TL;DR
Don’t digitize everything. Sort your notes into Keep, Summarize, and Skip, and only move what still matters: recurring NPCs, places, factions, open threads, and items with a story. Get handwriting into text by typing, dictating, or using your phone’s text recognition, one file per arc. Settle contradictions with a simple rule, build the wiki by hand or with a little AI help, and make sure new sessions don’t start a new pile.
Three notebooks. One has a coffee ring on the cover. Somewhere in the second one there’s a page that says “Session 14 (?): the dwarf (Brom? Brann?) knows about the mine.”
Then a player asks what the city was called where you met the dragon, and you start flipping pages while the whole table waits.
It’s in here somewhere.
If you’ve run a long campaign, you probably have a pile like this: notebooks, loose pages, a phone full of half-sentences. All of it is valuable, and almost none of it is findable. This guide shows how to turn that pile into a campaign wiki without spending a month of weekends on it.
Don’t Digitize Everything: the Three-Pile Sort
The biggest mistake is trying to type up every page. Most of what’s in a DM’s notebook was only useful on the night it was written. Before you touch a keyboard, sort what you have into three piles:
| Pile | What goes in it | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Keep | NPCs who could come back, places the party knows, factions, items with history, unresolved threads, promises the party made | Move it to the wiki in full |
| Summarize | Old arcs that are finished, but still shape the world: wars, betrayals, the party’s big victories | One short paragraph per arc |
| Skip | Initiative tallies, HP math, shop prices, random encounters that went nowhere, prep you never used | Leave it in the notebook |
A useful test for every page: “Could this come up at the table again?” If yes, keep it. If it only matters as history, summarize it. If not, skip it.
DM tip: start with the present
Work backward from the most recent sessions. The latest notes matter most for the next game, and by the time you reach the oldest notebook, you’ll know which early details actually turned out to be important.
Step 1: Get the Handwriting Into Text
A wiki needs text. You have three ways to get there, and you can mix them:
| Method | How it works | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Type it | Read and retype. Slow, but you edit as you go | Short notebooks, messy handwriting |
| Dictate it | Read your notes aloud into voice typing (Google Docs, or your phone’s keyboard mic) | Long notebooks. Usually much faster than typing |
| Scan it | Point your phone at the page and copy the text it recognizes (Live Text on iPhone, Google Lens on Android) | Neat handwriting and printed handouts |
Whichever you choose, check the names first. Fantasy names are where text recognition and voice typing break most often: “Brann” turns into “Brian,” “Xal’thar” turns into nonsense. A wrong name in the wiki is worse than a missing one.
DM tip: one file per arc
Don’t put three years into one giant document. Save one file per arc or per year (“Arc 2: The Sunken Mine.docx”). Smaller files are easier to check, easier to fix, and easier to work through one at a time.
Step 2: Light Cleanup, Not a Rewrite
You’re not writing a novel. Ten minutes of cleanup per file is enough:
- Add session headers with numbers or dates, if you know them. Even rough ones help.
- Mark what you’re unsure about with “(?)”. Uncertain is fine. Silently wrong is not.
- Write names in full at least once per section: “Brann Ironfoot,” not just “the dwarf.”
- Keep your secrets separate. If your notes mix what the party knows with what only you know, mark the secret parts. More on that in player notes vs. DM notes.
Step 3: Build the Wiki: Two Ways
Now turn the text into wiki pages: one page per NPC, place, faction, and important item, linked together. There are two ways to do it:
| Approach | What you do | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| By hand | Read your files and create each page yourself in a wiki tool like World Anvil, LegendKeeper, Kanka, Notion, or Obsidian | Highest. Full control |
| Semi-automatic | Paste a file into a general AI chat, ask for a list of NPCs, places, and factions, then copy the results into your wiki | Medium. Faster at finding names, but you have to check everything |
If you go by hand, our guide on how to build a campaign wiki compares the tools, and how to track NPCs, locations, and lore shows what to put on each page.
