I’ve talked in the past about trying out a wiki as a way of recording campaign info as well as keeping the players in the loop and informed about the game. I’ve done a fare amount of looking around other peoples wiki’s and while some work perfectly there are far more wiki’s out there that are very hard to get into and find anything your looking for in them. It’s certainly an art form.

One of the other ways in which some GM’s keep in touch with players is using a mailing list. I have had experience with using one of these before with an Airsoft group I used to be part of and help organise. The one thing mailing lists have over other forms of online communication is that your pushing it onto your readers rather than relying on them coming to your site and reading whatever it was you posted to your wiki/forum/blog. Not everyone is web savy so you can’t guarantee that telling them to sign up to your blog’s RSS feed will work. Bombard them with the info. Where ever you record your campaigns you should also post the meat of the mailing list emails. In fact you could probably go one better and post most of the information and have it link to your wiki where it expands in it. This way you encourage the players to utilise the library of information you’ve collated but at the same time give them what they need as well as the option to read up a little more on it.

So what kind of things can you put in your newsletter? Well yet again the airsoft newsletter that I sent out provides a very good framework from which to start.

• Brief round up of the last game.
• Highlighting any problems from previous games and suggestions for fixing them.
• Brief run down of any site news or rules changes.
• Start organising the next game day.

Now you can see that right from the off it fits almost perfectly into a campaign update newsletter. In addition to this we could add plenty of information that would be useful to the players.

• Profiles on prominent NPC’s.
• Gossip and rumours from about town which may lead to the occasional side campaign if players show enough interest.
• Myths and Legends from around the region.
• Information on famous magical items in the region.
• Player written fiction.

All these things add to the gaming experience and if you can get your players more involved then no one loses.