Designing a world down to the smallest detail, suggestions? - Downloaded from the Wizards Community, all coding removed by Solauren

Designing a world down to the smallest detail, suggestions?

Post/Author/DateTime Post
#1
lschuster
Jun 03, 2009 1:03:18 Hey folks,

I'm currently playing in a campaign that will last at least a year. At the end of the campaign, it's probably my turn to DM. I've designed my own world before, but never with much true detail or forethought and my players suffered. I ended up making stuff up on the fly as a result of my PCs actions and sometimes it didn't make sense. Since I enjoy world building, I pose this question to you...

I want to design an entire world to the last detail. If I want to know the name and personality of the shopkeeper in the smallest shop in the smallest town, I want to have access to it. If there's a random chance of a bum in an alley in said small town, I want to know his stats and personality immediately. Obviously this is a huge undertaking, but as I said, I enjoy things like this and I have at least a year.

Is anyone aware of any programs that will help me to keep things organized? To put it in perspective, if I were to publish a book on the finished product, it'd run at least a thousand pages long. When I'm actually DMing, I don't want to be flipping pages or stalling while my PCs wait for me to figure out what's going on. If you assume insanity on the level of detailing every inhabitant of a major metropolis, and have an idea that will make that work, I'm listening. I'm not quite that insane, but the more detail, the better.

It doesn't have to be a d&d related program. If you have a good way to keep track of this stuff using anything, I'll listen. It seems like even good old fashioned paper and pencil organization will be bogged down here. Any ideas?
#2
zelmor
Jun 03, 2009 9:49:57 Keep it in mind and have notes on paper. A good writer knows his book by letter. Besides, it is a lot of work as you described. If the PCs skip some npcs and shop in a city, let them have the chance to meet the character and his shop the next town! They will never know, and no planning and creation will go down the flush.
#3
lord_karsus
Jun 03, 2009 11:18:18 -Microsoft Excel is good for this- one document, lots of spreadsheets, detailing names, locations, and all kinds of other things.
#4
trei
Jun 03, 2009 11:22:22 Microsoft OneNote from Office 2007 is even better! I use it to keep all my D&D stuff organized. You can have different notebooks, and each notebook can have different tabs, and each tab can have different pages, and each page can have subpages...

And you can link to different spots in the different notebooks if several disparate items are related, for easy access. Aside from my dice roller, it is my number 1 recommendation for plugged-in DMs!
#5
mostly_ghostly
Jun 03, 2009 15:12:32 First off, it's really admirable that you have this much obvious drive, and I certainly wouldn't want to discourage you. However, I think you underestimate just how vast the work involved really is. There are only a few settings which have the level of detail you're talking about (Forgotten Realms being the best example) and they have had hundreds of people working on them for dozens of years. There's nothing wrong with being ambitious, but the problem is, you're going to get bogged down in details your players won't see or use. Your attention can only stretch so far, and you'll spend so much time on aspects of the world that don't matter that the bits that do will suffer.

Give the people, places and aspects of culture that directly affect the characters the level of detail you describe, and then expand outward with increasingly light levels of detail. For example, if you're working on religion in the area where the PCs will be adventuring, detail the local deities, their festival days, the little ways their worship pokes its ways into everyday life, the religious tensions in the community, and (if the local Gods are part of a widely worshipped pantheon) the idiosyncratic rituals and beliefs of the populous. You can still come up with the ancient history of the Gods and the creation of the world, but the PCs aren't going to care much about that because it won't affect them (unless they're very high level), so don't come up with every last detail.

Plus, if you write down everything before hand, you run the risk of "painting yourself into a corner" so to speak. If you leave some things unknown, you leave some flexibility and (importantly for a fantasy world) a bit of mystery.
#6
lord_karsus
Jun 03, 2009 18:10:01
There's nothing wrong with being ambitious, but the problem is, you're going to get bogged down in details your players won't see or use. Your attention can only stretch so far, and you'll spend so much time on aspects of the world that don't matter that the bits that do will suffer.

-The OP said he/she is/was world building. That entails non-D&D stuff.
#7
falcongk81
Jun 04, 2009 15:02:00 I'd caution using this level of detail unless you will be deriving enjoyment from simply its creation. If the players never encounter something, then it never need exist, your world will be just as believable.

