Workflows

Running an Adventure with Inklings

Your NPCs don’t organize themselves. (If they did, that would be a different kind of campaign.) You have a city to populate, a dungeon to key, a dozen factions with competing agendas, and six players who will, at some point, ask a question you haven’t prepared an answer for. The session is in four hours.

Inklings is built for exactly this kind of organized chaos. This guide walks through a complete campaign management workflow — from setting up your workspace through session prep, NPC tracking, and post-session debrief.

This guide uses a tabletop RPG campaign as its running example, but the patterns work for any project with an evolving cast of characters and interconnected locations.

One Campaign, One Workspace

Create a workspace for each campaign. If you’re running The Shattered Spire, name it that. If you’re running something less defined, name it after the system or the vibe. The name is yours to change at any time.

Everything campaign-related lives here: locations, NPCs, factions, session notes, rules clarifications, handouts, loot tracking, and whatever else your game requires. Separating campaigns into separate workspaces means no cross-contamination between your current game and your last one, and you can archive or share a completed campaign workspace without touching your active one.

Build the Campaign Structure

Organize your workspace into the sections your game needs. A typical campaign might look like:

The Shattered Spire Campaign
├── Sessions
│   ├── Session 01 — The Arrival at Port Ash
│   ├── Session 02 — The Lamplighters Guild Job
│   └── Session 03 — Thornwall Keep Heist
├── Locations
│   ├── Port Ash
│   │   ├── The Dockside Quarter
│   │   └── The Magistrate's Tower
│   └── Thornwall Keep
├── NPCs
│   ├── Magistrate Thorne
│   ├── Captain Vex
│   └── The Oracle of Dust
├── Factions
│   ├── The Iron Accord
│   ├── The Lamplighters Guild
│   └── The Exiled Court
├── Rules and Rulings
└── Player Handouts

Sessions get their own folder so you can browse backward through the campaign easily. Locations and NPCs each live in their own section, with pages nested as granularly as your game demands. The Dockside Quarter is a subpage of Port Ash; the NPCs who live there link to both.

Define Your NPC Type

NPCs have structure. An NPC has a name, a faction affiliation, a role, a personality note, and whatever statblock or mechanical information your system requires. Create an NPC type in Settings → Types and define properties that matter to your game:

faction (text — or link to a Faction page via wiki-link)
role (select: Ally, Adversary, Neutral, Recurring, Dead)
first-appeared (text — session name or number)
threat-level (select: None, Low, Medium, High, Critical)
known-to-players (yes/no)

Once the type is defined, assign it to every NPC page. Open Magistrate Thorne’s page, assign the NPC type, fill in her faction (Iron Accord), her role (Adversary, at least initially), and whatever notes you have on her personality. Now she’s in your NPC collection view — a live table of every NPC in the campaign, sortable by faction, filterable by role.

When a character dies, flip their role to Dead. When players meet a new NPC, flip known-to-players to true. The collection view keeps your cast list current without manual auditing.

Use Container Rules for Auto-Typing

As your campaign grows, you’ll be creating NPC pages regularly — one per session, sometimes more. Setting up a container rule on your NPCs folder saves the manual type-assignment step each time.

Open the NPCs folder page, go to its settings, and set a container rule: type = NPC, depth = direct children. Every new page created inside the NPCs folder automatically receives the NPC type with no extra steps. The collection view stays current automatically.

Apply the same logic to your Locations folder if you want every location to be a Location type with its own set of properties (district, controlling faction, notable hazards). The container rule handles the bookkeeping.

Write Session Notes with Links

Session notes are the living document of your campaign — they’re where you record what actually happened versus what you planned. They’re also your best tool for continuity.

Write each session note as a running document that links to everything it touches. When the players interact with Magistrate Thorne, link to [[Magistrate Thorne]]. When they visit Port Ash, link to [[Port Ash]]. When they discover information about the Pact of Silence, link to [[The Pact of Silence]].

The result is a session archive where every entry connects to the entities it involved. Open Magistrate Thorne’s page and her backlinks panel shows you every session she appeared in — her entire story in your campaign, in order. When a player asks “wait, when did we first hear about the Pact of Silence?”, you check the Pact’s backlinks and find the session immediately.

Track Faction Relationships

Political campaigns live and die on faction dynamics. Each faction page in Inklings is a document that can hold mechanical information (agenda, resources, key members) and relational information (who they’re allied with, who they’re at war with, what they want from the party).

In each faction’s page, link to the NPCs who are members: [[Magistrate Thorne]], [[Captain Vex]]. Link to their enemies and allies among other factions. Link to the locations they control.

Create a Faction Relations page as a campaign-level reference: write out the relationship matrix in prose, linking to each faction as you mention them. This page becomes your political cheat sheet for session prep, and because it links to everything, it’s only one wiki-link away from anywhere in the campaign.

Prep Sessions with the Agent

Pro+Agent The built-in agent has access to your entire workspace. For session prep, this means it can answer questions that would otherwise require you to skim through multiple pages.

Before a session, ask the agent:

“What’s the current status of the Iron Accord, based on my notes?”
“What plot threads are unresolved from Session 3?”
“What does Magistrate Thorne know about the players’ activities?”
“Suggest three complications for the Thornwall Keep heist given what I have written about the location”

The agent draws on your existing notes — it’s not inventing lore, it’s synthesizing what you’ve already established. The quality of the answers depends on the completeness of your notes, which is another argument for maintaining them well.

Run the Dungeon: Nested Location Pages

Dungeons and complex locations benefit from the same hierarchy structure you use for everything else. Thornwall Keep might contain:

Thornwall Keep
├── Ground Floor
│   ├── Guard Barracks
│   └── Gatehouse
├── Second Floor
│   ├── Magistrate's Office
│   └── Evidence Room
└── Tower
    └── The Sanctum

Each room or area is a subpage. Write the room description, the hazards, the inhabitants, and the notable contents. Link NPCs who are assigned to that location. Link items that are stored there.

When the players reach the Evidence Room, you open that page. The backlinks show you every NPC and session note that’s ever referenced it. If the players put something there in a previous session, it’s findable.

Post-Session Debrief

After the session, while the events are fresh:

Update the session notes with what actually happened versus your prep
Update NPCs whose status changed (promoted, revealed, killed)
Note plot threads that opened or closed
Update faction pages if the party’s actions shifted the political landscape
Create pages for any new locations or NPCs the players encountered

The debrief takes five to ten minutes and keeps your workspace accurate. The alternative is a campaign where your notes drift from reality session by session until you can’t trust them anymore.