Introduction
GMTales is a collaborative writing space for tabletop role-playing campaigns — a wiki that still feels like a writer's notebook. You write plain Markdown; the system handles linking, permissions, and change tracking.
Why GMTales Exists
Running a campaign means juggling lore, multiple authors, spoilers, discoverability, and "what changed since last session" — all at once. Personal notes don't collaborate, generic wikis demand manual link maintenance and handle spoilers poorly, and shared documents grow into unnavigable walls of text. GMTales is built to handle all five concerns without adding work for the writer.
Core Principles
Everything in GMTales follows five principles:
Plain Markdown is the source of truth. Articles are ordinary Markdown files. All GMTales directives are HTML comments, so files stay portable, readable in any editor, and versionable in git. See Markdown.
Write naturally; the system does the bookkeeping. Mention an article by name and it becomes a link. Relations, backlinks, and disambiguation are computed on save — never maintained by hand. See Automatic Linking.
Visibility lives in the text. Who can read what is declared in the article itself — per article or per paragraph — and cascades automatically to links, images, and notes. The most restrictive rule always wins. See Secrets.
The table stays informed without effort. Every save creates a revision; unread tracking, activity feeds, and comparison views replace manual announcements. See Change Tracking and Discoverability.
Players are authors, not readers. Players write their own articles — journals, backstories, theories — and discuss in notes. See Collaboration.
What GMTales Is Not
Just as important as what it does:
A full-blown wiki. There are no talk pages, moderation queues, or edit approvals. Every article has exactly one author and ownership is not transferable — collaboration happens by each member writing their own articles and discussing in notes, not by editing each other's text.
A virtual tabletop. Maps and markers document the world; they don't run the session. No tokens, no initiative tracker, no fog of war, no real-time play.
A rules companion. No character sheets, no dice, no system mechanics of any kind. The flip side: GMTales fits any system equally well — published or homebrew.
Infinitely customizable. Themes and custom CSS restyle the surface, and the visualization toolkit keeps growing — but layout and structure are deliberately opinionated and not yours to rearrange.
Where to Start
Read Definitions for the core vocabulary, then Markdown — the complete syntax reference.