Welcome to Tempus
Background
On this site you will find my DM notes for my Tempus 5e D&D campaign. This campaign was my first foray into creating my own setting. As with any creative endeavor, I pulled inspiration from a lot of sources, including:
The structure of my notes is based on Mike Shea’s notion notebook, which I have since ported over to Obsidian . I’m a big fan of the Lazy DM Books by Mike Shea and my GM prep is largely built on the advice in The Eight Steps of the Lazy DM
Campaign Teaser
When Darkness Descends
It began with a simple rescue — a blacksmith’s daughter stolen in the night. But the goblins who took her served a darker master, and in an ancient tomb, four unlikely heroes discovered fragments of a shattered blade and whispers of a forgotten order sworn to fight the shadows.
From the frozen halls of the Winter Court to the raucous festivals of the Summer realm, from battling undead nightmares in corrupted temples to stealing the First Kiss of the Midday Sun atop a Feywild mountain, the heroes raced against an accelerating clock. They reforged a legendary blade, earned the favor of an Angel of Justice, uncovered an ancient god hiding in plain sight, and stood against a cult bent on tearing open a door that was never meant to be opened.
At the same ancient battlefield where the shadow dragon Nidhogg was sealed away centuries ago, the Weaver made his final move. The heroes made theirs.
A 3+ year D&D 5e campaign spanning 48 sessions
Note & Prep Tour
Below are the folders in my Obsidian notebook and my purpose of each folder. You’ll find a menu option on this site for each of them.
Session Notes
Prep notes for individual sessions. These evolved significantly over the course of the campaign as I discovered what worked best for me at the table.
Early Sessions (Sessions 1-5): I used my iPad at the table to access my prep notes in Notion. I included links to D&D Beyond for monsters and split content into different Notion pages. The format was still experimental—I was figuring out what information I actually needed at the table versus what just cluttered my view.
Middle Sessions (Sessions 10-25): In an effort to be more present at the table, I changed my approach and worked off printed notes—one or two pages if I could get away with it. The structure became consistent: a Strong Start to kick off the session, a list of possible Scenes, Secrets & Clues to reveal, and key NPCs/Monsters. I took handwritten notes during play and transferred anything important back to Obsidian afterward.
Later Sessions (Sessions 30+): My prep became more elaborate while still fitting on a few pages. I started including detailed stat blocks so I didn’t need to look things up mid-combat. I also began writing “Cold Open” descriptions—evocative prose to set the scene when we started each session. For complex situations, I’d prepare encounter tables with multiple options so I could respond to whatever direction you all took the story.
The irony of following a “Lazy DM” philosophy is that my notes actually got more detailed over time—but that extra preparation was about giving myself tools for improvisation, not scripting outcomes. The goal was always to be ready for wherever the story went, not to force it down a particular path.
Characters
- Significant NPCs and monsters
- Main party notes
Locations
- Fantastic locations I need to track
- Usually include descriptions and/or maps.
- Most maps come from Chezpeku, which I support on Patreon.
Items
- Homebrew or third party items, which usually get translated into custom items in D&D Beyond since all of my players have their character sheets there.
Planning
- A variety of notes for larger concepts or quest plans that didn’t seem to fit in my normal session notes. These are usually for things that might not happen next session or that I need to significantly foreshadow.
Factions
- Significant groups the party interacts with.
- Guilds, gangs, secret organizations, etc.
Rules
- Any homebrew or third party rules I need to track and disseminate.
Recap
- Various types of notes capturing the ongoing campaign.
- Tempus Campaign Session Notes: a fairly raw combination of all of session notes captured during play and transferred back to my Obsidian Session Notes.
- Tempus Campaign Recap: a summary of the raw session notes. I start by feeding a section of raw session notes into ChatGPT/Claude and refine a bit from there. These are ready to share with the players.
Use This for Your Own Campaign
If you’d like to set up a similar notebook for your own campaign, I’ve extracted the structure and tooling from these notes into a reusable template:
dnd-campaign-template — a GitHub repo you can clone to get started with the same folder hierarchy, automation scripts (for wiki-links, frontmatter, and Hugo publishing), and session prep template used here.