Retiring a Gaming Notebook. 2023 - 2025

An unremarkable $1 notebook from Ikea, now discontinued, as far as I know. The perfect vessel for in-the-moment notes, never meant for reading after the session, but nevertheless heavy in the web of memory. 2023 was a big year for me with TTRPGs, and this notebook is the record of that activity and what followed. These are the sessions that it contains.

1. Danger in the Air (DCC) Spring 2023?
   
2. Frozen in Time (DCC)
   1. I recall these friends being a bit dazed at the complexity of DCC. Fun times, but a bit exhausting.
3. Cairn Jam ideas
   1. It’s interesting to look back at a brainstorming session. Going from broad to focused. By the end of this page, I had settled on the premise for Tears of the Salamancer.
4. Wolves Upon the Coast session 1
   1. This campaign continued for like 25 sessions, but we played on Discord so I stopped taking notes in this notebook.
5. The Croaking Fane (DCC) 6/14
   1. This was a fun one-shot at the store! I remember printing pages out to prep and cramming them into the rulebook, and sweating a lot during the game.
6. A Pound of Flesh (Mothership)
   1. This was a nightmarish 10-player game that I completely lost control of. I didn’t have a handle on MoSh at all and felt terrible about this session.
7. Electric Bastionland
   1. This was another bad session. I didn’t really understand this system either, and thought I could run it with no prep, just rolling out of the book. The players were supportive, but it was a bit painful.
8. Salamancer Playtest (Cairn) 07/08/23
   
9. Hideous Daylight (Cairn) 7/12
   1. Had a great time running this module at the store. It looks like I prepped the map for myself, and I remember the abominations getting laughs and being a big highlight.
10. Lair of the Frog God (Cairn) 7/15
    1. This was a hangout sesh with friends. We sat outside on a summer day. I remember feeling really relaxed and just goofing around.
11. The 13th Skull (DCC) (player)
    1. Genuinely can’t remember anything about this. Maybe it was a discord session in which I was a player? The many doodles suggest this is the case, I don’t usually have time for that as a GM.
       
12. Hideous Daylight (Cairn) part 2
    1. I don’t remember this too well. I think the first half of the module ended on a major high, and this wrap-up session wasn’t quite as good for whatever reason. Not that it was bad, just less memorable.
13. Swine (Violence)
    1. This was another chill friend sesh. I brought over a big pile of books and they liked the one with the piggy on it! It was brutal. I think witches were involved. Everyone was shocked how easy it was to die in Violence, and how pointless everything seemed in the end. I loved it.
14. Kehnet Rock? (Vaults of Vaarn) (player)
    1. A friend from the store ran this VoV module for us. I miss that guy. He kind of disappeared.
15. Knave 2e (player) 8/9
    1. Another friend from the store wanted to try out running Knave 2e. I think this was Tomb of the Serpent Kings, but we didn’t get very far. I recall he felt like it went badly because the system wasn’t fully released yet and we struggled with some rules, but I had fun.
16. Fabien’s Atelier (Cairn) 8/16
    1. I remember very little about this one, but it was with the store crew, and I think it was successful!
17. Cy-Borg (player) 9/20
    1. This one was great. A store crew game. Not sure what the adventure was called but we broke into a corpo building and had to blast some cops or something. I played an Irish Catholic padre with a shotgun. So fun.
18. Doom of the Savage Kings (DCC)
    1. I ran this for some folks from the store and had a good time. The final fight might have been a tad anticlimactic, if I recall correctly?
19. Came the Monsters of Midwinter (DCC)
    1. This memory is pretty vague, but it must have been Christmas time or thereabouts. I think I had to pull shenanigans to avoid a TPK with a dragon they couldn’t kill, in the end. Which was right for a holiday game. But it was cool, the dragon had a legitimately otherworldly presence. I think this was the last time I ran a game at this store location, because the job I was on nearby ended, and then the store moved.
20. Meatheads
    1. Cult of the Muscle Gym or something like that? Ran this for some friends who aren’t really into TTRPGs. They got it, it was fun, but we didn’t play again. This must have come after a long period without any games, or at least no games recorded in this notebook.
21. Freakdog Hellwalk playtest 9/1
    1. My friends were so supportive to do this with me. It was a large group, and too messy, but I learned a lot about the game. I definitely remember feeling self-conscious, like I had commandeered a gaming get-together for my thing, and making it all about me. Thankfully, I think that’s mostly just self-consciousness. They’re all still my friends.
22. Poker Legacy playtest 9/8
    1. This sucked. I found out that the rules I threw together didn’t work at all, or not well enough. This was with a group of long-distance friends I’d been running Vaults of Vaarn for, not recorded in this notebook. I wish I hadn’t done this to them.
23. The Coming of Sorg (Cairn)
    1. This was the start of a kitchen table campaign with the group I played Wolves Upon the Coast with. I wanted to run Trilemma Adventures with Cairn to experience one-page adventures and have a low-prep campaign. This one was great, they later recalled it as the high point of the campaign.
24. Lair of the Frog God (Cairn)
    1. I just love this module.
25. Owlshade homebrew (Cairn) 12/1
    1. I prepped a whole city to color in the spaces left by Trilemma’s description of Owlshade. I sort-of used Into the Cess and Citadel, but not rigorously. I think this session was mostly about meeting asshole noblemen.
26. Journey to Novy Dom (Cairn) 12/14
    1. I turned a few paragraphs of description into an overland journey. Dropped a ton of quest hooks. I feel good about this session, although it didn’t really go anywhere (except Novy Dom).
27. The Raid Mirror (Cairn) 01/20
    
