Minireview: The Keep 1.0
Do you run tabletop rpgs and have constant problems with how to organize your notes and other info (before, during and/or after a game session)? Do you have a laptop and wish there was a handy GM tool to have at the gaming table? The Keep to the rescue.
I’ve been using a wiki for that sort of stuff up to now and don’t have a laptop/netbook (yet) to use at the table, but I’ve been looking for alternatives for a while now. While wikis are fantastic tools for collaboration, they are not totally ideal for single-person work – a lot of that is due to the web interface, of course. Many things are more cumbersome than they need to be… and then there is the fact that you can’t always access your notes on your laptop at the game table, unless there’s a network connection handy. Recently NBOS Software, makers of quality rpg tools like Fractal Mapper, announced a 1.0 version of a new “Personal Information Manager for Gamers”, The Keep. I’ve liked NBOS products a lot in the past so I decided to test the thing out.
There is a time-limited (30 days) demo version available, so I went for that first. Long story short: I liked it so much I pretty much straight away bought the full version (a bit over $30, very reasonable).
Even though this is “just” a 1.0 version, it already has a pretty nice feature list. At the core, it’s a notes organizer. You can add text notes in a tree hierarchy, and you can also add other media to the same tree (PDFs, images, etc… even web page URLs). The program itself doesn’t impose any hierarchy, that’s up to you. There’s a one-button “game log” functionality which adds a timestamped game log note to a predefined spot, handy for making notes at the gaming table during a session. The text editor is pretty nice, it has a nice balance of simplicity and utility. Besides the normal text editing stuff, it also supports tables. You can also do wiki-style hyperlinks to other notes, which is fast and easy. There’s an on-the-fly spell checker.
Organizing and reordering notes (or other info nodes) is a matter of drag & drop. There are also some tools to organize nodes in alphabetical order etc, should you wish that.
The program also automatically integrates with other NBOS products, both the for-pay ones like Fractal Mapper and the free ones like Inspiration Pad and Character Sheet Designer. Very nice. You can embed FM maps in your hierarchy alongside pixelmap image maps, you can add PDFs next to Character Sheet Designer sheets… it’s really versatile. There’s a dice roller, though it doesn’t support dice pool systems (yet). Full-text search is available for all your info nodes, naturally enough. If you happen to have a second monitor, there’s a nifty “GM Screen” function where you can show an image there, with a cursor to point stuff out to players. So you can show the “player map” of a given place on a second monitor, while examining the GM version (or game notes) on the main screen, all without leaving the program. Cool stuff.
I tested the thing out while planning for my latest Exalted session and really liked it. Liked it so much, in fact, that I migrated my wiki content over and intend to use this thing for game session planning and notes from this point on; it’s just that nice and convenient. Everything worked in a nice and logical fashion, I didn’t find any bugs, and the fact that the program doesn’t impose any strict hierarchy on you (but helps you keep one, if needed) was extremely welcome.
Honestly, the only downside I can think of is that it’s a Windows-only program. It may well run under Wine/VMWare/etc in Linux or Mac OS X, but haven’t tested those.
If you’re like me and constantly fighting against chaos in keeping your game notes (and maps and PDFs and…) organized, this just might be what you need. It’s mostly geared for GM use, but naturally enough it could work for player notes too. Or whatever, it’s a fairly general-use info organizer that just happens to be optimized for rpg use.
Very much recommended.
Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:48 Posted in Blinkenlights, Games
Tags nbos software, the keep
