First, a retrospective:
Curse of Strahd was the second adventure that I ever ran as a DM, and the first notebook that I spent a considerable time organizing. A few years have passed since I created this notebook, and naturally my organization methods have evolved and changed over this time. I’ve decided to go back and edit this post, turning it into a retrospective on the choices that I made at the time, along with some changes that I would make today.
The Book:
I started with a similar look to my “Core Rules Notebook” with its textured paper background that fades to a solid color, but this time I went for a grayscale theme so that the page could blend to white instead of yellow. Originally this was to create a visual distinction between the Rules and the Adventure, and personally I felt the grey background with the blood red Trajan Pro page titles better matched the horror theme of the adventure. Over time I found myself preferring the look of this white theme and decided to use something similar for all my notes going forward (white backgrounds also make it easier to blend images in without relying on larger png files).
Originally this adventure started off as its own dedicated notebook, which can be seen in these images (“CoS-DM”). Today however, these six tabs live withing a Section Group as part of a larger Campaign Notebook which includes several different adventures.
The first Tab is an Adventure Log Tab: this is where I would keep track of the campaign itself, including an in-game calendar and some basic player stats for quick reference. I wish I remember where I found this beautiful moon cycle image from.
Next is the Curse of Strahd Tab, where I keep all the generic campaign information about the adventure. This includes the game rules on the Mist, All the random encounters, etc.
One benefit to using Digital Notes is the ability to copy and paste content around. Since I had all the stat blocks already formatted from my rules notebook, it was very quick to move them over to the campaign as well. The physical Curse of Strahd adventure book has numerous instances where it would ask you to refer to either the Monster Manual for a statblock or the Dungeon Master’s Guide for a Trap. But with Onenote I could just paste and embed these directly into the campaign notes so I wouldn’t have to jump around.
A note on Outlines:
This was the first time that I made heavy use of Outlines (Headers with indented paragraphs) which allowed for entire paragraphs to be collapsed, and instant page-linking with [[tags]]. Once I discovered these two things, they became a staple of all my note taking.
The collapsing paragraphs let me keep entire pages of content together without it becoming a mess.
Locations:
Here’s an example of where those quick links really came in handy.
It’s also a prime example of how my style has changed over the years. I’ve since gone for a more interactive approach to the overworld map, setting the page size to be the same dimensions of the map image and setting the map to the page background. This lets me put text and marks directly on top of the map, and the markers can hyperlink to their pages.
As for individual locations, they mostly shared a similar format that saw text on one side of the page, with images on another. This was before I came up with a standardized layout and quick-reference side bar that you’ll see me use in other adventures. This was also before I started to color-code Area Names for quick reference too.
So while these notes are more direct copies of the adventure without my own personal annotations, the collapsible outlines are at least still used to keep things nice and tidy.
Narrative text is kept in a yellowish table cell and also tagged with a custom “DM Narration” tag, which gives it a similar feel to the published adventures. Quick links are also used for characters, locations, handouts, etc.
The castle was a nightmare. In the future I’d probably give each floor its own page.
Characters:
My NPC Tab is, in retrospective, a giant mess. Since this was one of my first campaigns, I went completely overboard and gave every single named NPC their own dedicated page >.<
It doesn’t matter with Onenote since you’re not limited to paper or anything, but it is unnecessary and might even make running the campaign harder if you think you have to worry about all these minor characters. These days I’m more comfortable with my knowledge of the adventure and so I know that I don’t need to give characters like “Erik Lorensk” (a souless bartender in Barovia) their own page. Newer adventures even include “Dramatis Personae” lists to help you weed out the lesser characters from the important ones.
At least I had the sense to group NPCs together as subpages (as an example, NPCs in Vallaki would all be sub-pages of a page called “NPCs in Vallaki”).
This was also my first time trying to come up with an NPC page layout, and this layout doesn’t even use tables to keep things consistent.
Appendix – Monsters:
Monsters used the same template as my Core Rules book. This monster template has been consistent with all my notebooks, and pages like these are what really made me come to love the white theme.
When the adventure lived in its own notebook, it included pages for monsters that were found in the Core Rules (bandits, wolves, etc). I’ve since removed these, so that the adventure only contains unique monsters (it instead links to the Core Rules stat blocks when necessary).
Appendix – Magic Items:
These share the same layout as my Core Notebook.
Appendix – Handouts:
Handouts are all included, both in image form and with an easier-to-read version if needed.
Appendix – Tarokka Deck:
This was actually the very first thing I did, but sits at the end of my notebook. I consolidated all the Tarokka deck information onto one page so that I would be able to do a quick look up of a card.
In addition to combing the playing card with the Tarokka representation, I also gave every card their own page and pre-populated it with all of its information. This way a simple search can bring up the card in question and I don’t have to jump around to find out what it means to the players or to the game.
Hello,
First off, i love your work. Second, i was reading on reddit that at some point you had a CoS barebones linked and was wondering if you still had that file? It is more as use for layout and learning it all myself and trying to incorporate it in my own campaign notebook.
Greetings,
Evan
You can find the .onepkg file for the CoS Barebones book here
Recently found your site while looking into CoS. I used the link above, thank you for all your effort by the way, but I was wondering something. In the previously referenced reddit post you listed a section that was about the general adventure, the mists, and had the random encounters. When I downloaded the items from the dropbox link though this was missing. Was that intentional? Also, I tried the links on the reddit post and neither worked.
