons: Still relatively limited in terms of style. Also, blue is my least favorite color.



Google Docs/Google Drive
This is an excellent thorough option.
To use google docs, just go to docs.google.com and create a free account if you don't have one.
Google docs is like Microsoft Office online.
You can have almost any sort of file uploaded here - pictures, word docs, excel files.
You can control who edits or sees each document or folder. Make a "Campaign X" folder and let DP people and your players see it.
Keep a single file with the Story So Far and a spreadsheet with some important stats of your world in it.
This is a really flexible suite of options and takes very little time to learn, though there can be a lot of settings to wade through.



Google Sites
This is like the Build Your Own option, but it gives you a lot of tools to lessen the skills required. Of course, this costs you a bit in control, but you're basically building your own wobsite or wiki.


Obsidian Portal and other wikis
This is like making a Wikipedia exclusively for your campaign. It's an awesome if daunting solution. This is a great way to store a bunch of data. Obsidian Portal accounts come pre-built with a bunch of organization into session logs, character pages, etc.
You can see mine at
http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/ ... /main-page

I don't recommend Obsidian Portal for serious GMs. Searchability is very limited and there are boundaries on how much data you can store. It allows some sharing, but a lot of fairly fundamental functionality is behind a paywall.

There are some other choices you can explore. Post those in this thread too!

Maybe the best wiki solution is to start a generic wiki at a place like http://www.wikia.com/Wikia. I've done this before and it's pretty easy, and it's free. There is a small learning curve but if you know your way around the web it won't be a problem. Make sure you put some effort into organization.


Start a forum
I've used ZetaBoards forums for other games but never for D&D. It's a free forum solution that doesn't ask for any technical no-how. Still very customizable. Zetaboards even lets you have subsites and nonforum pages.


Build your own site
Keep it simple, don't burn yourself out! Just make a few simple pages. I've made webpages for campaigns before and they don't get as many hits as I'd expect from players and then I feel like I wasted a lot of time.

Obviously, this one has a lot of resource demand. You need a webhost, a domain, and some coding skills. All of these costs can be alleviated with an ad-sponsored webservice like Go-daddy.

[Volatilus]

A fine thread, quite possibly the only thing I was left wondering about. I made a google.doc file as my profile as soon as I knew of it as my profile cleanly shows, I'll be sure to add more to it when I have the time. Never shown much passion for my worlds as I did for what happened in them to consider documenting on it past notebook, but who knows... Props to the post

[Steepest Durin]

A problem with th' docs idea - looks like permissions are turned off on yer world, Volatilus. Bet there's a way to make it viewable by anyone, but the complication is still a con.

Least, I can't get to it.

[Volatilus]

Fixed and fixed, not much to look at the moment though.

[Yerkan of Elish]

I use Google sites, and it's got all the cons of Google docs/drive (e.g. permissions). It'd be really nice if I could just let everyone viewing from the diamond pantheon view everything. It's kinda nice though 'cause you can hide things from players, and grant page-level permissions (so players can write their own pages for their characters, can't view stuff they don't know about, etc.)

[Great Thrash]

Obsidian portal has limited me to 2 campaigns. Rather than delete an old one I am going to try out http://www.epicwords.com/ or http://mydndgame.com/.

Thoughts so far:
Epicwords - This one has slightly better features, in my opinion, like good notifications and custom HTML. Unfortunately, a free account comes with very little storage, including only ONE campaign and 3 characters. Could probably get around this with multiple accounts, but that's just dumb.

My DND Game - Takes itself really seriously. I can't tell you how many campaigns you get, because admins have to manually approve all requests to join. The password requirements alone were almost stringent enough to make me quit before I'd even begun.

[Yerkan of Elish]

If you have coding skill, but don't want to go through the trouble of getting a domain, or through the annoyance of having ads all over your pages, you can use Google App Engine, which will give a free site (up to ten, I think). I've not used this for D&D, but have been using it for other things recently.

So PROS: complete freedom of design and functionality. Write in your favorite language with your favorite framework.

CONS: requires coding experience, though you can probably find templates or source for a basic wiki somewhere.

[Diamond Master]

The Diamond Pantheon Wiki

PROS:
Local.
Links to other Diamond of Existence lore, other campaign worlds.
No hard limits on space.
Tons of organizational abilities.
Free.
Integrated.

CONS
Requires a few formatting lessons for full functionality (but no more than, say, ObsidianPortal).
Some limits on what you can do.
Difficult to share with your players without revealing the Pantheon.