Think about it like this. J.R.R. Tolkien was famous for having an incredibly rich and excruciating level of detail on his world. Even he might not have been able to tell you how many inn keepers there are in Minas Tirath, let alone what their age/gender/motivation/personality all are. MiddleEarth was never less believable for that.

It is important when your PCs walk into an Inn that you know who the NPCs are inside that building (or be quick on your feet), but did you need to know that is who would be there months before the adventurers ever got there?

Again, I'm not trying to be negative here, I'm just saying that unless you'll really enjoy spending this time detailing all these things without ever using them you'll be wasting your time.

All of that being said, creating an ObsidianPortal site for your world may be helpful. www.obsidianportal.com. I'd look into finding a good cartographer program to help draw your world. I used to use a program back a few years back called Campaign Cartographer, I dunno if its still around or not. Good luck!
#8
calm
Jun 04, 2009 17:26:54 I suggest having a list of 2-3 names, male and female, for each type of race that you have in your game. Also, include one to four adjectives with each one to help you roleplay it (scarred, slurring, military bearing, etc.). When the PCs are outside an area you've designed where you know the names of everyone, just pull out the list and you've got that NPC. The key, however, is to note when and where the PCs met that NPCs, and any circumstances around it. Then you can maintain game consistency by having that name on hand when the PCs ask about him/her (they always do). At the end of each session, update your file of info on people & places with that new NPC. If the NPC dies, make sure to note deceased, so you don't have any consistency issues. It can be fun to pull that name/NPC out at a later time too, as a contact, or whatever, and it makes the world seem more vibrant.
#9
esperifiel
Jun 05, 2009 3:48:33 Use a personal wiki, or make a simple database.

I'm working on a campaign wiki on Obsidian Portal for now, but it already has limitations I don't like, so I might end up hosting it locally.

Detail? I've got detail down to the shades of color of clothes that people wear...

And some meta-DMing advice: make people in your head. Give them motivations. Then plant them as needed. You can create the reluctant son who inherited the general store, then place him anywhere you want. Make a list of names, and use when you want. When a name has been set to a persona, write it down for future use. It doesn't have to be set in stone beforehand. There's no point in fleshing out people the PC's will never encounter directly or indirectly.
#10
yellowdingo
Jun 05, 2009 4:10:59 I'm doing it myself. Best Advice: Take your time. Get it right.

A. Geography of the Whole World (DM eyes only).

B. Get the game on:
B/1. Local Map, Communities, Monsters in the Wilderness, Events that happen with or without the PCs, NPCs (That First Gazetter will begin to fill with scraps of ideas).
B/2. Build Adventure as it happens (Start playing - if the Orc Mercenaries that kidnapped Lady Anya are hold up in the Caves befor their meeting with the BBEG at his fortress - let the PCs actions determine whether they catch up).

GOTO TO B.
#11
AbdulAlhazred
Jun 05, 2009 16:02:12 I agree with those who say that building a wiki is the way to go.

Every element you need gets a topic, and they can be subtopics of something higher up.

So you can have top level topics for "world stuff". One of those may be "gods" and subtopics can cover each individual god, plus you can always have summary topics like "calendar of holy days" and such.

Geographical divisions are another obvious one that works well. You can have a topic for "Grand Duchy of Tisloch" with an attached 1 mi/hex map. Then you can have subtopics for each town with sub-subtopics for each location or other element in the town you need.

My own world has been used and reused for 30 years and has a LARGE amount of accumulated material. Yet I still don't have every innkeeper in every town etc made up. More like there are 3-4 generic inns that I can slot in where needed and once placed they become permanent. Of course if the inn is somehow a key part of what is going on in that area of the world, then it does have a description etc since it has some significance.

The point is that it all boils down to a matter of time efficiency. There must be 50 different inns within the main active campaign area. PCs have probably visited 10 of them. So I've had to make up say 12 inns all told, vs 50 if I tried to do them all. Frankly I'd run out of ideas for how to make them interesting long before I got to that point anyway, so I have 10 that happen to have been explored and 2 extra ones in reserve that can slot in when I need another.

Same thing for things like mini-adventures. There must be 10 different graveyards in the whole area, but do I REALLY need to write them all up? No. I have 2-3 that are potentially interesting and could be slotted in as required with some encounters in them. Probably when it comes down to using them there will be some customization that gets done if the story requires it (maybe noting that a certain grave is a famous historical figure or the shrine is dedicated to a specific god that is revered in the town I drop it next to).

