Recently I was catching up with some viewer comments on my YouTube channel when I happened upon the following comment by Cylland:

“Hi, I have been having trouble recording my sessions, I usually end up writing every sentence like a book [which] makes the game very slow, but at the same I am scared of leaving juicy details of the story behind. Could you make a video with tips on recording/journalling?”

Speed up Your Solo D&D Games with Shorthand, a Solo D&D Tutorial

Avoiding logging everything that happens in a solo D&D campaign in a heavily descriptive, narrative form is of course, very time consuming. So speeding this process up, or avoiding it altogether is quite desirable when trying to strike a good balance between narrative output and pacing.

I myself, am pretty descriptive as I journal my solo adventures for vodcasts and this has definitely slowed my process down significantly!

I’ve recently pondered the idea of using shorthand to journal my solo gaming sessions and I think there is no better excuse than to do this now, as the topic has arisen via good old Cylland. So how would we approach this?

Firstly, several popular methods of shorthand writing tend to utilise symbols and squiggly lines, however in this new digital utopia we thrive in, that’s not so practical to recreate and whilst I would never discourage a solo roleplayer from sticking with pencil and paper, a universal solution that covers both angles would be more than adequate for our purposes.

It’s important to know in the first instance what a vowel is. Lucky for us, there are only five vowels. They are the letters: A, E, I, O, U and are quite easy to remember. So the first thing that can be done to cut down our descriptive writing is to remove vowels from our words, keeping only the ones that exist at the beginning and end of each word. Here’s an example:

“Cns srchs fr a scrt dr”

This confusing jumble translates to: “Canus searches for a secret door.”

It’s a bit tricky to get used to this shorthand method, however with some practice (and perhaps by placing the vowels in constant view) it’s not so bad at all.

This method alone might be adequate for your needs, but it can be taken further by replacing the common words ‘of’, ‘to’ and ‘the’ as follows:

the = .

Of and to = \

So, “Canus opens the chest”, or “Cns opns the chst” becomes “cns opns . chst”

I’d also recommend using initials as character identifiers, so ‘Canus Marullus’ becomes ‘CM’ and finally we end up with:

“CM opns . chst” or “CM srchs fr a scrt dr”

Give it a try!

Let me know what you think in the comments and be sure to check back for more content. In the meantime:

• Follow me on Twitter @crawlersolo
• Check out my YouTube content at youtube.com/c/SoloDungeonCrawler

See you next session...

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