What is a Journal and Why Should I Have One?

What is a Journal?

A Journal is an in character record primarily of your character’s thoughts and feelings about their experiences with others. This record should be preferably updated regularly but especially when a major event in their life has occurred. You may want to do entries daily, weekly, monthly or yearly just make sure that you keep updating it.

Journals are strictly optional but we encourage you to keep one for your character.

Why have a Journal?

The heart and soul of role-playing is getting to know your character through experiences they have with other people’s characters. Your character’s thoughts and feelings about those characters and experiences with those characters is an important and fun way to explore this. This will help you to further develop your character and also decide on what direction to take with their life’s story.

Also for those of you with characters that don’t express themselves well it’s a good way for others to get-to-know your character and their thoughts and feelings about their characters.

Styles

There are two ways primarily that journals have been done.

Thoughts style- This style usually lists the name of characters your character has met and their thoughts on those characters. Also your character's mental state is often mentioned.

Entry Style- Some people enjoy just writing entries like in a real journal mentioning the people they've met.

How to Start

Create your journal in this section as a topic. The initial post should be permanent and edited each time you update. At the top there should be a place where the updated date should be placed at the top for easy reference. You can also include brief out of character/author notes under that date but everything after should be completely in character. You are also encouraged to post a description of your character’s journal that reflects their lifestyle and personality.

Below is a link to one of my character’s Journals you can see as an example.

Examples (coming soon)

We look forward to viewing your character’s thoughts and feelings on their journey!