Campaign Keeper is a session-memory app for tabletop RPG campaigns. It was built to solve a common table problem: important details get scattered across chat logs, notebooks, and memory, and continuity degrades over time.
Instead of treating each session as an isolated note, Campaign Keeper treats campaign state as a system: sessions, NPCs, locations, open threads, player recaps, and DM-only context all stay connected.
What it does
- Manage multiple campaigns with their own sessions, NPCs, locations, players, and unresolved threads
- Log sessions quickly with structured inputs (highlights, notes, tags, locations, mentions, loot, outcomes)
- Generate recap outputs with a strict visibility split:
- Player recap: player-safe highlights and public threads
- DM recap: full context, including private notes and private threads
- Publish public recap links per session with rotatable/disableable share tokens
- Collect anonymous player feedback from shared recap pages
- Search across sessions, NPCs, and threads within campaign scope
Architecture and stack
Campaign Keeper is built with:
- Next.js 16 + React 19
- Firebase Auth (magic-link sign-in)
- Firestore via
firebase-adminfor server-side data operations - Private S3 storage for NPC/player portraits, served through authenticated app routes
- Tailwind + shadcn/ui for UI primitives
The app uses a practical split between client and server concerns:
- auth/session handling through server routes and HttpOnly cookies
- Firestore as the campaign system-of-record
- S3 for binary assets with private object access patterns
- recap and markdown generation logic encapsulated in library utilities
Data model choices
The project uses flat Firestore collections scoped by userId and campaignId (campaigns, sessions, threads, NPCs, mentions, locations, visits, and poll responses).
A notable design decision is selective denormalization for recap and dashboard speed:
npc_mentionsand location visit records retain context needed for fast rendering- recap generation can avoid expensive fan-out queries in common flows
This keeps the app responsive as campaigns accumulate history.
Why this project matters
Campaign Keeper is less about note-taking UI and more about continuity quality.
When continuity is weak, prep effort increases and narrative coherence declines. This project explores a lightweight operational model for campaign memory: fast capture, clear visibility boundaries, and durable retrieval between sessions.
It also doubles as a useful engineering exercise in balancing:
- product ergonomics vs. data correctness
- public sharing vs. private context
- lightweight workflow vs. long-lived state management