Hello. The Reddit links are definitely outdated (Dropbox changed URLs on their end back when they changed how their public folders work, and since the Reddit thread is more than a year old there is no option for me to edit it). The most up-to-date links are found on the sidebar of this website.
As for Curse of Strahd, the General Section should still be there (it would be the “Curse of Strahd” tab). I haven’t seen the Dropbox version of the link in a while though, so its possible that it might be unintentionally missing. Either way there will be some missing pages (or pages with missing content) within that section since the public version should only include info that appeared in the Death House or Adventure League pdfs. Otherwise any screenshots I post are showing off my personal notebook.
Hi bud. Thank you for all of this!
I found that the first clickable image of the calanader has the wrong link and goes to a dead page. Correct link is – http://www.cryrid.com/dnd/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/calendar.jpg
Thanks again mate!
Thanks for letting me know, I’ll fix it.
what do you mean by “player’s journals” when you talk about handouts?
The biggest thing I don’t understand is how you send information to the players.
p.s. on this page http://www.cryrid.com/digitaldnd/2018/05/17/dd-onenote/ you have an old link Curse of Strahd example
In my case, we were playing with Roll20 which has built-in journals. So I could just create one for a handout, and copy/paste content into it from Onenote (which also preserves formatting).
If players had their own Onenote campaign book where the players have edit access, then you could paste pages and content into that as well.
I was wondering how you went about creating the themes for the OneNote templates, and the red bars that separate things like the Ability Scores and the basic info. on an NPC or enemy.
For the themes, they are just images created in photoshop which were hand placed onto a page and set to be a background image. This process is covered more in this post. Basically I just created an image in photoshop, threw a cloudy ‘old paper’ texture, dropped its opacity and saturation, then used a soft-edged brush to fade out three of the corners. It takes some trial and error to place it into a Onenote page without the program automatically trying to adjust the page size to compensate.
As for the red lines, I use two types. The first are the red triangles that can be see in the statblocks. Those are just .png images of a thin red triangle with a transparent background. The second red line is the one seen at the bottom of every page. This is just a line created in Onenote itself using it’s draw tools.
You’ve done tremendous work. I applaud you and your skill.
I am having a few issues though, Could you please, if at all possible email me?
Do you still offer the bare bones for CoS? I’m trying to import into Onenote and it keeps saying it isn’t a valid one note notebook.
Hey is that even ok that you publish the Durse of strahd adventure online with one Notes? I just waanted to ask that.
I do not (and will not) publish The Curse of Strahd adventure via Onenote .
This post is just an example of how I have my own personal notes for the adventure organized in order to take full advantage of Onenote. This personal notebook shown here is not actually available for download, and once again will never be.
I do have a shared “bare bones” version of the notebook which has only the page names and empty templates, to help people get started planning their own campaign. This version of the notebook lacks all the actual information and content.
Hi, great work ! I really appreciate and take to heart a lot of the advice here. Quick question if I may :
“I’ve since gone for a more interactive approach to the overworld map, setting the page size to be the same dimensions of the map image and setting the map to the page background. This lets me put text and marks directly on top of the map, and the markers can hyperlink to their pages.”
Next is an image with the map as a background – I know how to do that, with some goole-maps-like-pins, red and blue in it. Can you detail a bit how that works ? I know hot to [[bracket] to link to other pages, but how does that map work ? If the pin markers are images, how do you link those – is it like a popup ? Do they go to a page like a hyperlink ? Really interested in this.
I’ve been trying to get pop-ups to work with OneNote for a while, and I got the answer that – it is not possible. As well as “instancing” pages – just to have a page in different adventures for example, and when you modify one, you modify them all…alas
Hello.
You can select any image (the pins in this case), and use Ctrl+K to link them to a page. From there, you just need to Ctrl+Click on the image for it to take you to whatever page it is linked to.
thank you !
Brand new to this, but how does one go about importing this into OneNote? I have downloaded the “Cos_Barebones” file. I see the folder and 5 files within ending in the .one extension, but I am unable to get them imported. I tried following the information here (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/export-and-import-onenote-notebooks-a4b60da5-8f33-464e-b1ba-b95ce540f309), but it does not seem to work. Figured I would ask in case I am missing some blatantly obvious step.
Hello. The file I uploaded was an older method that required Desktop 2016 (and an office subscription) to open. I was unaware of the one you linked, but it sounds like they’re trying to make notebooks easier to download.
I’ve exported the file using those new steps, could you let me know if this works?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nbe7zssruz52x0w/OneDrive_Cos_Structure.zip?dl=0
If not, I can always share the notebook through Onenote itself using an email address.
Almost all of the content has been [Removed]. Is this right? Do I have the right file?
Sounds like it. The only file I’ve ever released for Curse of Strahd is an empty template for people who wanted to rebuild their own version. I don’t distribute the actual content that is exclusively found in the paid products.
Hi! I’m a long time player, but inexperienced DM that will start DMing CoS soon. I was trying to figure out a best way to organize campaign notes when I found your site via Reddit. This amazing! Thanks so much for the work you did, and I’ll make sure to go drop you a littl something via ko-fi to support you.