OneNote Tutorial: Organizing Adventures

The Notebook is the root of the Onenote Hierarchy, so lets start there. Personally I have two D&D notebooks open at all times. Both books share a simple thought process when making them; Page Titles are King. Page titles will quickly standout in a search result, so for maximum speed I find it helps to break my notes into as many pages as possible (within reason). When each entry gets its own page, a Onenote notebook evolves into an easily searchable database that can show you the exact page you want faster than you can even type what you’re looking for. With the program being this quick, I find that organization takes a back seat and becomes more of a visual aid than anything else.

The first is the D&D Rule Book. This is my original book I talked about here, and the one the SRD book is based on. There’s not much to say about its structure that hasn’t been said or shown previously. It contains the core rules of the game from the Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual, Dungeon Master’s Guide, along with some of the later books that expanded on the rules. This is where all spells, conditions, core monsters, and other rules are stored.

The Adventure Notebook exists to contain my adventure notes. If you’ve seen my notes for Curse of Strahd, Storm King’s Thunder, or Tomb of Annihilation, they all live in this single notebook. 

On thing you will probably see me stress is that how I choose to lay things out boils down to both the adventure in question, and my personal preference.

Onenote uses a Tab-based system (called Sections) to sort its pages similar to a physical notebook. But you can also group these tabs / sections together into “Section Groups”.

In my case, section groups are used to help separate the contents of each adventure module. This separation lets helps me treat the structure of each adventure from each other, since each adventure is unique and can require different notes depending on its scale (the land in Curse of Strahd is far more compact compared to something like Storm King’s Thunder which stretches all over an extremely vast amount of land).

If you were using OneNote to create a custom adventure in your own setting then you likely won’t need this level of segmentation, although depending on the size of your world Section Groups are still a good option for distinguishing between different continents, islands, regions, etc.

Note: If you use the App/WUP version of Onenote, Sections and Section Groups are found along the left side of the screen rather than the top. 

Inside each Section Group is a series of tabs. I usually use at least the following four (in order) for my notes.

• The first Tab, Adventure Name, will contain all the general information for that adventure. This can include the general synopsis and flow chart, the adventure hooks, special rules the adventure uses, etc. If you’re familiar with the published adventures, then you know the kind of information they like to include at the start of the books.
• A Locations Tab will include at least one page for each location in the adventure. These are organized by chapter in the books as subpages, which allows for entire chapters to be collapsed
• A Characters Tab includes a page for each character deemed important enough to have their own page (Dramatis Personae). These characters are stored as subpages that help categorize them either by location or role.
• An Appendix Tab includes Magic Items, Monsters, and lore unique to that location. These are also stored as subpages to allow for the page list to be collapsed. Depending on the adventure I might even split the Appendix into a few tabs (like giving the Tarokka cards their own tab in Curse of Strahd).

How the locations tab is arranged can really depend on the scale of the adventure. For a smaller of land like Curse of Strahd, I simply have my location pages sitting alphabetically.

For Storm King’s Thunder and Tomb of Annihilation, I found it better to sort the locations by their chapters in the book in order to follow the overall flowchart of those adventures. Regardless of which method I choose, I make use of sub-pages in order to let me store relevant pages together, and to collapse the list as needed.

The actual pages themselves share a similar layout for most towns as dungeons. I keep the full content on the left in it’s own container. On the right is a second container that contains a two-column table. This lets me put the dungeon map in the middle, with some custom notes off to the side. I like this layout because depending on which device I’m using I might not get to see the full page at once, but even when using smaller devices like my tablet I can still at least see the map and location text at the same time.

The area under the map can store additional maps (if the dungeon is really large) or other artwork for inspiration. I treat it like a mood board. Sometimes I use concept art of the city or other images to help give me ideas of what to describe to the players. Sometimes I use monster artwork for the type of creatures lurking there. Sometimes I don’t have anything under the map.

The contents of the right-hand side bar can vary depending on the location. This is the area of my notes where I put my own notes, rather than content from the book. I like keeping it formatted as simple lists to give me an idea of which characters, encounters, and other information I should in advance of a location in order to more easily prepare it.

Each area on a map makes use of Formatted Headers and Outlines in order to let me collapse several pages of content down to a simple list (which also lets me see a room description and the map on the same screen at all times, even if the dungeon has hundreds of rooms. For these larger locations I can just use outlines for each floor (for dungeons) or district (for cities), and have the rooms under them.

The headers themselves are formatted in a special way that lets me easily see the area number in bright red, the name of the room, and then any important notes about that room in smaller blue (such as if it contains an encounter). This is just another easy way to be able to see an entire dungeon at a glance, and lets me prep each game faster by being able to quickly see what is in store (I can also put similar information on my right hand ‘side bar’).

These room descriptions can also make use of their own outlines/sub-levels to further collapse content down (as seen below).

I also give each room a simple To-Do tag, in case I need a quick way to keep track of which rooms or encounters a group has already cleared.

Not every location in a book is a large, mapped dungeon or town containing tons of sub-rooms with pages of notes. Some areas are far smaller, small blurbs of text, and don’t really warrant the same level of detail. For these smaller locations I use a simpler layout, but one that still makes use of a two-container / two-column system to keep my personal notes off to the right side.

Like with locations, I use subpages to help keep my Characters Tab organized. Depending on the scale of the adventure, NPCs might either be categorized by their location (“NPCs in Krezk”, “NPCs in Vallaki”, etc) or by role (“Giant Lords”, “Merchant Princes”, etc). In either case I also use subpages to keep family members close as well.

The layout for my characters has changed more than any other page in my notebook. My current preference is to have the NPCs statblock visible at all times on the left. On the right of the screen I use a quick reference “card” at the top to help tell me the things I want to know about the character at a glance. And below that I store their full history and notes from the book. This setup lets me easily collapse the full history when I don’t need it, and creates a page look that I love (I think it looks great in OneNote, and if printed).

But the sky is the limit with OneNote. You can easily lay things out how YOU want, creating a system that works for you. Below are some examples of older layouts that I had toyed with before settling on my current one.

If you’re wondering how to layout pages like this, the answer is simply a clever use of Tables (usually tables with hidden borders, sometimes placed inside other tables which may or may not have borders).

Old Layout Examples

Above. My first three layouts. I shifted away from the Curse of Strahd layout in favor of one that put a “character card” as the priority of the page. This makes it easy to see the NPC at a glance, and works well for minor NPCs as well as Major ones. I then decided to shift from my second layout to one that still contains this card, but keeps the statblock on the screen.

Side note. If you have spellcasting NPCs with long statblocks like this, you can even use outlines INSIDE the statblock to collapse their features like ‘Spellcasting’.