The "painting yourself into a corner" thing is quite valid too. I don't know all the aspects of the cosmology of the world. Maybe it is held up on the back of a giant turtle, maybe not. If that seems like it will be cool at some point and I need something like that, then I'll decide, but it might work out better that the world is round. So far nobody has ever cared one way or the other.

The same goes for maps. Leave plenty of blank spaces, you'll need them later!

I will also through oddball things onto my maps quite often. The Crystal Forest, The Great Stone Heads, The Stone Circle of Lad, etc. I don't know what they are. Nobody happens to have ever explored them or noticed them, so they're just points on the map right now, or at best they have a one sentence description. If I need something interesting for the party to go explore or whatever, then I can flesh it out. If it was already all fleshed out then I'd be stuck with it and it might not be an adventure of the level or type or theme that I want to use right now, so I've closed a door on myself for no good reason.
#12
pluisjen
Jun 07, 2009 5:09:56 If you want a nice program that helps you memorize stuff, I'd advise Wikidpad.
It has all the goodness of a Wiki, but it's faster, you don't have to put it online, and it's completely free.

You can get it here:
http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/
#13
lschuster
Jun 08, 2009 2:30:42 Hey folks,

After rereading, I may have been a tad misleading. Hey, that rhymes!

I absolutely realize that this will involve much more work than only a year's worth of spare time. I understand it could take a year just to develop a city down to this level of detail, if not longer. The thing is, this world will likely develop into an ongoing campaign platform that will last centuries. I guess I'm not looking to get it all done now, I'm looking to start organizing from the beginning so if I need something years down the road, I'll know it. Consistency is a big thing for me.

I'm open to adaptability. Say I'm working on a dungeon of sorts. I'll work out a detailed map, locations of various encounters, etc. I don't mind tweaking those things to later fit the feel of a particular campaign, I just find it a lot easier to nail things down now and adjust them later than it would be to just make them up on the fly. It's much easier to have a drawn map and modify later than it is to make it up in a weeks time in my opinion.

The other thing is, hey, I like this stuff! If I design a town that the PCs never visit, that's ok. I like doing it. Even if they never go there, they might ask about it, and I can give them as much detail as they'd like. As a player, I hate when my DM says "you don't know" to a question when I should know, but he hasn't worked it out. My fellow players are inquisitive and creative, I think I should reward them for that.

Excel is a good idea, as are wiki's. I've used things like this in the past for other application, shouldn't be too hard to convert. The one thing that has piqued my interest after a lot of searching is maptool. After some brief playing, it seems like you can design a world from complete planet view down to 5 ft squares, and all the while have notes on every object in it. Seems like a good way to keep track of things in a geographic sense. Anyone used it before?
#14
AbdulAlhazred
Jun 08, 2009 7:30:30
The one thing that has piqued my interest after a lot of searching is maptool. After some brief playing, it seems like you can design a world from complete planet view down to 5 ft squares, and all the while have notes on every object in it. Seems like a good way to keep track of things in a geographic sense. Anyone used it before?

Maptool is a great program. My current group is scattered all over the country, which pretty much necessitates that we use a VTT (Virtual Table Top) in order to play. Maptool is almost certainly the most sophisticated of the several VTT applications around today. You can do a lot of things with it. I guess in theory if you want to write enough macros you could store practically any sort of information in Maptool tokens and display it in a variety of ways. You could in fact make something very wiki-like.

There are some disadvantages though. One of the main ones is that at this point there is still no way to export a map from Maptool (or most other stuff). You can draw a nice dungeon map for example, but you cannot turn it into a printable file like a PNG or JPG. This feature does seem to be in the offing, but it doesn't yet exist. Nor would it be possible to convert other information stored in it to text you could for instance print out.

Another disadvantage is with the way Maptool structures its data. Maps are contained within campaign files. You can have many maps in a campaign file, but at some point the file becomes too large and unwieldy. At that point you have to start splitting things up between multiple campaign files. This is OK, but you can't transfer a map from one campaign file to another, which can be a problem. Again this may get addressed at some point.

