World Anvil is an archive. Notion is a blank canvas. We wanted something that knew it was a game table — so we built it.
Every GM eventually builds a system.
Some use Notion. Some use Google Docs. Some use index cards and a spreadsheet. A few of us use World Anvil, then export everything and start over when prep for an actual session becomes too much friction.
The problem isn't a lack of tools. The problem is that no tool was built for the specific moment when you're sitting at a table, three players are staring at you, and you need to remember the name of the blacksmith's dead wife.
World Anvil is a phenomenal archive. It handles genealogies, timelines, and the kind of lore depth that professional authors use. If you're writing a novel-length fantasy world, it's incredible.
But GMing is not writing a novel. GMing is improvising inside constraints. The world you've built is the ceiling — you need a floor. You need session prep. You need something that says "here are the five things that matter tonight."
World Anvil doesn't know the difference between a world with 1,000 articles and a session with 5 NPCs. It treats them the same.
Notion is flexible. You can build anything in Notion. GMs do — elaborate campaign wikis, relationship trackers, random tables, all of it.
But Notion doesn't know what a campaign is. It doesn't know that an NPC has a relationship web, that a location should be revealable to players, or that an encounter has a round structure. You have to build all of that structure yourself, every time, from scratch.
That's not tooling. That's work.
We wanted something that understood the vocabulary of GMing at a level where the tool itself could ask useful questions.
When you create an NPC, should it be revealed to players? When you pin something to the session panel, should it auto-dismiss after the encounter ends? When you run a session, do you want a minimal interface that doesn't require you to navigate away?
Those aren't features you bolt on. They're the shape of a tool built specifically for this problem.
Skryrún is an opinionated platform. It has strong opinions about how world data is structured, how a session flows, and what information GMs need at different moments in the lifecycle of a campaign.
It's not a wiki. It's not a blank canvas. It's a game table companion that also happens to be a world engine.
We built it because we needed it. We're sharing it because we suspect a lot of GMs do too.
— The Skryrún Team