Character journals

[Fitz]

I was recently looking through some ancient AD&D stuff for some old resource material I knew I had stashed somewhere, and I came across some of our old party journals. Functionally, they were used for recording monsters killed and hit-point tallies (for totting up experience), significant NPCs and places, and loot gained. However, since I was the one stuck with the job of recording all that, I ended up keeping a sort of "in character" diary of the events of the campaigns so that everything was coloured by the point of view of my own character -- intra-party rivalries, notable sights and so forth.

Re-reading them again after all these years really brought back vividly some of the incredible fun we've had roleplaying over the years, though it also brought home to me how bad my memory is -- there was a whole lot of stuff referenced there that I had absolutely no recall of.

Do others keep in-character diaries like this, or do you stick to purely functional game records?

[Roy_The_Ruthles]

onyxclaw has it required for her game this year. I've seen her boyfriend write an in character journal of the sci fi game. So it's not unheard of.

[Super Squirrel]

I was mostly the GM and rarely the player. So for me, the chances of keeping journals was never really given to me much. Recently when I did get into games, I did keep logs. Although my wife might laugh at me for saying this, I am much more organized now than I have been and as such, I most definately will keep logs if I should ever get myself into a FtF game again.

[Markdoc]

Heh. I remember some of those jottings. In the dee20 game we are playing currently, my wife keeps track of events, but her notes tend more to Gertrude Stein (we went and we went and we went...) than the Hunter S. Thompson notes Fitz used to keep.

Since I GM more than play, I keep notes every session in my little black book, but they are sadly functional: BOD damage, stuff used up, new enemies made, and the like.

But something similar that was really cool was that in the US version of my HERO sengoku campaign, various players used to write up stories told from their character's point of view and we posted them on the website. In many cases the story was bounced back and forth between various players and me, so that extra information/different perspectives could be added in.

Indeed, it was so successful, we started a side campaign with two of the players, which was carried on entirely by email, and filled in some of the backstory to the main face to face game - in which the same players were plaing different characters.

The stories are here:
http://www.geocities.com/markdoc.geo/Gaming_stuff/Sengoku/oldfiction.html

cheers, Mark

[teh bunneh]

I send each of my players a "recap" of the previous adventure, because it seems that so many details get lost between sessions. They're also fun to look over, years after the campaign ended.