Does anyone know of an effective way to keep track of the various NPCs and rumours encountered in this adventure
I plan on running this game on Roll20 so everyone will be in a separate room.
And it seems important to keep track of what has been heard and who has been met for story hook purposes.
I'd like to create somewhere central for my players to record things so they don't rely on individual note taking because that will either lead to one person doing everything and getting annoyed or to utter disaster
Can google docs work for something like this with an editable document? If so how? I also see many people seem to have Obsidian Portal pages for campaigns. Is that what they are doing - keeping a record?
(If it wasn't obvious I am not massively tech savvy)
A Google sheet works great for this. We play in person and my players keep their own notes, but they enjoy doing that. Whenever someone connects the dots I reward the player in question a Hero point (i.e. "this must be the items taken from the monastery!"), so it's become sort of a mini-game for them to keep good records.
I myself have a Google sheet with NPCs, factions and clues, and if they wouldn't be doing it themselves I would had copied and pasted info to a shared sheet whenever they find out stuff. Then again I'm the type of GM who likes my players to eventually find out most of the backstory, you might play differently.
I've been using free project manager site called trello.com. I have columns for: today's session, NPCs, NPCs not met, Villains, current events, mysteries (to the PCs), future events, revolution, generators, rules, and brainstorming. Then you set up a card per NPC, event, encounter, etc. You can use labels to visually cue you on which character this should appeal to, whether it is finished or not, etc. And you can link to files on each card. It comes with comments so that you can do end of session summary updates on each thing they interacted with.