The Best Free Campaign Journal I've Found (And I've Tried Them All)

I'm writing this from PAX West in Seattle, where I've spent the last few days running games for strangers and sleeping roughly as much as a raccoon. It has been a hectic couple of days, so naturally I decided the restful thing to do would be to make another video for the $25 year-long campaign series.

This one is about the campaign journal. Specifically, the free tool I landed on after years of trying everything else.

But first, let's talk about what a campaign journal actually has to hold.

What does a D&D campaign journal need to hold?

A D&D campaign journal needs places, people, events and consequences. Those four buckets cover where things happen, who wants something, what the players need to discover, and what changes because of their choices. Keep them reliably and you can find the campaign again when your memory shrugs.

I've run enough games to notice that the notes always sort themselves into the same four buckets, whether you plan it that way or not.

Places. Where the cities are. Where the temples are. Ruins, forests, that one tavern the party keeps burning down. The physical furniture of your world and the world itself.
People. NPCs, power groups, factions, political organizations. Anyone who wants something and can act on it.
The past. Could be two days ago, could be two centuries ago. Doesn't matter. What matters is what you need the players to eventually discover.
Consequences. What happens because of what the players did. This is the bucket most DMs skip, and it's the one that makes a world feel alive. If the party robs a merchant house in session four, somebody at that merchant house should have opinions in session eleven.

Get those four things down reliably and you have a campaign. Lose track of them and you have a series of loosely related fights.

Why didn't OneNote, Word, Fantasy Grounds or Obsidian work for me?

OneNote and Word were easy to use, but my campaign outgrew my filing. Fantasy Grounds still works for adventure prep, while Obsidian took more relearning than I wanted. For long-term campaign notes, I needed a structure I could remember and a way to find things quickly.

I want to be fair here. Nothing on this list is bad. They just didn't survive contact with a long campaign.

OneNote, then Word

Dead easy to use, which is genuinely their best feature. Titles, keywords, table of contents to organize it, all of it right there. The problem showed up around month four. The campaign got complex faster than my filing did, and I started relying on my memory to find things instead of relying on the system. That is precisely backwards. The whole point of a journal is to be the thing you trust when your memory shrugs.

Fantasy Grounds

I love it. I still use it to prep individual adventures and it's very good at holding notes between sessions and small notes at the player level. But I needed something with a much stronger search function for the long-term over-arching campaign material, and that isn't what it's built for.

Obsidian

Everyone's darling, and I understand why. I noodled with it a lot. Making it run smoothly and quickly took real work, and here's my honest problem: I kept forgetting how I'd decided to organize things. And I forgot how to do a thing. So relearning the tool started getting between me and the note I was trying to take. When your note-taking system requires you to remember the note-taking system, something has gone sideways.

Your mileage may absolutely vary. Plenty of DMs are thriving in Obsidian. I wasn't one of them.

Tool	What worked for me	What I found over time
OneNote and Word	Easy to use, with titles, keywords and a table of contents	The campaign grew faster than my filing
Fantasy Grounds	Individual adventure prep and notes between sessions	I wanted stronger search for the overarching campaign
Obsidian	Plenty of possibilities to explore	I kept relearning the tool and my own organisation
Workflowy	Nested lists, tags, links and quick searches	The free tier has been enough for my use

How do I organise a campaign journal in Workflowy?

Workflowy is the simplest text screen you have ever seen. That is the entire pitch. It's a nested bullet list that goes as deep as you want and searches instantly. Free tier is generous enough that I have never bumped into it.

Pricing checked 16 September 2026: Workflowy Basic is free, with 100 nodes per month. Check the current limits before choosing a plan.

I start with the four buckets as my top-level bullets:

Places
People
Events (past and present)
Consequences

Then I just start nesting.

Under Places I've got the island of Eard, because that's the world we built a couple of videos back. Under Eard, the five kingdoms. Under Ilyadas, the ruined city of Nightstone. Under Nightstone, the Sunken Temple where one of our early adventures takes place.

That's it. That's the whole structure. Indent, type, move on.

Each bullet can carry a note, so the Sunken Temple gets a line or two underneath it: half-flooded temple in the ruined quarter, currently controlled by the Ashen Circle.

Do the same for People. Player characters, NPCs, power groups. Do the same for Events, with subheadings for ancient history, recent history, and character history, which is where I record what the party has actually pulled off so I can call it back later. Consequences gets its own treatment and I'll go deeper on that in a future post.

