Writing, Bullet Journals and Summer Campaign

Hi all,

I hope everyone had a great Easter weekend! I know I sure did, from Thursday evening till Tuesday morning I did very little other then play in a session 0 game of  Castle and Crusades game hosted by  +Perry Chalmers from My Own Little World. My first time ever to play using that system, and a very long time since I played anything OSR based. It was a blast to try it out, and I look forward to playing it again in the future!

Other then that, I spent nearly my whole time off, writing. Something I have not really been able to do in the last several months; I have been to busy hosting games! Essentially really since last spring, Almost a full year of weekly games! Madness I tell you!

I am going to share something about me, something which I have been dealing with since a very young age. I will be the first to say this, my writing, even on this blog is full of errors, typos, poor grammar and punctuation. This is due to dyslexia. I am not ashamed of having it, nor do I care if people know I have it. But being someone who always enjoyed telling stories it has always been something I have been struggling with. Its been holding me back from doing something I always wanted to do, write adventure modules for some well established gaming publisher. That's the dream anyways.

It is a well known fact, that I am big on three main genre's; Hard Sci Fi Horror, Weird Wars Horror and Sword and Sorcery Fantasy. And it is also a well known fact that I also dove into the deep end when +Modiphius announced its Conan Kickstarter a while back. So, starting last spring in order to shake the rust of my S&S gaming. I started to run a long series of contained One Shot games of Beasts and Barbarians (For Savage Worlds) until a more solid version of the Conan Rules game out. Basically what I was doing, was testing out a few of my ideas in the setting. I had a lot of fun.

Anyways, about 3 weeks ago; although I have been writing a bucket load of one shot adventures for several different systems. I realized that I have not really sat down and taken the time to organize a long standing campaign adventure. In fact, its been years since I really broke out my journal and started writing.

I needed away to start to capture everything I was thinking and doing. When I dragged my old journals out of storage and started to look at them, I realized that I am the most disorganized (and reminded once again of my Dyslexia) person in the world. Pouring through my books I used when I was in high school everything was jumbled and a mess. Which just re-enforced my fear of not being able to write. I am much better at telling stories then I am writing them down.

Just recently, I hosted a #coriolis One Shot for #fg-con and, I had received several requests if I could send my story notes to individuals, as they would like to run that adventure in their group. As much as I wanted too, when I looked at my notes, I realized again, that my story notes are a complete mess, a series of paragraphs, with lines drawn to other paragraphs with no sense of structure, symbols scattered every where. Nothing but a blob of written characters. Even if I did send it, it would make no sense to anyone. This made me realize two things; I need to get better at recording my ideas, and that maybe some people would actually like to use my adventures in their own games. But I need to find a way to over come this dyslexia which I have had for many many years.

Then I stumbled across +Victor Diaz and his community page called Bullet Journal for GMs The concept of the Bullet Journals intrigued me, and after having a in-depth conversation with +Daniel McLaughlin about it, and having it explained to me how it works, I realized that this could be very well what I have been looking for. Basically the way its designed to work; feeds directly into a structure that my dyslexia understands. Its in bullet form, it uses symbols and it allows me to write everything down in a way that I can go back and read it later and it actually makes sense! So I spent most of last week learning about Bullet Journals, I started three separate logs, one for writing adventures, one for chronicling games, and one for use at my work.

Using this technique I sat down and wrote. I wrote for several hours, and the Bullet Journal allowed my brain to stay engaged with my ideas instead of getting totally frustrated. I wrote everyday I was off over the holiday, and I am loving it! I feel like now, with help from my editor. Yes, I actually do have an editor lined up. I am hoping to attempt submitting my writing in the coming months!

I have loved GM'ing games for years, but I could never share my ideas with others outside of the players in my games. Hence why I enjoy broadcasting my games on YouTube and Twitch. It allows me to share my ideas with more then just my players, but with those who listen to my games.

So, what I am going to work on. Well, I am in the process of "writing" an actual campaign set in Hyborea which I plan to run during this Spring/Summer! Ill make an announcement when I start looking for players, but its going to be a small group.. most likely 3 players, and definitely no more then 4. But I am really looking forward to this.. Its gonna be epic!