The GM Deck vs LegendKeeper: which is right for you?

At a glance: The GM Deck vs LegendKeeper

Where LegendKeeper is genuinely better

LegendKeeper has spent its time on a different problem. The places it leads are the places we have explicitly chosen not to compete on.

• Free unlimited player access

  Anyone you invite to a LegendKeeper project joins as a free guest; there is no per-seat cost for players. That is the right shape for a campaign where players are expected to read between sessions and contribute their own pages. The GM Deck is single-DM today, with per-page share links instead of seated guests.

• Real-time collaborative editing

  Multiple people can edit the same wiki page simultaneously, with cursor presence and live updates. For groups where worldbuilding is a shared activity (or for west marches campaigns where players write their own characters’ pages), this is meaningfully better than asynchronous editing. The GM Deck is not multi-user; edits are single-DM.

• Collaborative whiteboards

  LegendKeeper’s Boards feature is a real whiteboard surface for plotting relationships, story arcs, and session prep visually. The GM Deck has no whiteboard equivalent; we lean on plotlines and timelines for that work, which is the trade we made on purpose.

• Per-block visibility (secrets)

  LegendKeeper lets you hide individual blocks of a page from specific groups of viewers. The GM Deck’s closest equivalent is the per-page scope picker on handout share links; it is page-grain, not block-grain.

Where The GM Deck is better than LegendKeeper

The GM Deck is built around the work that happens after the wiki is written: prep a session, run the table, recap, repeat.

• A real session runner

  LegendKeeper has notes and pages but no session runner. The GM Deck has a three-column live-play layout for sessions, with queued plotlines and locations on the left, rich-text notes in the middle, and a per-session dice log on the right. Pins, handouts, and roll results land in the runner log automatically.

• Combat, dice, and roll tables built in

  The GM Deck includes a combat tracker with initiative, HP and condition tracking; a 3D physics dice roller logged per session; and a first-class roll-table editor with auto-fill ranges, weighted rolls, and reroll-on-match. LegendKeeper has none of these and most LegendKeeper DMs pair it with a separate dice and initiative tool at the table.

• Plotlines as a status workflow

  Plotlines are their own page type with a seeded / active / resolved status, branching threads, and links to the entities they touch. Drop a plotline update into a session and the plot progresses. LegendKeeper has wiki pages for plot but no workflow you can drive forward session by session.

• Templates shaped for tabletop, not free-form

  Every entity type in The GM Deck ships with templates that prompt for the fields a DM uses (HP, AC, faction, motive, attitudes, rumours). LegendKeeper articles are free-form by design; if you would rather start by filling fields than by shaping a page, this matters.

• Lower price floor

  LegendKeeper starts at $9 per month or $90 per year. The GM Deck starts at £4 per month or £40 per year. Roughly half the price floor, both flat-rate per-account.

Pricing: The GM Deck vs LegendKeeper

Coming from LegendKeeper?

The most common reason DMs move from LegendKeeper to The GM Deck is the same as the move from any wiki-first tool: prep is fine, but on game night they want a single screen for live play with combat, dice, and notes integrated. LegendKeeper is a wiki and a map editor; The GM Deck is a wiki, a map editor, a session runner, a combat tracker, and a dice tool. There is no automated importer; in practice DMs bring across the entities they actually reference and treat the rest as archive. The bigger trade-off goes the other direction: if your campaign relies on free unlimited guest access, real-time co-editing, or whiteboards, those are LegendKeeper strengths The GM Deck does not match.