Party kills bugbear tribe for spite, sells remaining grain to another town. Party resolves mayor's issue by accidentally burning down the woods, the listening post, and its inhabitants. Party declines to search for missing cobbler's daughter. Grain's being stolen by agents of a foreign listening post in the woods whose last supply drop was intercepted by bugbears. 'Mayor Jim Hardtford needs someone to find out who's been stealing grain from the silo.

I rarely prepare much in advance, so my logs tend to mirror my lazier approach listing plot hooks, party decisions, significant events, and NPC interactions.

I started recording highlights of the party's actions on lined paper as a way to preserve memorable events, but it also acted as a great resource to bring continuity into my games. Outside of this, I like to write a recap of all of the events that happened in a session the next day so that we have a record, in case I ever want to novelize it or we want to reminisce. I also keep track of initiative, HP, status effects and z co-ordinates of combbatants (lots of flying and swimming in my combat encounters lately for some reason. I keep track of RP experience using a modified version of the 'ticks' system Matt Mercer likes to use, and keep track of that there. I also mark down the end of each day in game with a visual marker so I can easily track time as it passes, and lastly, I write down lore that the players or I come up with on the spot: things like 'Druids of the Dancing Stones really care about respecting names', or Daryl's middle name is apparently Craig now. I write down names I give to NPCs, events that the players expect to have come up again (like, they say 'We comission x magic item', I say 'It will take one week' and then I write down ' x magic item - 7 days left'. Over time as a DM my notebook turned from where I planned all my encounters to where I just keep track of cool roleplaying moments of my players and crap I make up on the fly.

Dnd logsheet