Guides · Updated August 2026
What Sections Should Actually Be in a GM Notebook?
Short answer: five sections cover the job — a session log, an active cast roster, a faction ledger, a next-session sheet, and a short list of promises your world has made. But the split that actually matters isn't by topic. It's between the archive (everything you write, which is allowed to grow forever) and the ledger (the few facts that must stay current, which is not). Most notebook systems fail because they organize the archive beautifully and leave the ledger scattered through it.
The question is a classic for a reason. "What are the sections/contents of sections you use in your GM Notebook", asks a GM on EN World — a thread that fills up with a different answer per reply. On Paizo's boards, another arrives at the same place from the other direction: "I guess I need to start using notecards to remind me of the important details for every encounter. What do all the great DM's here on the Paizo boards use to keep track of everything?" Both are asking about structure. Neither has a writing problem.
The five sections
1. Session log. One line per session, written in the five minutes after the game: date, where the party ended, the one thing that changed. This is the raw material of your timeline — kept as you go, it costs nothing; reconstructed a year later, it costs a weekend.
2. Active cast roster. Not every NPC you've ever written — the ones currently in play, each with one distinguishing fact and one current attitude toward the party. The rest belong in the archive, where they can rest until recalled.
3. Faction ledger. Who exists, what they want, and — the part that drifts fastest — their last change of state. An alliance that flipped eight sessions ago is exactly the kind of fact that stays wrong everywhere else it was ever written down.
4. Next-session sheet. The only genuinely disposable section: scenes you expect, names you'll need, the encounter details the Paizo GM wanted notecards for. Write it before the session, throw it away after — anything worth keeping gets promoted to the log or the roster.
5. The promises. The short list of things your world has committed to: the prophecy as actually worded, the rules of your magic system, the debt the duchess has not forgotten. These are the facts players will quote back at you verbatim, months later. They deserve a page of their own precisely because they must never quietly change.
Archive vs ledger — the split that does the work
Notice what sections 1, 2, 3 and 5 have in common: they're small, they're lists, and they're only useful if they're current. That's the ledger. Your prose — the lore, the backstories, the plans — is the archive, and it can live in whatever you already use: notebook, wiki, Notion. Switching that tool doesn't fix campaign organization, because the tool only ever holds the archive better. The ledger fails not from bad storage but from not being reopened.
Kept on one page, the ledger is also your recovery plan: after a break, it's the two-minute read that restarts a long campaign without rereading a year of notes. A ready-made, printable version of sections 1-3 exists: the Continuity Sheet — free, one page, nothing sent anywhere →
Where AtelierMonde picks this up
The five-section notebook keeps the ledger current as long as you keep tending it. What no notebook does is check the ledger against everything else you've written. That's the job AtelierMonde is built for: you write your world wherever and however you like — it watches what's already on the page and flags the roster entry that contradicts session 12, the faction described two ways, the promise about to be broken by next week's plan. It writes none of your world. It keeps what you wrote honest.
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Quotes reflect publicly available forum discussions as of the dates cited in our source record; individual experiences vary. AI-assisted content, reviewed by the publisher before publication.