The Notebook I Keep Instead of Trusting My Memory

Marcus calls it a spreadsheet with extra steps, which is fair, and also misses the point a little, because a spreadsheet doesn’t sit next to the game shelf where I’ll actually see it and pick it up mid-setup. It’s a plain spiral notebook, the kind you’d buy for a kid starting school, and every legacy or campaign box we own has a page, sometimes two, tracking what state it’s in, what we sealed and haven’t opened, what choice we made at a fork the game told us we could never revisit.

This started because of a specific failure, not a general anxiety about forgetting things, though I’ll admit the anxiety’s real too. We put a campaign down for about four months, work got busy, life got in the way, normal stuff, and when we picked it back up none of us could agree on what had actually happened in the last session we played. Two people remembered a character dying. One person swore that character was still alive. We ended up house-ruling our way through it, picking the version that made the most narrative sense, and it bugged me for weeks afterward that we’d essentially guessed at our own story.

So now I write it down, and I think it’ll make it much easier going forward not to forget things the way we did that time, box name, date, what state everything’s left in, a line or two of narrative summary in case the session’s memory gets fuzzy before we return to it. It’s not glamorous. Half the entries are just a box name and a date and three words like “sealed envelope three.” But it means the next time we open something after a long gap, we’re not reconstructing our own history from four conflicting memories around a table.

The part Marcus actually gives me grief about isn’t the tracking, it’s that I’ve started doing it for regular games too, not just legacy ones, a running tally of what we’ve played and roughly how it went. That one I’ll admit is closer to a habit than a necessity, there’s no real risk of forgetting whether we liked Sky Team. I think it’s just become a thing my hands want to do at the end of a session now, the same way I can’t leave a receiving count unfinished at work. Doesn’t hurt anything. Doesn’t need defending, really. It’s just the notebook, and it stays on the shelf, and I use it more than I’d probably admit to anyone who wasn’t already asking.