Whichever way you choose, a good wiki entry is short: a name, two to four sentences about who or what it is, and links to everything connected to it.
Example: one notebook line → one wiki entry
Notebook: “S14 (?) dwarf Brann, knows about mine, owes Kessa, hates the Guild.”
Wiki: Brann Ironfoot (NPC). A dwarven miner the party met around session 14. Knows the way into the Sunken Mine. Owes money to Kessa and openly despises the Miners’ Guild.
When Your Old Notes Contradict Each Other
They will. Three years of notes written in a hurry always disagree somewhere: a name spelled two ways, an NPC who died in one notebook and shows up in another. Pick a rule and stick to it:
- What the players remember wins. If the table remembers it one way, that’s canon, even if your notes say otherwise.
- Newer notes beat older ones. When the players don’t remember, trust the later version.
- Make the contradiction part of the world. Two versions of how the king died? Maybe both are rumors. Write “sources disagree” in the wiki and let it become a plot hook.
For gaps, ask your players. They often remember things you never wrote down, and they enjoy helping. A short “lost years” paragraph is a fine way to cover a stretch nobody remembers in detail. It’s the same idea as restarting a campaign after a break: you need a shared picture, not a perfect record.
Keep the Wiki Growing
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the moment you finish moving the old notes, a new pile starts. Every session adds names, places, and promises, and if they go back into a notebook, you’ll be doing this again in two years.
How Kazkar handles this
If your group plays on Discord, Kazkar keeps the wiki growing for you. Type /summon when the session starts and /banish when it ends, and Kazkar turns the session into a chronicle and adds every new NPC, place, faction, and item to your campaign wiki, linked to the people and places around it.
Your old campaign has a place there too. Create a session for a past arc, paste in the text from your notes, and click Detect cast & places: Kazkar writes the chronicle and pulls the NPCs, places, and factions into your wiki, right next to the ones from new sessions. Do that for your “Keep” pile, one arc at a time, and everything from here on fills in by itself.
If you’d rather keep your wiki somewhere else, the same rule applies: whatever tool you use, make adding new sessions part of the routine. Our session recap template is a good place to start.
So the next time a player asks what that city was called, the answer isn’t somewhere in the second notebook. It’s one search away.
Your notebooks did their job. Let them retire.
Ready to stop filling notebooks? Add Kazkar to your Discord: 10 free hours of recording, no card needed.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the best way to organize old D&D campaign notes?
Sort them first: keep what could come up at the table again, summarize finished arcs, and skip mechanics like HP and initiative. Then get the keepers into text, one file per arc, and build wiki pages for NPCs, places, factions, and important items.
Can I scan handwritten notes straight into a wiki?
Not in one step. Phone text recognition (Live Text, Google Lens) can turn neat handwriting into text, but you’ll need to check it, especially fantasy names. Once it’s text, you can build the wiki from it.
How long does it take to turn years of notes into a wiki?
It depends on how much you keep. Sorting first cuts the work a lot. Typing or dictating is usually the slowest part, and building pages comes second. AI help can speed up finding names in the text, but you still need to check the results.
What do I do when my notes contradict each other?
Pick a rule: what the players remember wins, and newer notes beat older ones. Or make it part of the world: write “sources disagree” and turn it into a rumor or a plot hook.
Can I add my old campaign notes to Kazkar?
Yes. Once your notes are typed up, create a session in your campaign, paste the text in, and click Detect cast & places. Kazkar turns it into a chronicle and adds the NPCs, places, and factions to your campaign wiki. You can also add entries by hand, and every new session recorded on Discord adds its own entries automatically.
Let Kazkar keep the chronicle
Kazkar joins your Discord voice channel, records the session, and turns it into a narrative chronicle and lore wiki — automatically. Free to start, no card required.
Add Kazkar to DiscordDanylo
Co-founder, Kazkar
Danylo is a co-founder of Kazkar and a tabletop RPG player and GM. He writes about running games, tracking campaign lore, and turning messy session notes into stories worth keeping.
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