So overall what I've found is that Maptool is great for playing. It isn't an ideal tool for documenting a campaign and it isn't really intended for that purpose. I still do all my basic documentation of the campaign using my TWiki and simply put whatever I need into Maptool maps to run a particular adventure. The nice thing about the wiki is its shared. The players can access a lot of information and maintain their own notes and character sheets, etc. Saves me a lot of work since I can get them to save chat transcripts from game sessions.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 lschuster Jun 03, 2009 1:03:18	Hey folks, I'm currently playing in a campaign that will last at least a year. At the end of the campaign, it's probably my turn to DM. I've designed my own world before, but never with much true detail or forethought and my players suffered. I ended up making stuff up on the fly as a result of my PCs actions and sometimes it didn't make sense. Since I enjoy world building, I pose this question to you... I want to design an entire world to the last detail. If I want to know the name and personality of the shopkeeper in the smallest shop in the smallest town, I want to have access to it. If there's a random chance of a bum in an alley in said small town, I want to know his stats and personality immediately. Obviously this is a huge undertaking, but as I said, I enjoy things like this and I have at least a year. Is anyone aware of any programs that will help me to keep things organized? To put it in perspective, if I were to publish a book on the finished product, it'd run at least a thousand pages long. When I'm actually DMing, I don't want to be flipping pages or stalling while my PCs wait for me to figure out what's going on. If you assume insanity on the level of detailing every inhabitant of a major metropolis, and have an idea that will make that work, I'm listening. I'm not quite that insane, but the more detail, the better. It doesn't have to be a d&d related program. If you have a good way to keep track of this stuff using anything, I'll listen. It seems like even good old fashioned paper and pencil organization will be bogged down here. Any ideas?
#2 zelmor Jun 03, 2009 9:49:57	Keep it in mind and have notes on paper. A good writer knows his book by letter. Besides, it is a lot of work as you described. If the PCs skip some npcs and shop in a city, let them have the chance to meet the character and his shop the next town! They will never know, and no planning and creation will go down the flush.
#3 lord_karsus Jun 03, 2009 11:18:18	-Microsoft Excel is good for this- one document, lots of spreadsheets, detailing names, locations, and all kinds of other things.
#4 trei Jun 03, 2009 11:22:22	Microsoft OneNote from Office 2007 is even better! I use it to keep all my D&D stuff organized. You can have different notebooks, and each notebook can have different tabs, and each tab can have different pages, and each page can have subpages... And you can link to different spots in the different notebooks if several disparate items are related, for easy access. Aside from my dice roller, it is my number 1 recommendation for plugged-in DMs!
#5 mostly_ghostly Jun 03, 2009 15:12:32	First off, it's really admirable that you have this much obvious drive, and I certainly wouldn't want to discourage you. However, I think you underestimate just how vast the work involved really is. There are only a few settings which have the level of detail you're talking about (Forgotten Realms being the best example) and they have had hundreds of people working on them for dozens of years. There's nothing wrong with being ambitious, but the problem is, you're going to get bogged down in details your players won't see or use. Your attention can only stretch so far, and you'll spend so much time on aspects of the world that don't matter that the bits that do will suffer. Give the people, places and aspects of culture that directly affect the characters the level of detail you describe, and then expand outward with increasingly light levels of detail. For example, if you're working on religion in the area where the PCs will be adventuring, detail the local deities, their festival days, the little ways their worship pokes its ways into everyday life, the religious tensions in the community, and (if the local Gods are part of a widely worshipped pantheon) the idiosyncratic rituals and beliefs of the populous. You can still come up with the ancient history of the Gods and the creation of the world, but the PCs aren't going to care much about that because it won't affect them (unless they're very high level), so don't come up with every last detail. Plus, if you write down everything before hand, you run the risk of "painting yourself into a corner" so to speak. If you leave some things unknown, you leave some flexibility and (importantly for a fantasy world) a bit of mystery.
#6 lord_karsus Jun 03, 2009 18:10:01	There's nothing wrong with being ambitious, but the problem is, you're going to get bogged down in details your players won't see or use. Your attention can only stretch so far, and you'll spend so much time on aspects of the world that don't matter that the bits that do will suffer. -The OP said he/she is/was world building. That entails non-D&D stuff.
