Document Workflow
Why documents in Mimir are organized the way they are, and how they fit into the life of a campaign.
Documents are markdown-based text entries — your DM notebook. The mechanics of creating, editing, reordering, and exporting them are covered in Manage Documents; this page explains the design behind them.
Why Two Scopes
Every document belongs to a campaign, and optionally to one module within it. This mirrors the Two-Board System: content has a natural lifespan, and the scope encodes it.
Campaign documents are the long-lived layer — world lore, faction descriptions, house rules, recurring NPC notes. They are written once and consulted across many adventures, so they live where every module can see them.
Module documents are the working layer — encounter plans, read-aloud text, location descriptions for one adventure. They are self-contained within their module, so when you prep or run that module, you see exactly the notes that matter and nothing else. When the module is finished, its documents become a record of what happened rather than clutter in your active workspace.
The alternative — one flat pile of notes — forces you to re-sort your own material every session. Scoping does that sorting once, at creation time.
The Template Philosophy
A new campaign isn’t empty: Mimir generates a set of starter documents (Campaign Pitch, World Primer, House Rules, Safety Tools, and others — see the Data Model for the full list). These templates encode the campaign-genesis methodology from the Campaign Framework: the questions worth answering before play begins.
The templates are ordinary documents — rename, rewrite, or delete them freely. Their purpose is to replace a blank page with a prompt, not to impose structure.
From Prep to Play
Documents flow through the campaign lifecycle:
During prep, you write into campaign documents as the world takes shape and into module documents as a specific session approaches. Because everything auto-saves, prep notes are always current — there is no “publish” step between preparing and running.
During play, prepared documents are read-only reference material in spirit: each module’s auto-created Play Notes document is the surface for in-the-moment tracking (initiative, HP, events), so your carefully written prep is not overwritten by table chaos.
After play, observations migrate upward: session outcomes get folded into campaign documents, turning module-level events into campaign-level history. This is the Module → Campaign information flow described in the Two-Board System.
See Also
- Manage Documents — Creating, editing, reordering, exporting
- Module Documents — Module-scoped document tasks
- The Two-Board System — The structure documents live in