Name: Journey
Item: Journey
Rating: 5
Author: Words and Nocturnes

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Journey is a fun, interactive way to plan a story or immerse the reader in worlds of their own creation.

Synopsis

Journey is a solo roleplaying game that puts you in the role of an explorer in the worlds of your own creation. Discover new details of these amazing places and gather new inspiration from what you find. This game is perfect for writers, designers, game masters, and the uncommonly curious.

Journey is a game and tool in one beautiful, whimsical package. It is both a useful exercise in creativity and an enjoyable gaming experience.

This book is a new tool of imagination, a vehicle of creativity that has the capabilities to guide you deeper into the ephemeral locations and spaces of your own creation and help give them greater depth and form in both your mind and work.

It’s time to leave on a grand adventure.

Are you ready?

The idea behind Journey is interesting. It is not an unheard of concept. The end product is essentially a writing workbook with a "choose your own adventure" vibe infused in it. Readers are given the chance to go on a journey in any world they choose, whether it be preexisting fictional worlds or self-created worlds. Readers are taken through this process, or rather journey, with the aid of instructions, prompts, and examples.

The pages have a simple layout that is pleasing to the eyes, and apt illustrations accompany the content, making the content more visually pleasing and engaging. A pleasant surprise is that Journey includes all the details one would usually stress over. This includes the "length of journeys", similarities between different locations and so on.

One slight nitpick I could find with the book is that the examples are put right at the end of the book. While this may cut any "blabber" from the middle of the book, making for a seamless reading experience, this may not be the case for first time readers. For those who need the examples as guidelines for navigating through Journey, having to constantly flip (or scroll) to the back of the book can be distracting. It could possibly detract a little from the reader's otherwise smooth-sailing experience.

Journey is described as suitable for "writers, designers, game masters, and the uncommonly curious". While so far I have only experienced the book through a writer's view, it has been a fun experience. In my case, it can be difficult to start planning in the first place due to a number of reasons, the main one being a tendency to slack off. By turning the planning process into a game, it gives structure to the process and makes it less of a seemingly arduous or difficult process.

The book begins with words from Terry Pratchett's A Hat Full of Sky, part of it being "There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world." Journey brings the promise of worlds full of stories and imagination, and it invites readers to delve into their creativity. It makes the planning process less daunting, and provides a solid start to a great number of possibilities and creations.

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