#7 falcongk81 Jun 04, 2009 15:02:00	I'd caution using this level of detail unless you will be deriving enjoyment from simply its creation. If the players never encounter something, then it never need exist, your world will be just as believable. Think about it like this. J.R.R. Tolkien was famous for having an incredibly rich and excruciating level of detail on his world. Even he might not have been able to tell you how many inn keepers there are in Minas Tirath, let alone what their age/gender/motivation/personality all are. MiddleEarth was never less believable for that. It is important when your PCs walk into an Inn that you know who the NPCs are inside that building (or be quick on your feet), but did you need to know that is who would be there months before the adventurers ever got there? Again, I'm not trying to be negative here, I'm just saying that unless you'll really enjoy spending this time detailing all these things without ever using them you'll be wasting your time. All of that being said, creating an ObsidianPortal site for your world may be helpful. www.obsidianportal.com. I'd look into finding a good cartographer program to help draw your world. I used to use a program back a few years back called Campaign Cartographer, I dunno if its still around or not. Good luck!
#8 calm Jun 04, 2009 17:26:54	I suggest having a list of 2-3 names, male and female, for each type of race that you have in your game. Also, include one to four adjectives with each one to help you roleplay it (scarred, slurring, military bearing, etc.). When the PCs are outside an area you've designed where you know the names of everyone, just pull out the list and you've got that NPC. The key, however, is to note when and where the PCs met that NPCs, and any circumstances around it. Then you can maintain game consistency by having that name on hand when the PCs ask about him/her (they always do). At the end of each session, update your file of info on people & places with that new NPC. If the NPC dies, make sure to note deceased, so you don't have any consistency issues. It can be fun to pull that name/NPC out at a later time too, as a contact, or whatever, and it makes the world seem more vibrant.
#9 esperifiel Jun 05, 2009 3:48:33	Use a personal wiki, or make a simple database. I'm working on a campaign wiki on Obsidian Portal for now, but it already has limitations I don't like, so I might end up hosting it locally. Detail? I've got detail down to the shades of color of clothes that people wear... And some meta-DMing advice: make people in your head. Give them motivations. Then plant them as needed. You can create the reluctant son who inherited the general store, then place him anywhere you want. Make a list of names, and use when you want. When a name has been set to a persona, write it down for future use. It doesn't have to be set in stone beforehand. There's no point in fleshing out people the PC's will never encounter directly or indirectly.
#10 yellowdingo Jun 05, 2009 4:10:59	I'm doing it myself. Best Advice: Take your time. Get it right. A. Geography of the Whole World (DM eyes only). B. Get the game on: B/1. Local Map, Communities, Monsters in the Wilderness, Events that happen with or without the PCs, NPCs (That First Gazetter will begin to fill with scraps of ideas). B/2. Build Adventure as it happens (Start playing - if the Orc Mercenaries that kidnapped Lady Anya are hold up in the Caves befor their meeting with the BBEG at his fortress - let the PCs actions determine whether they catch up). GOTO TO B.
#11 AbdulAlhazred Jun 05, 2009 16:02:12	I agree with those who say that building a wiki is the way to go. Every element you need gets a topic, and they can be subtopics of something higher up. So you can have top level topics for "world stuff". One of those may be "gods" and subtopics can cover each individual god, plus you can always have summary topics like "calendar of holy days" and such. Geographical divisions are another obvious one that works well. You can have a topic for "Grand Duchy of Tisloch" with an attached 1 mi/hex map. Then you can have subtopics for each town with sub-subtopics for each location or other element in the town you need. My own world has been used and reused for 30 years and has a LARGE amount of accumulated material. Yet I still don't have every innkeeper in every town etc made up. More like there are 3-4 generic inns that I can slot in where needed and once placed they become permanent. Of course if the inn is somehow a key part of what is going on in that area of the world, then it does have a description etc since it has some significance. The point is that it all boils down to a matter of time efficiency. There must be 50 different inns within the main active campaign area. PCs have probably visited 10 of them. So I've had to make up say 12 inns all told, vs 50 if I tried to do them all. Frankly I'd run out of ideas for how to make them interesting long before I got to that point anyway, so I have 10 that happen to have been explored and 2 extra ones in reserve that can slot in when I need another. Same thing for things like mini-adventures. There must be 10 different graveyards in the whole area, but do I REALLY need to write them all up? No. I have 2-3 that are potentially interesting and could be slotted in as required with some encounters in them. Probably when it comes down to using them there will be some customization that gets done if the story requires it (maybe noting that a certain grave is a famous historical figure or the shrine is dedicated to a specific god that is revered in the town I drop it next to). The "painting yourself into a corner" thing is quite valid too. I don't know all the aspects of the