Last week in Episode 1, I started a campaign from nothing. A name, a concept, and a couple of worldbuilding notes. By the end of 12 minutes, The Slow Death of Magic existed as a real workspace in ScriptoriumGM. A Mage the Ascension-inspired setting where magic is fading and nobody knows why.
But here's the thing about a campaign that only lives in your head and a few scattered notes: it's fragile. One busy week and you forget half of what you'd planned. Two busy weeks and you're starting over from scratch, rewriting things you already wrote because you can't find them.
This week, we fix that.
What Happens in Episode 2?
Episode 2 is about two things: organizing and feeding.
First, I set up a folder structure inside ScriptoriumGM for The Slow Death of Magic. Nothing fancy. Just the bones of an organization system that won't collapse the moment the campaign gets more complex than a single page of notes.
Then I upload actual reference material. Specifically, the Mage the Ascension "How do you DO that" guide — a practical supplement focused on how magic actually works at the table: the Spheres, what they let you do, and how to adjudicate them in play. Once that document lives in the campaign library, the AI assistant can read it. It stops guessing about how magic works in my world and starts knowing.
That second part is the real shift. An AI that knows generic fantasy tropes is fine for quick NPC names. An AI that has read your actual sourcebooks? That's a collaborator.
Why Does Folder Structure Matter?
I know, I know. "Folder structure" sounds about as exciting as filing taxes. But stick with me for a second.
Every GM I've ever talked to about campaign organization falls into one of two camps. Camp one: everything in a single massive document that you scroll through desperately during sessions, ctrl+F-ing for "that blacksmith's name" while your players wait. Camp two: notes scattered across four apps, two notebooks, a Discord server, and a voice memo from 2 AM that you'll never listen to again.
Both approaches work for about six sessions. Then they don't.
The folder structure I set up in this episode is simple on purpose. A few top-level folders that mirror how I actually think about a campaign: world lore, characters, locations, session notes. Nothing deeper than two levels. Nothing that requires a filing system degree to maintain.
The goal is a structure where future-you can find things without present-you having to be obsessive about organization. When I'm in the middle of session prep and I need to remember what I wrote about the Technocratic Union three weeks ago, I want to open one folder and see it. Not search through 47 untitled Google Docs.
Sly Flourish, one of the most trusted voices in GM advice, recommends a similar approach: top-level categories for characters, NPCs, maps, session notes, and campaign support material. Keep it flat. Keep it obvious. The structure should serve you during a session, not impress anyone with its taxonomy.
Uploading Sourcebooks to the Campaign Library
This is where Episode 2 gets interesting.
ScriptoriumGM's campaign library isn't just cloud storage for your PDFs. When you upload a document, the system processes it into a searchable knowledge base using RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). In plain terms: the AI reads your files and remembers what's in them. Not the way ChatGPT "remembers" things you paste into a conversation window that it forgets 20 messages later. Actually remembers, because the information gets indexed and retrieved when relevant.
In this episode, I upload the "How do you DO that" guide — a Mage the Ascension supplement that cuts straight to the practical stuff: how each Sphere works, what you can and can't do with them, and how to handle magic at the table. It's not the full core book, but it's the reference I actually reach for mid-session when I need to adjudicate whether something is Prime 3 or Forces 2. That distinction matters when your players are reality hackers arguing metaphysics.
Once uploaded, I can ask the AI things like "How does the Sphere of Forces work?" or "What are the main differences between the Traditions and the Technocracy?" and get answers grounded in the actual sourcebook rather than whatever generic fantasy the model was trained on. For a setting like Mage, where the metaphysics are specific and weird and wonderful, that distinction matters enormously. The difference between consensual reality and standard D&D-style magic isn't something a general-purpose AI is going to nail on its own.
The campaign library supports PDFs up to 100MB and text-based formats like DOCX, Markdown, JSON, and TXT up to 10MB each. For most sourcebooks and homebrew documents, that's plenty of room. I uploaded a couple of files in the episode and the processing took less than a minute.
How Does This Change the AI's Responses?
Here's a concrete example of why this matters.
Without sourcebooks uploaded, if I ask the AI "Help me design a magical faction for my campaign," I'll get something serviceable but generic. A council of wizards. A secret society of enchanters. The kind of thing you'd find in any fantasy setting guide.
