Story Hour Writers..... How?

[LcKedovan]

Hi All,

Recently Horacio asked me to talk about my upcoming Spycraft game that I will be running. I was thinking the easiest way to do that was to finally write my own story hour. The Question I had was what techniques do you all use for "recording" the session, then writing it up...

do you take extensive notes, or just key "phrases" and events and fill in the blanks. Do you record the session some other way. What else do you do? How much "creative" content do you add when writing it up? Is there a format to your Story hour beginning and presentation (ie: background, followed by characters, scene 1 etc.) All thoughts welcome!

Thanks

-Will

 

[Someone]

I take brief notes after every session of what happened and who did what, and the general feeling of what was said, the personality of the characters, etc. One of the players writes the fights with detail.

So, my story hour is more a story based of what happened in the table than a detailed relation the play.

 

[Gospog]

Well, I type up pretty extensive notes before play, so if the game went more or less along the lines I anticipated, I refer to these notes when writing the Story Hour.

I also jot down notes during the game, as strange and exciting things that are definately not in my notes happen every game (I love being a GM!).

As for "creative content", I restrict myself to making the verbal exchanges between PCs sound like actual dialougue, instead of my friends yakking at my games table.
Though I can tel you from experience that there are some Story Hour authors whose stories feature at least 90% "creative content". To each his own, I suppose.

 

[Dinkeldog]

The closer you are to the game session when you write up, the less extensive your notes need to be, in my experience.

 

[LcKedovan]

Hmmm Horacio must be MIA... no answer from him yet . Thanks for the answers so far guys!

-W.

 

[Darkness]

Moved to Story Hour.

 

[Lars Frehse]

I take very few notes and try to remember what happened when I am writing the story hours. Of course I sometimes skip minor events, like discussions with a shopkeeper or things like that in my story hour. After all, I want to be able to write one chapter in one week, so I have to concentrate on the actual plot.

Likewise, there are sometimes very long discussions in the group and between PCs and NPCs. I try to use dramatic compression here, concentrating on the vital parts of the exchange. That means, I write down if a player comes up with a good idea or something like that and then concentrate on the essence in the storyhour.

Sometimes, I do embroider something in the story hour or I simply use different words in the story hour than I do during a session. For instance, if I tell my players in the game that they are standing in front of a hundred yards high Aztec pyramid, I have to describe it differently in my storyhour- after all, the Aztecs had never been around in the Scarred Lands afaik.

All in all, I think that my story hour is an 85% percent correct transcription of what happened during the game. The rest is left out or, very rarely, slightly modified.

Here is another example: The paladin in my group made a big mistake in the last session I had documented. He attracted the attention of undead soldiers while the rest of the group was asleep. There was a combat, and all the while the player of the halfling druid was mightily pissed at the player of the Paladin and an argument ensued. Now, in the story hour, the character didn't know that it was the Paladin's fault just then. So, in the storyhour, I placed the argument to the point where the halfling did find out. This way, the essence of what happened was transported and it made more sense then the argument taking place right away.

 

[Rel]

I give a small amount of bonus experience points to any and all players who write an "After Action Report" for the session. I spend enough time preparing for the session and I have my hands full during play. The least those lazy gits can do is jot down a summary of what happens during the session.

I take those AAR's and use them as an outline for writing my Story Hour.

 

[Shayuri]

Well, I'm not the GM of our game, but after each session I do a journal entry from my character's POV (the journal is actually a cool little magic book in the game). Then, when I have the time...which is distressingly seldom these past few weeks (sigh), I use the journal entries, plus my memories of what happened, plus a liberal dose of creative license, to write the story hour.

It's worked so far, though this next update is so late it's making my head melt. Arg!

 

[Mahiro Satsu]

We all take some notes, the degree of which is basically determined by mood. For instance, I took an insane amount of notes for the "Into the Woods" section of our storyhour, but lately I havent taken many.

We used to determine before the adventure started who would be writing it up, but lately we've all written up different parts and the DM (Tom Cashel) would splice them together, filling in the gaps. I think Its been working out well. Click the link in my signature and tell me what you think.