It’s become pretty clear to me that Shroud of the Avatar is going to be a massive game full of locations, quest items, people to talk to and plenty of other things to remember. The built in quest journal is pretty cool, but egad, I’m already writing down who I talked to and what they wanted to me to do.

In the old days of Ultima we used to write all this stuff down on paper, most likely in a spiral notebook or maybe in a fancy, big 3-ring binder. But I think we can do better these days and this time around I’m using OneNote to organize where I’ve been and who I talked to. For example, Lord Enmar says to go deal with the Red Sashes. While there, Kelly says to go talk to Bodan in Braemar. He then sends you back to Kelly. Of course while in Braemar you talk to lots of different people who offer up tons of information and low and behold you have all sorts of things to keep track of. Most of it won’t be quest related so it’s not in the main journal.

So this is my plan for OneNote. I’m going to create a new Notebook called Shroud of the Avatar. Each Tab will be a city name such as Owl’s Head, Owl’s Nest, Kingsport, Ardronis, etc. Under each tab will be General information such as where people are located so I can find them again and then a tab for each Quest or person of interest.

Owl’s Head will list important characters such as Wyclifee, Morton and Lord Enmar and the important buildings like the location of the Firelotus Tavern, Armory, Crafting stations, The Clink, etc. Nothing worse than going back to town only to forget where the different characters are.

After the General info, there will be inserts for each quest and what need to be done and how I got it. Since the game keeps resetting it will be nice to know where I need to go to pick up the quests again.

The Quest tabs will list the keywords needed to invoke the quest, like going to the Firelotus Tavern, buying a beer and giving it to Morton. After that he’ll ask me to go get his Ledger from Kingsport. His shop is the first building in town that faces out to sea. Alicia is his wife and she has the Ledger. You have to say you’ll take the ledger to Morton in order for her to give it to you.

I’m just now starting to put this together and will keep filling it out this weekend when the game is up and running. I have a lot of notes about Ardoris that still need to be entered, but I think this structure will work well for me. It might need some tweaking as we move forward, but I think I’m pretty close. Also, OneNote will let me link pages together so if information in Owl’s Head is relevant to something in Kingsport, I can make a link to jump between pages.

Here is a quick screenshot of what my Notebook looks like so far.

OneNote is one of a few apps that come to mind for this sort of thing and it’s an app I use all the time. However, if you don’t have OneNote, you could just as easily use AllMyNotes Organizer, RightNote and UltraRecall.

I figured this might help out some of the other adventurers out there.

 OneNote

More brilliant musings about my adventures in New Britannia

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