Prepping in a Journal


#1

Hey shields,

who else is journaling on facing pages with small bullet lists? How does your prep notes for a night of gameplay look like? Let’s make this thread a compilation of journal pages.

I’ll start right now:

Greetings
glocke


#2

I keep one big handwritten journal for all my game prep and musings, but they take different forms.

Sometimes for one night of gaming I just put my bullet points (really just a hierarchy of plot hooks) into Notes on my iPad…


#3

Here are a bunch from back in the day:


#4

Compared to your typical dungeon crawl in ICRPG, I notice that my old Call of Cthulhu investigations had many more “moving parts” requiring a lot more careful timelining and integration and create that mystery structure for the PCs to play within…


#5

Like @chrisbynum, my journaling varies from session to session. However, I always distill the night down to index cards, one per room. My philosophy is that if it can’t fit on a 3x5 (or smaller), it’s too complicated for me.





#6

Your maps and flowcharts are beautiful, so clear even I could follow those notes!


#7

It looks so beautiful ! :heart:


#8

Mine are a mess. I scribble random things and do doodles and brainstorms.
Then I’ll try write them up “neatly” before the game.
But as I’ve done it twice and thought about it through the week i never really look at them in the game anyway lol.
“Write it to get it, not to use it” -B

No pics as they’re disgracefully messy haha


#9

My notes are cold and boring:

The upside is, and this is huge for me, I can search and find anything with a few keystrokes, even if that thing is from many months ago.

I don’t scribble or draw on paper (or on the computer for that matter) because I find it too slow for me. I don’t need to visualize rooms or encounters. I just map them out directly in Dungeondraft.

As usual, I keep the minimum amount of notes and I delete anything that is not useful. Anything not immediately useful, but can be referenced later, is collapsed behind a header like this:
image

This document is the one single document where I keep everything necessary about the game - How to GM better, all necessary info on the game world, logs of all previous sessions, notes about next session, potential upcoming campaign elements, info about all important NPCs… you name it. I have everything and I can find anything I want.


#10

Me at my most minimalist, when I already have the monsters worked out and memorized, and I only need to make sure I set up the boards correctly…

The efreet encounter as it was realized on the tabletop…


#11

Notes and terrain look awesome! :herocoin:


#12

wow that’s the three clue model! great


#13

All my sessions notes are made with a tiny laptop and org-mode (sorry, shield says I cannot post links, so goggle it). I’m too clumsy to make anything else with my own fingers.

(org-mode looks like Khan’s notes)