A bit of journal organization March 21, 2008
Posted by chorenn in Miscellaneous.trackback
I’ve been kind of wondering how I should organize posts about the actual sessions. Since the campaign started two years ago, I have articles to write about sessions that happened then, as well as sessions that happen now. If I work on the former, I won’t get to the latter until I’ve forgotten about them. If I work on the latter, you’ll never see how the campaign got this far.
What I’ve decided to do is work on both, slowly. They’ll be written in prose, with hopefully few side comments, and written as WordPress pages, rather than posts. I’ll have a link to them on the right side, when I finally get the first one done, and then, if I have comments about the session, those will be in a regular journal post. (Thus, you’ll probably know when a new page has been added to the right-side link.) I will also have two sections — one for then, and one for now.
Sadly, the older sessions will suffer from lack of detail. I seem to have written up the first two sessions, but neglected to do so after that (mostly due to apathy — I wrote two versions for each session, one for me and one for the players, and when I posted them, the players showed no interest [except my husband, who loves seeing his own adventures], so I stopped writing), so a lot of detail has been lost. I’m making an effort now to write session summaries as I go along.
If anyone has any better idea on how to organize this using the tools WordPress gives us, please let me know!
One way to do it would be to create a ‘parent’ page for the campaign journal instead of a category and then make all your entries ‘children’ of that page. You can also use the Blicki plugin to make linking to those pages easier. Blicki lets you create wiki style links such as [[Session One]], so you dont have to click through the admin interface or remember page id numbers. I use this on my wordpress blog and am working on a more fully featured wiki plugin for wordpress as time allows.
Cheers!
Personally, I’d summarise the old sessions as briefly as possible and keep writing the new ones, but not publishing them until what has come before has been described. Or at least I would try such a feat and probably get bored at some point.
Story-hour-like retellings have the problem of masking some actual content and creating new one; the nature of the play itself is hidden.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit more. I think, yes, I’ll definitely make a parent page with the other entries as children. I looked around on WordPress and didn’t see anywhere I could install plugins? I’m not prepared at this point to transfer this journal to my own webspace, but if I do, I’ll consider Blicki.
About prose vs. GM retellings, I think you’re right, Tommi. I still will probably work on prose versions and link them somehow, but I think the versions here should be more about the gameplay than the story (though the story will come through the gameplay descriptions). I won’t, though, save the current reviews until later, because if I wait for me to write the old stuff, you’ll never see the new stuff.
I kind of like the way that Girl Genius did it when they went to the web. They had problems getting their comic book published consistently, so by the time they decided to publish on the web, they had a few years of paper-published content. Since the comic is of the academia-based mad-science steampunk type, they divided the content into the “Basic Class” and the “Advanced Class.” Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, they published one page of the old content in the Basic Class and one one page of completely new content in the Advanced Class. I’d like to do something like this, though not on such a schedule.