Traveler's Notebook reborn!

And a return to roleplaying, sort of…

Recently I posted about abandoning my Traveler’s Company Passport Notebook for something a little larger. In that post I wrote:

For now the Traveler’s Notebook sits unused, but I’m determined it won’t remain so, it’s just too nice to languish in a box or drawer.

If I am being completely honest, whilst I was hopeful of finding a use for it, I wasn’t certain I would. I did have a couple of ideas, but when I started to think about the practicalities, the page size issue reared its head once more so I abandoned taking them any further. It had been less than a month but I was starting to think that I might not achieve what I hoped and that the TN and its inserts might languish in a box for the foreseeable future.

But then, completely out of the blue, a use case came along that I didn’t expect and now the TN has a purpose and is slowly finding its way back to regular use.

But first, a little background…

I’ve been playing and running tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs - the best known probably being Dungeons and Dragons) for a little shy of 50 years. For quite some time I haven’t been involved as much as I was, and, if I’m honest, have occasionally missed playing. Playing online doesn’t really appeal, so my gaming has dropped off considerably. A big growth area for the hobby in the last few years, apart from the influx of interest thanks to Stranger Things, and a lesser extent The Big Bang Theory, has been Solo RPGs, something that up until now I hadn’t paid much attention to. Well that changed, and with it came the unexpected use for my Traveler’s Notebook.

This isn’t the post to go into my exploration of solo role-playing games (I’ll save that for another post), but it’s enough to say that for my first foray into this area of role-playing games I settled on a game called Four Against Darkness, a game of classic dungeon-delving in which you take a party of four adventurers into, normally randomly generated, dungeons in search of adventure and treasure, hence the name.

Cover of Four Against Darkness Expanded Edition showing four adventurers in a dungeon reaching for a treasure chest, with a dragon lurking in the background

One of the conceits of the game, in order to not drag games out, or to make them too tough for starting characters, is to limit the dungeon maps to an area roughly 20 x 28 squares. Coincidentally, the Traveler’s Company Dot Grid Passport inserts are 23 x 32 squares over a two page spread (as are the Good Inkpressions inserts I ordered), making them the perfect mapping tool.

With that idea firmly planted I worked on how else I could I could utilise the form factor of the TN Passport. Keeping it simple I decided not to add an additional insert to record game notes (foes encountered, treasure found, etc.) but to instead just map the dungeon on one two page spread and keep the notes on subsequent pages. Flipping between the map and the notes is easy and doesn’t interrupt the flow of the game.

As with any roleplaying game, you need a way to record details of your characters and track their progress. There are quite a number of online resources created by fans of the game, but most are designed to be printed on A4 or US Letter sized paper and I really wanted something that would fit within the TN cover, so I ended up borrowing some ideas from existing examples and designing my own that are B6 in size but fold to B7 to fit within the Passport Cover. Even printed on 100gsm paper, four to eight characters add hardly any bulk.

Add similarly sized sheets to track encounters with foes and reference sheets for the dungeon elements and their contents (again resized to B6), along with a handy reference card of page numbers in the rulebook, and with the exception of some six-sided dice, a pencil and a copy of the rulebook, I have everything I need to play in a handy compact package.

Photo showing a Traveler’s Company Passport Notebook, mechanical pencil, four six-sided dice, character sheets and reference sheets of a Four Against Darkness game in progress

I haven’t put the whole package to considerable use yet, but what little I have done would seem to indicate that it all works well together. It all fits quite nicely in my everyday bag (I currently have the rulebook as a PDF on my iPad Mini), so I can take it with me and if I find myself at a loose end, I can play through a few rooms rather than reaching for my phone and doomscrolling.

My Traveler’s Notebook is reborn, my interest in roleplaying has been rekindled and I have another reason not to reach for my phone. I think we can call that a win.

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