cosmology of the world. Maybe it is held up on the back of a giant turtle, maybe not. If that seems like it will be cool at some point and I need something like that, then I'll decide, but it might work out better that the world is round. So far nobody has ever cared one way or the other. The same goes for maps. Leave plenty of blank spaces, you'll need them later! I will also through oddball things onto my maps quite often. The Crystal Forest, The Great Stone Heads, The Stone Circle of Lad, etc. I don't know what they are. Nobody happens to have ever explored them or noticed them, so they're just points on the map right now, or at best they have a one sentence description. If I need something interesting for the party to go explore or whatever, then I can flesh it out. If it was already all fleshed out then I'd be stuck with it and it might not be an adventure of the level or type or theme that I want to use right now, so I've closed a door on myself for no good reason.
#12 pluisjen Jun 07, 2009 5:09:56	If you want a nice program that helps you memorize stuff, I'd advise Wikidpad. It has all the goodness of a Wiki, but it's faster, you don't have to put it online, and it's completely free. You can get it here: http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/
#13 lschuster Jun 08, 2009 2:30:42	Hey folks, After rereading, I may have been a tad misleading. Hey, that rhymes! I absolutely realize that this will involve much more work than only a year's worth of spare time. I understand it could take a year just to develop a city down to this level of detail, if not longer. The thing is, this world will likely develop into an ongoing campaign platform that will last centuries. I guess I'm not looking to get it all done now, I'm looking to start organizing from the beginning so if I need something years down the road, I'll know it. Consistency is a big thing for me. I'm open to adaptability. Say I'm working on a dungeon of sorts. I'll work out a detailed map, locations of various encounters, etc. I don't mind tweaking those things to later fit the feel of a particular campaign, I just find it a lot easier to nail things down now and adjust them later than it would be to just make them up on the fly. It's much easier to have a drawn map and modify later than it is to make it up in a weeks time in my opinion. The other thing is, hey, I like this stuff! If I design a town that the PCs never visit, that's ok. I like doing it. Even if they never go there, they might ask about it, and I can give them as much detail as they'd like. As a player, I hate when my DM says "you don't know" to a question when I should know, but he hasn't worked it out. My fellow players are inquisitive and creative, I think I should reward them for that. Excel is a good idea, as are wiki's. I've used things like this in the past for other application, shouldn't be too hard to convert. The one thing that has piqued my interest after a lot of searching is maptool. After some brief playing, it seems like you can design a world from complete planet view down to 5 ft squares, and all the while have notes on every object in it. Seems like a good way to keep track of things in a geographic sense. Anyone used it before?
#14 AbdulAlhazred Jun 08, 2009 7:30:30	The one thing that has piqued my interest after a lot of searching is maptool. After some brief playing, it seems like you can design a world from complete planet view down to 5 ft squares, and all the while have notes on every object in it. Seems like a good way to keep track of things in a geographic sense. Anyone used it before? Maptool is a great program. My current group is scattered all over the country, which pretty much necessitates that we use a VTT (Virtual Table Top) in order to play. Maptool is almost certainly the most sophisticated of the several VTT applications around today. You can do a lot of things with it. I guess in theory if you want to write enough macros you could store practically any sort of information in Maptool tokens and display it in a variety of ways. You could in fact make something very wiki-like. There are some disadvantages though. One of the main ones is that at this point there is still no way to export a map from Maptool (or most other stuff). You can draw a nice dungeon map for example, but you cannot turn it into a printable file like a PNG or JPG. This feature does seem to be in the offing, but it doesn't yet exist. Nor would it be possible to convert other information stored in it to text you could for instance print out. Another disadvantage is with the way Maptool structures its data. Maps are contained within campaign files. You can have many maps in a campaign file, but at some point the file becomes too large and unwieldy. At that point you have to start splitting things up between multiple campaign files. This is OK, but you can't transfer a map from one campaign file to another, which can be a problem. Again this may get addressed at some point. So overall what I've found is that Maptool is great for playing. It isn't an ideal tool for documenting a campaign and it isn't really intended for that purpose. I still do all my basic documentation of the campaign using my TWiki and simply put whatever I need into Maptool maps to run a particular adventure. The nice thing about the wiki is its shared. The players can access a lot of information and maintain their own notes and character sheets, etc. Saves me a lot of work since I can get them to save chat transcripts from game sessions.