Tips on writing an interesting log

Writing a log doesn’t have to be a weekly chore, and we certainly hope it isn’t. At it’s heart, Star Trek: Engage is a creative writing game and we want to promote that image and reward interesting and consistent writing. While the format is much like a tabletop, Pen and Paper game such as Dungeons and Dragons, there are no dice rolls and beyond building a world for you and your characters to play in your Game Director doesn’t control your actions. It’s up to you to choose where your character goes, how they act, the things that go on in their daily lives, your Director is there simply to give you a situation to react to and get involved with.

When it comes to your weekly log, although you certainly shouldn’t feel restricted to writing just one if you have more in you, it helps to have the Mission Transcript for that week open so that you can go through and get a quick update on what happened, what your character did, interactions with NPCs or other crewmates. After every mission you’ll be given a time lapse - the amount of time that will pass between the end of this mission and the beginning of the next - and with that in mind you can set down your characters actions for that period.

Us this as an opportunity to set yourself up ready for the next week. After you about to head into battle? As the Chief Tactical Officer, it might be prudent to run a tactical drill with some of your NPC TAC officers, or calibrate the shield generators on Deck 6 while crawling through jeffries tubes. It gives you something interesting to write about while showing your characters thoughts on what happened, their own inner monologue.

“But”, I hear you ask, “what if my character didn’t do much during the mission? Or what if I was absent but still want to write a log?”

Well, I answer, your character was still onboard the ship (Or at least somewhere in the vicinity) for that mission which means you have an hour of time to account for. What was your character doing? Were they interacting with another absent crew member? That could be the perfect segue into a joint log. Perhaps they were running maintenance, stuck in a turbo lift, in Sickbay getting a checkup (Run this by your CMO) or they could have just been quietly sat at their console lost in thoughts of the new shield modulation system that’d about to win them the Cochrane Award for Excellence in Engineering.

Your characters story is yours to play with, and one of the best ways of doing this is through your logs. It gives you such a fantastic canvas to work within, your potential is near limitless for the stories you can craft for your shipmates. Speak with them, see about involving them in your character subplots or even combining them. Your character is a genetic clone, bred in a tube and found after Starfleet shut down the illegal genetics experiments in the lab, growing up with foster parents or in a Federation Orphanage. Your CO? She’s the one who raised the lab and found you. Your TAC crewmate? They were in the same laboratory, also fostered. Your CEO? His genetic material was used to create you!

Create a world through your logs, involved your other crewmates and bring them in on it, and contribute your part to the ever-growing, ever-expanding Star Trek: Engage universe. We give you a universe, you are the ones who make your mark on it.

Posted on 19th Feb 2014 08:38:49 in Guides by James