28. Owlshade homebrew (Cairn) 2/15
    1. I had mentioned an arena in Owlshade in an earlier session, and by now the players were foaming at the mouth to do some fighting in the arena. They loved this shit, even though I spotted holes in the run of it quickly. Always add more chaos than seems necessary to the arena.
29. Owlshade homebrew (Cairn) 2/22
    1. More arena. This one was cool, I just copied the ship battle scene from Gladiator 2. Should’ve added even more chaos, maybe, but it still kicked ass. We did a little bit of Basilica of the Leper Messiah.
30. Owlshade homebrew (Cairn) 3/1
    1. I wanted to disrupt the arena proceedings with some drama so I made them go into the sewers. I used Dyson maps and the sewer tables from Knock and generated stuff on the fly. It was silly fun.
31. Owlshade homebrew (Cairn) 3/30
    1. I really lost steam with this campaign around here and gave up soon after. Nobody seemed to mind too much, but it felt like a failure.
32. The One Ring 3/22
    1. This was an interesting session, I ran the first of the Hobbit adventures for a new group, one of whom had got the rulebook as a gift. I hated the way the adventure was written and we as a group didn’t clock until late that you have to try really hard to act like a Tolkien character for anything to work right. Probably never again, although I liked the group a lot.
33. There’s a Goblin Loose on Icarus Station (Mothership) 6/7
    1. Back at the kitchen table with the Owlshade group, trying out Mothership again. I picked a silly module so we could ease into the system, but I regret it. I think things would have gone better with stronger scene-setting about the horrors of space. Players didn’t like the spiraling panic mechanics, being used to more heroic games.
34. Goblin Session 2 / A Pound of Flesh (Mothership) 6/29
    1. I prepped a bunch of cool stuff for the Goblin (and his wife the Girl Goblin) to do and then ignored all of it. Kind of an anticlimactic session. I was definitely kicking myself after this.
35. Hideo’s World (Mothership) 8/29
    1. The notebook skips a session in which, as the PCs were headed to the rendezvous, they picked a fight with a gang and nearly got themselves killed. Again, the players seemed surprised at their lack of power in the setting. In this entry, they played through the module they were supposed to play that time. It was pretty low-key without much horror or challenge, which I guess is on me, but it’s not really there on paper with this tri-fold. After this, we all decided Mothership isn’t for us.
36. Gator Rancher playtest (Meatheads) 9/20
    1. A one-shot with the Owlshade group. It went great! Everyone had a blast.
37. Grave Robbers of Thracia (DCC)
38. Sacrificial Pyre of Thracia (DCC) 11/2
39. Sacrificial Pyre 2 (DCC) 11/9
    1. This is our current campaign, and it’s going smoothly. It’s nice to have a large, vetted module to nest in and work out from, and to be back with a system I’ve run a lot and enjoy. The players are into the deep options/randomness as well. I’ve been prepping a lot, prepping well, and using the prep at the table. Fingers crossed it holds together when we move from booklet adventure to megadungeon play.
40. How the Bros Got Their Bold Back first-draft map
    

What’s the next notebook? Looks like it’ll be a dot-grid Field Notes book that’s lying around my room. A lot smaller than the Ikea book, and not as malleable. But I have to have something to write down monster HP on.