Diaries?

[sirteabag]

Maybe a silly question but does anyone here ever write diaries of their adventures? I have an elaborate 120 page diary of pictures and writing of my characters POV in one of my old campaigns, complete with maps I took, monsters encountered, ideas of the plot, etc. The best part is now I can hand this diary down as a plot source found on the body of an old skeleton in a cave. We never finished the adventure (whisked away to a bmq) and that left me (the DM, and player) an unfinished diary. I added some ramblings, ideas, blood, etc. on the pages. I had even sewn in pages and left this diary as legit to old time literature as possible.

Anyone else ever log things like this?

 

[Stoat]

Not quite the same thing, but I keep a record of my game on a private messageboard that my players and I use. After every session I post a quick writeup about what happened, and I encourage the players to post in-character responses, questions etc.

 

[pauljathome]

Maybe a silly question but does anyone here ever write diaries of their adventures?

Anyone else ever log things like this?

Nothing that elaborate but in the current campaign several of the players are keeping a journal of their adventures. They're all written from the Character point of view.

The ones that I write are a combination of writing down the events that I found of interest and personal character development (often including things that never showed up at the table). The accounts of battles etc definitely concentrate on how the character perceived the battle and not as much on what actually occurred. Definitely NOT a blow by blow description.

But no art work, maps, blood. Heck, not even any paper. Its all electronic

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

My wife did this for her favourite character that she played in one of my campaigns. It was his journal, written as he would write, from his own point of view. She typed it all on the computer, though she did use a "script"-type font. I don't think I've ever read it.

Additionally, she now keeps a historical chronicle of all our campaigns in a daily calendar format on google docs. It's laid out in a giant spreadsheet so it's easy to see which party was doing what and where they were relative to all the others. It makes it immensely easier to avoid continuity problems when running multiple games in the same region of the world (or even across it) in overlapping timelines.

We care a great deal about this homebrew campaign world, which is understandable given we met while gaming, and have been jointly developing it ever since (circa 1998 or so). We probably have enough detail to publish an almanac or something like that, which is kind of my pet project. I'm working on that via a website, though it also contains houserules and homebrew content for our players.

 

[Ktulu]

I always do recaps and journal entries, whether I'm a player or DM. I track all of my data on epicwords.com

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

I have, inconsistently. I like doing it, but there's a limit to how much time I have to devote to it. I've posted some of those diaries as storyhour threads.

I've also found that it makes me a more effective player. As I'm writing up an old session as a diary, I'm going over my thoughts and making connections. I've figured out a few puzzles that way.

 

[Colmarr]

I fictionalised our group's Raiders of Oakhurst mini-campaign.

 

[TarionzCousin]

We never finished the adventure (whisked away to a bmq)

What is a "bmq"?

Back in the original Dark Sun 2E days, I played in an Evil PC game with only one other player. The two of us and the DM played about 30+ hours a week for many weeks (we were all only partially employed at the time). Since both of the characters were evil, we never really trusted each other and there were many secrets in the game. So we both took the time to write diaries while the DM worked on the game. When we had to move on to another town and gainful employment, we went back and read each other's diary. It was a great way to memorialize the game--and I finally found out what that crazy invisible thing was!!!

[sblock]The "crazy invisible thing" was the other guy's familiar, a dog-sized scorpion-like critter with a wicked sense of humor.[/sblock]