Well, it's been a wild and crazy year so far, and I let this column fall by the way side for a few months. I apologize for the lapse and hope I'll be able to return to making this a monthly feature of Collector Times, along with my book and movie reviews. I'd like to talk about character journals. Journaling from an in-character point of view serves as a handy way to take extended notes, making it easier to keep track of important NPC names, how many days ago you were given a quest, and what exactly it was that so-and-so's character did that really pissed you off. Some games lend themselves very well to in-character diaries. EarthDawn sourcebooks are littered with excerpts from the log books of famous adventuring groups. If you're the group's troubadour or otherwise the most literate character (or player), you could volunteer to write down the details of each session for posterity. If your group has a website, blog, or forum, you can even post it there for everyone's reference and enjoyment. Speaking of electronic media, a modern-day game would be a good excuse for your character to have a blog. You can either set up an actual blog (and perhaps encourage your fellow players to set up their own blogs, or at least post in-character comments on yours), or just keep a document on your computer written in a blog style. If you go for an actual blog, please feel free to make in-character responses to obnoxious spammers as well. GMs, if your players don't want to keep journals or blogs, but you want that sort of detailed record of your game, you have two options. You can either sweeten the pot by offering extra exp to anyone who keeps a detailed journal, or you can keep it yourself. Character journals can be as terse or as verbose as you want, as suits your play-style, your character, and the time that you want to put up with it. I kept a journal throughout the L5R campaign (well, actually, I started it in the middle of the game when I was having trouble keeping track of everything my character was doing), writing it in a dedicated section of my notebook. I usually just scrawled in it throughout the game, updating it while my character was idle and others were in the forefront, during long combat turns, or while people chattered in-character. I'd also occasionally update it during the week, if a session was too busy for real-time journaling. I found this journal incredibly useful. When the group went undercover and assumed pseudonyms, I had everyone's new name right there. When people wanted to know if a deadline was looming for something, I was able to count the days since the deadline was given. And when my character was trying to piece together puzzles, I had all the clues written down, to go over again and again. A journal probably won't be as useful in a hack-and-slash campaign, but it can prove invaluable in a heavily plot-driven game. It's also very useful if you have a character who is prone to lying, as you can use it to keep track of what lie has been told to which character. Best of all, after the storyline has been completed, you can read back through your journal, gloat about all of the things you figured out early on, and laugh at how very wrong you and your character were about so many other plot elements.

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Copyright © 2009 By AJ Reardon E-mail AJ at: ErtheFae@aol.com Visit AJ at: www.erthefae.net