With the "How do you DO that" guide in the campaign library, the same question pulls from a completely different foundation. The AI knows that magic in this world is shaped by belief. It knows that the Technocracy uses science as their paradigm while the Traditions draw on ancient mystical practices. It knows that doing magic too visibly triggers Paradox, reality fighting back against what shouldn't be possible.
So instead of "a council of wizards," I might get a faction of reality hackers who believe the internet is the new Umbra, using code as their mystical focus while the old-guard Hermetics dismiss them as children playing with calculators. That's a faction that could only exist in a Mage-adjacent world. That specificity comes from the uploaded source material.
The RAG-powered knowledge base does the heavy lifting here. It doesn't dump the entire guide into the AI's context window. It finds the 500-1,000 most relevant tokens for your specific question and sends those. The AI stays focused. Your responses stay grounded in your world.
What If You're Not Running Mage?
The system and setting don't matter. The workflow is the same.
Running a D&D campaign? Upload the sourcebooks your campaign draws from. Player's Handbook, the specific adventure module, any supplements that define your world. Running Pathfinder? Same thing. Call of Cthulhu? Blades in the Dark? Mothership? Whatever reference material defines your game's rules and your world's identity, put it in the campaign library.
Running a fully homebrew system? Even better. Upload your design documents, your house rules, your world bible. That homebrew material is exactly what a general AI knows nothing about, which makes it exactly the kind of thing the campaign library was built for.
I chose Mage partly because it's a game where the reference material does an enormous amount of work. You can't run a Mage campaign well without understanding the Spheres, Paradox, and faction politics. The "How do you DO that" guide is exactly the kind of focused, practical document the campaign library is built for — specific enough that a general-purpose AI would never know it, useful enough that having it indexed changes every answer. The same principle applies to any game with specific mechanics or lore. The more specific your source material, the more useful the AI becomes.
The Folder-First Approach to Worldbuilding
One thing I want to flag from this episode: I set up folders before I filled them. That's deliberate.
When you're starting a new campaign, the temptation is to write everything at once. The world history, the pantheon, the political factions, the major NPCs, the geography. You open a blank document and try to build from the top down, and three hours later you've written 4,000 words about a continent your players will never visit while the starting village has zero detail.
Starting with folders instead of content does something useful for your brain. It gives you categories to fill rather than a blank page to stare at. "I need something in the Locations folder" is a much more answerable prompt than "I need to build my world." It breaks the work into pieces small enough to do in 15-minute sessions between other life obligations.
Over the coming episodes, those folders will fill up naturally. Some will get heavy fast. Others might stay sparse for weeks until the campaign needs them. That's fine. The structure is there when you need it.
What's Coming in Episode 3?
Next week, the AI has read the guide. The folders are in place. It's time to start using them together.
I'll be working with the AI assistant to brainstorm the core conflict of The Slow Death of Magic. Why is magic fading? Who benefits from its decline? What happens to the mages who depend on it? The kind of big-picture questions that define a campaign's identity and give you material for dozens of sessions.
This is where having reference material in the campaign library really starts to pay off. The AI won't just generate generic plot hooks. It'll draw from the specific metaphysics and faction dynamics we've taught it, suggesting conflicts that feel native to a Mage-inspired world rather than bolted on from a different genre.
Subscribe to the ScriptoriumGM YouTube channel so you don't miss it. New episodes drop every Wednesday.
Try It With Your Own Campaign
If you watched the episode and thought "I should really organize my campaign notes," this is your sign. You don't need to restructure everything at once. Start with four or five folders that match how you think about your game. Move your existing notes into them. Upload one sourcebook to the campaign library and see what changes when the AI actually knows your system's rules.
Fifteen minutes. That's all it takes to go from a scattered mess to a workspace where you and the AI are working from the same foundation.
Your campaign deserves better than living in your head and a handful of untitled documents. Give it some structure. Give the AI something real to work with. Then come back next Wednesday and we'll start building the story together.
Get Involved
Building along with the series? I want to see what you're creating. Share your campaign folder setups, your uploaded sourcebooks, your first AI-assisted worldbuilding conversations. The best ideas often come from seeing how other GMs approach the same problem differently.
Join us in the ScriptoriumGM Discord and show us your setup. Subscribe to ScriptoriumGM on YouTube for weekly episodes. And if you haven't tried ScriptoriumGM yet, create a free account and start building. The getting started guide walks you through everything, or just follow along with the videos.
See you next Wednesday.