After last night’s game, one of the players asked for all of the descriptions of the rooms they’d been into. We tend not to have the time to play every week, and sometimes things get forgotten. More importantly, sometimes connections, links, and associations might be ignored because two related descriptions happen, for the players, weeks apart, when for the characters they’re a few hours or a few days apart.

With open text adventures (or adventures you’ve written yourself) this is easy: just copy the flavor text out into a separate document, and cut them into strips. You’ll want to leave space for the players to make notes.

Then, after you’ve finished reading a description and the characters have dealt with any attention-wasting encounters in the room, you can hand the strip of paper with that room’s description to the players.

You will, of course, want to go carefully through each bit of flavor text for Adventure Guide sidenotes, to make sure you aren’t giving them too much information.

I don’t know how well this will work, but it seems like a good idea. We’ll see if it helps them the next time we game. With the holidays coming up, there will likely be a lot of long spaces between game sessions.