I’ve really been enjoying Matt Colville’s thoughts on Quest Cards, which he talked about in his latest Running the Game video. I love the idea, but I wanted to make a system that would let me keep everything in one place and not have to make extra cards for my players. The result: using kanban for quest cards.
Kanban (Japanese for signboard) is a project management tool used in agile development. It’s been super popular in a lot of the software jobs I’ve had, and they’ve all used different programs: Trello, Asana, post-it notes on a wall in the office.
My favorite tool for this is Notion, because you can customize your cards a lot and organize them however you like. The Kanban system is usually about tracking the progress of a task, though (like whether something is in progress or complete). I’m not doing that at all. I’m just using Kanban software in a different way.
The meat of the work is in the Quest Cards page. We haven’t started playing yet so the examples are silly:
In that page, I set up a relation to this List of Characters database, which means each quest card links back to the page of the characters who are tied to that quest.
I’m using a Notion Personal Account, which means if I want to share, I have to publish my Notion pages to the web and then send my players the link. So whatever I write in these databases, I need to make sure it’s okay for everyone in the party to see. I probably will do just that once this is finished! I suppose you could also send your party screenshots if you wanted to keep quest cards separate for each player.
When a quest is first given, I can send over a link to just the individual card, and players can use the breadcrumb at the top of the page to get back to the kanban and view it at their leisure.
Enjoy!