I earlier took a look at three dungeon planner products for mapping out fantasy adventures, and added thoughts on what I’d pack into an ideal planner for a game like Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game (DFRPG). Let’s look at a similar product: the character journal. Picture a slim notebook that includes all the offerings of a full-featured character sheet, plus more space for back story, adventuring records, artwork, and . . . hmm, what else? That’s the topic. Edit 2021-02-07: My local gamer culture has always seemed to focus on the term “character form” instead of “character sheet”, but I know many people use the latter, as do the GURPS/DFRPG sheets…

Steve Jackson Games (SJG) recently dropped two nifty dungeon planner products, one for its (GURPS-derived) Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game (DFRPG) and one for its (GURPS-spawning) The Fantasy Trip (TFT) system. Around the same time, a Kickstarter campaign let me pick up a system-agnostic adventure planner from a different (but not unrelated) source: the Dungeon Crafter’s Sketch Book by Philip Reed, CEO of SJG and launcher of many personal RPG products on Kickstarter. Dedicated planner books, for a task that graph paper and any old notebook have always handled just fine? Let’s see what these products bring to the table. And after that, let’s indulge in unhinged thoughts on creating the…