Within about twenty minutes you have the skeleton of a campaign journal, and you fill in the meat as you play.

How do tags and links connect campaign notes?

Tags gather related campaign notes from across the journal, while links connect specific people, places and events. I tag the important things I want to review together and link the other relationships. That gives me a way to find what matters without tagging every detail in the world.

Here's where it stops being a tidy list and starts being a tool.

Everything important gets a tag. NPCs, locations, events, notes, half-formed ideas at 1am. In Workflowy you type a hashtag and it becomes clickable, and clicking it pulls up every single bullet carrying that tag from anywhere in the file.

Now to be crystal clear, not every location, NPC, event is important. I fell into that trap almost immediately. Some just need to be linked to each other. You create a link by typing [[ and then the words you want to link to.

Example: John Smith

John Smith is an NPC who works for the leader of the Ashen Cult. He assisted the player characters in killing the cult leader by claiming he was blackmailed into helping her. This may or may not be true. So John Smith is listed under NPCs, he is Linked to the Ashen Cult, to Nightstone and the Sunken Temple in Nightstone but he is also Tagged as #secret and #villain just in case there are more developments that could be developed for or attributed to him.

Two more ways to connect notes

You can stack tags too. An NPC might carry #villain and #secret, so they show up when I'm reviewing my possible antagonists and again when I'm auditing what the party doesn't know yet.
You can use [[ to create the titles of new entries in other areas of your notes without losing your existing thought.

This is the part that replaced my memory. Prep for a session now means clicking two or three tags and reading what comes back.

How do I keep fictional dates and session dates straight?

I keep two kinds of dates: fictional dates that move forward with the campaign, and real dates for the sessions we played. The fictional calendar makes events searchable by when they mattered in the world. Real session summaries link back to the game events that actually happened.

Fake dates

I put dates on events, but not real ones.

I use a normal calendar and set it back to the year 2000, then move it forward as the campaign progresses rather than as real life progresses. Session one is January 2000. Whatever comes next is a few in-world days later.

Why bother? Because a date is an anchor. When I want to know what was happening around the time the party met the Duchess, I search the date and everything from that stretch of the campaign comes up together. Places, people, events, consequences, all clustered by when they mattered.

It costs nothing and it makes the timeline searchable, which is more than I can say for my previous system of vaguely remembering that something happened "a few sessions before the wedding."

Real dates

However I also use the real dates of the Sessions played and do a quick summary of the session with links to all the relevant game events that happened, rather than the fictional campaign events.

Frequently Asked Questions

A campaign journal has to help you find things again: the place the party visited, the person they crossed, and the consequence that is still waiting. These are the practical questions behind my four-list setup, from choosing the tool to keeping the timeline useful.

What is the best free D&D campaign journal?

For me, Workflowy is the best fit: four top-level lists, nested notes, tags and links. OneNote, Word, Fantasy Grounds and Obsidian all have strengths, but I needed a journal I would keep updating when I was tired. If your current system works, your answer may be different.

Is Workflowy free?

Workflowy's Basic plan is free as of 16 September 2026. Its current pricing page lists 100 nodes per month on Basic. The free tier has been enough for my campaign journal; check the current limits against how much you write.

What are the four lists in a campaign journal?

Places, People, Events (past and present), and Consequences. Nest individual locations, NPCs, factions and historical events beneath those headings. Consequences records what changes because of the players' actions, so the world can respond when those choices matter again.

Should every NPC and location get a tag?

No. Tag the important things you want to pull together, such as possible villains or secrets. Use links for the other connections between NPCs, factions and locations. In Workflowy, type [[ and the entry you want to link to.

How do I track campaign history without mixing it up with session dates?

Use a fictional calendar for in-world events and real dates for session summaries. I start the fictional calendar in January 2000 and advance it with the story. The real session summary links to the relevant game events, keeping the two timelines connected.

What has the campaign journal cost?

We've spent five of our twenty-five dollars. Twenty left, and the campaign journal cost us exactly nothing. The best campaign journal is the one you'll actually keep updating on a Tuesday night when you're tired. For me that turned out to be a bullet list with hashtags. Sometimes the boring answer is the right one.

Next up: Session Zero

Next up we're setting up our very first session, which means Session Zero and all the delightful negotiation that comes with it.

Roll high, spend low.

— The Two Dollar DM