Here at the stew more than a few of us are fans of Scrivener, not just as a writing tool but also as a gaming prep tool. In particular, I’m a big fan of its innovative corkboard and ability to free form ideas–“Scrivenings”–into any order you’d like on the fly. The ability to customize the sections to hold custom information, such as character or location data, is also a big draw. As is normally the case this time of year, Literature &Â Latte are having a sale on Scrivener to go hand-in-hand with National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). You can save 50% by completing your book in October (honor system!) or take an attractive 20% off. In addition, a special trial edition of Scrivener is available that is feature complete through December 7th.
We reviewed Scrivener here on the Stew and how you might benefit from using it. Feel free to check it out for more details!
Scrivener enabled me to plot a stupendous Delta Green story arc that had players intrigued and working hard for weeks, and I use it for every home-made scenario now.
I love using the corkboard in-game to pull up notes too.
That said, Scrivener is not the perfect tool for my needs as it serves a different audience primarily.
However, in concert with Scapple another product from the same author, it comes darned close.
Scapple lets you drop notes onto a whiteboard and then connect them with arrows or dotted lines or a number of other options. It isn’t as feature-crusted as Visio but comes from the same sort of beginnings (as those who like me were early adopters of that product too will be able to attest).
Scapple costs around $15 (or did when I bought it), has a super-short learning curve and integrates nicely with Scrivener with a drag-and-drop idiom.
The only downside is that it is so easy to use out-of-the-box that some of its more useful features escape the user – reading the short manual is surprising in what new stuff you get to be able to do afterwards. This is true of Scrivener too, and the wise user will go through the Scrivener tutorial.
I use Scapple to get down the skeleton of the idea I want to develop, then flesh out the details in Scrivener.
In-game I use Scapple to diagram who is who and where in the plot they are waiting to interact with the players, saving me oodles of time. I think diagrammatically when it comes to inter-character relationships and Scapple gives me an on-demand whiteboard of the structure of an adventure that I find intuitive.
I last used it to make sense of the adventure “Convergence” from the Delta Green sourcebook because the sessions were widely separated in time and who can remember all that detail in the meantime? Worked brilliantly.
If you script your own scenarios, check out both Scrivener and Scapple. You won’t be sorry.