This is the cover of my notebook for the Animosity VIII campaign.
Notebooks have been a fundamental part of my hobby activity for over 25 years
now.
Even before that they felt like my "natural environment" - due, in no small
part, to how central they were to my four years of full-time art education at
college and then university. I also use them, without knowing it until very
recently, as a coping mechanism for then-undiagnosed ADHD.
I always carry (at least!) one notebook with me when I leave the house, and I
probably write or draw something in one every day. This can be all
kinds of things: ideas for painting or conversion projects, to-do lists, army
or warband lists, notes about facts or ideas I've picked up from films, books,
videos or friends, important things I need to remember, sketchy drawings,
ideas for event or campaign mechanics, hobby shopping lists, etc.
As well as these "commonplace" books I use one notebook for
each Animosity Campaign setting.
Choosing, and customising, the setting notebook for each new Animosity
Campaign season is one of the highlights of the year for me.
They are my primary worldbuilding tool. I use them to record the ideas and
concepts that form the basis of the setting. So the look and feel of the book
itself speaks to the "visual language" I find and use to imagine (or
re-imagine) these places.
The look of the cover and the pages don't dictate the vibe of a setting,
they're just the start-point of the journey, but if they at least resonate
with it, it makes the process easier and more enjoyable.
I try not to get too wrapped-up in the aesthetics of each page, or the
book as a whole, but I know I do. I like looking at other peoples' notebooks
and sketchbooks when they're messy and you can almost see the
stream-of-consciousness given free reign on the page. But I also get drawn in
to notebooks that have a vibe, so I can't help but get a bit lost in
working on the visuals of my own books.
I also know when I enjoy the process, my output will be better. So I don't
worry about whether I'm getting to wrapped up in the look of a page, most of
the time.
I like turning a page of dry notes into something more. Whether that's almost
a replica of an in-universe explorer's journal or something that illustrates
the imagined world, or just encapsulates the vibe in a way my words alone
can't quite achieve.
My preferred medium is ink, and I use a combination of gel-ink pens
(cheap-but-great rollerball gel-ink pens are sold in boxes of 3 for £1 in
Tesco!), a little bottle of diluted black ink and a fat-bellied but pointed
watercolour brush.
I've also added "waterbrush pens" to my bag lately, which are like a hybrid of
brush and marker pen, but with no ink or pigment. It has a refillable
reservoir for water inside - they're sold as portable alternative for a water
pot, for watercolour painting outside. But I add a couple of drops of ink inside them. This means I have to periodically take-apart and clean them
(as the ink clogs the flow eventually), but they mean I don't have to worry
about spilling the ink-water mixture while drawing on my bus-commute to work!
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Here's a few of my recent campaign notebooks:
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Animosity VII: Azyr Asunder
The 2025 Animosity summer campaign was set in Eklysium. An isolated city in
the hinterlands of Sigmar's realm. The city was originally a hidden Stormfort,
used as a secret prison for a terrible entity from the Aetheric Void. But it
was so secret that it's purpose was forgotten and at the opening of the Age of
Chaos, just before the Gates to Azyr were sealed, vast numbers of refugees
from the Mortal Realms were put there as a "temporary measure". They too were
forgotten and, over the slow centuries, the refugee camps became makeshift
towns. The towns grew and their edges blended together. Eventually the towns
all merged into a single sprawling city criss-crossed by canals, on an island
in a glittering lake, surrounded by jagged mountains.
To fit the atmosphere of a city in the Realm of Heavens, I leaned-in to
referencing astrology and tarot cards. The place descriptions were heavily
inspired by the meanings assigned to tarot cards, the 12 districts of the city
were named after the 12 Houses of astrology. The overall look of the
notebook was l going for was some kind of imaginary medieval astronomer's
journal.
I found a book with a perfect cover for it and tea-stained all the notebook's
pages to give them an "ancient tome" look. Then I filled corners of almost
every page with stylised (and entirely made-up) constellations in inky-blue
voids. I used fairly cheap blue acrylic artists paint for these, rather than
ink. This did mean I could only do those parts while I was at home, as I
wanted to control the graduation of colour by painting into a lot of water on
the page, letting the paint bleed for a while, and then quickly drying the
pages. But I did the blue areas in batches of six or more pages at a time.
The first dozen or so pages were covered with messy notes, from my research
into the published information about Azyr, and broad-strokes concepts for how
Eklysium might look and feel.
It took me a while to "find" the right look, and those first pages are now the
least pleasing to me visually, but as I went on it became easier to get the
look I wanted. And I focused on writing a lot more.
Looking for source material, I discovered the work of artist
Andrew Fisher Bunner, who made drawings and paintings of Venice in the
late 1800s.
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I used his drawings and paintings as the jumping-off point to imaging the
winding side-streets and canals of a "fantasy Venice".
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Animosity IV: The Bleeding Wilds
The Bleeding Wilds campaign took place in two realms, Metal and Beasts. So
the pages of my notebook for it were "coded" with blue ink and alchemical
symbols for Chamon or tea-stains and "sunwheels" for Ghur.
This book grew a lot during the campaign, as the theme was exploration, so
every time a new area was uncovered by players I wrote a drew a new page for
it, and added a photo to the setting page on the campaign website.
It feels like the most "finished" of my campaign notebooks, as I restricted its content to mostly in-universe styled writing and illustration. As much as that makes it pretty, it also feels like it might have made it harder to work in my next few campaign notebooks, as I kept comparing them to this one.
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Animosity III: The Prime Dominion
This campaign notebook, from 2021, seems messy and rough now, but that's not really a problem - notebooks are meant to be messy!
