I need to talk about stationery

My lovely stationery

Above is a selection ladies and gentlemen, of my lovely stationery. By sharing this you will now think I am really cool and want to be my friend etc. I need ALL of these pencils and the Post-its but especially the tabs. I love tabs. (As you can see.)

They have to be actual Post-it notes and not imposters as the others never stick or stay put long enough. I despair of stationery suppliers who try to fob me off with 3rd party sticky notes. I mean, what are they trying to pull here? Do they take me for a fool?

The highlighters at the bottom of the shot are Japanese. I took a while to find these. They're not quite the colours I would have chosen but what's great about them is they have a really weird window in the nib so I guess you can see the characters as you highlight so you can highlight individual Japanese characters. Makes sense.

Propus highlighter nib

I use pencils and fountain pens to write with. I am known for my handwriting. I use a Rotring Art Pen 1.1 and a Cross fountain pen for my diary. The Cross has the best flow of a fountain pen I've ever used. Not too much and not too dry - just right. I prefer Waterman ink to Parker Quink. The latter is acknowledged as the best but that's my personal preference.

By the way, I really really hate it when people borrow a rubber at gaming sessions and don't give it back IMMEDIATELY. This is very egregious behaviour and is very difficult to tolerate. They should work on this.

Talking of gaming, most players are pretty OCD (can you imagine!) and like to keep their books pristine. I used to be like that, but I grew out of it and these days - with my brain being what it is - I have to do a lot of background work before a game session.

It's very difficult to retain new information, and there can be a lot of it. For the game to flow I need to cram as much information as I can. The only way I can do this is to precis the whole book along with highlighting and tabbing the information within.

It takes about maybe 12 hours to prep around 20-30 pages.

WARNING! This following image would be considered desecration to a lot of gamers:

Covered in tabs, Post-its and highlighter

An A5 notebook with my summation of the text

I also buy a third party set of notes on the adventure so I can cross-reference those AS WELL and check if I've got the gist right. I have them as PDFs on my iPad when I'm Dungeon Master. It's the only way I can do it. Having all these resources also gives me the confidence to DM. I guess it's like a performer (say, Ozzie Osbourne) going through rituals before they go on stage. It's only before all these are completed thoroughly that I can feel relaxed enough to deliver a good session. I'm a people-pleaser by nature so I want everyone to have a good time, and this will all make me feel confident and we'll get a good result.

Here are some of my dice. I have to buy new ones now and again as they run out of juice and don't roll high enough, so having the new ones lets the older ones recharge. There are a lot of people like me who think like this (although not all of them will admit it) and again, this is perfectly normal.

Some of my lovely dice

So I've done my prep for The Final Enemy and I'm now thinking what else do I need to do? I had a really productive and busy day yesterday but today I feel rather dizzy. I might have overdone it. But sometimes it's worth doing. Poor night's sleep though. One of those where I fought a mighty battle against the duvet.

I guess I'll read through everything on the day and add some more touches - like the characters of the boatmen who take them to the isle, weather, encounters on their journey there etc.

I'll be DMing more next week too - a Sunday session at the club where it can get very noisy and some of the players can be quite disruptive. We'll see how that goes nearer the time. I happened to have prepped this particular adventure - a 3-4 hour one we call a One-Shot  - about a year ago so that will give me a head-start.

But anyway, that's stationery and how it helps me. Aren't I great? YES.