Review: Lonelog

This popped up in my YouTube feed and intrigued me enough to download the free 68-page PDF from itch.io here. The author is Roberto Bisceglie.

In a nutshell: Concise standard notation for recording solo game sessions. The player is intended to use this format to capture mechanical game elements while adding as much or as little narrative as desired. It's free to use under a Creative Commons licence.

What You Get

A format-agnostic shorthand for recording your solo sessions. Why would you want to use it? It's fast, it's searchable in digital formats, it acts as a shared notation for sharing game writeups between players. The core of the notation, which can be expanded considerably, is:

@ for player actions.

? for oracle questions.

d: for mechanics rolls.

-> for oracle or dice results.

=> for consequences.

In use, it looks a lot like Markdown, in fact it uses some Markdown features like heading levels, although if you're using something like Obsidian you need to flag Lonelog entries as code blocks to avoid the parser getting confused.

This basic system is then expanded with additional (optional) layers and structures, multiple examples, best practices, templates, and notes on adapting Lonelog to your favourite system. In particular these add tools for tracking recurring NPCs, plot threads, clocks, random tables or generators, meta notes (which a programmer would call comments) and whatnot.

As usual, the examples are the best explanation of the system in use, showing how it works with different levels of narrative detail.

At the end of the document, there's a quick reference sheet 

What I Think

You'll have seen me moving gradually towards something like this over the last few years, with shorthand such as "d6w=11 SR" for "d6 with Wild Die, score 11, success with a raise", and more recently experimenting with Obsidian as a notebook app; so I'm positively disposed to the idea, as for years I've been wrestling with how to record the mechanical elements without burying the narrative.

My first attempts were using different colours and later putting mechanical detail in italics, but those were unsatisfactory. My current method of splitting the mechanics out into a separate section works well enough, but maybe this would be more elegant?

I'll have to try it and see; it'll be a few weeks before I get around to that, as with some travel upcoming I have a few posts already in the can, so look for this appearing sometime in mid to late March.