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Possibly the most useful notebook for GMs
ever made.
Mead®
Marble Composition Book, Quadrille
and College-Ruled
Mead® Marble Composition Book, Quadrille
and College-Ruled
Printed by MeadWestvaco Corporation
100 Pages, 7 1/2 x 9 3/4, $3.35 list price
Product #09000
An RPG at its best can be a gestalt
experience providing the players with an
ambulatory mental experience that not only
entertains, but also evokes the Aristotelian
elements of drama while providing the
players a vicarious sense of accomplishment.
Players may rejoice as their characters
achieve the impossible in a game held
together with dice, paper, some simple rules
and their limitless imaginations. Tools that
can improve the efficiency of the players
and the GM can help steer a game toward that
pleasant destination, and I recently came
across a product so intuitive and amazingly
useful to gamers that I marveled that I
hadn’t thought of it myself.
Mead now produces a composition book which
has the pages split such that the top half
of each page is quarter-inch graph paper and
the bottom half is college-ruled line paper.
The product lists at $3.35, but I found the
street price consistently lower. The book is
built like the rest of their “marble”
composition line: cloth spine, hard
cardboard outer cover, soft white paper
pages inside with a sewn binding, and blue
inking. However, seeing this book’s outer
cover with its white and black display
transfixed me. I can’t remember a time when
I was so enchanted with a product without
having even used it. Its gaming applications
were immediately obvious to me.
From a GM’s perspective, the Quad/College
composition book makes a perfect idea
journal. It is small enough to carry tucked
inside other notebooks for quick retrieval.
The top half of each page is a perfect place
to map out mazes, tunnels, cities, or other
game locales. The bottom half has plenty of
room to write notes, character sketches, or
treasure descriptions.
A player would probably find the product
equally useful. This is especially true for
a designated chronicler or cartographer.
While the grid is not large enough to map a
large dungeon, it can easily handle
subdivisions of such a place and provide
ample descriptions to help the players
negotiate their way back out again. And, of
course, the product is useful for
non-fantasy RPGs as well. Star systems, ship
designs, military bases and urban
neighborhoods can all be handled more
efficiently with this clever composition
book.
The product isn’t flawless. Mead’s
composition books don’t have perforated
pages, so removing a page is messy. It would
be nice if they offered eighth-inch graph
paper as well as the quarter-inch version.
The weight of the paper used in the book is
light enough that markers can bleed through,
messing up the back of the page. Yet this
book’s usefulness far outweighs these flaws
for players or GMs.
I wish this product had been available when
I was doing my most regular gaming as a
player, but it wasn’t. Mead only released
this product in July of 2004, so it is
fairly new. They also released a similar
product in 2002 that would be of use to many
gamers - a comp book with the top-half of
each page blank for illustrations (product
#09920). But, it is the graph version that
struck me as most universally useful to RPG
enthusiasts.
I contacted Mead’s consumer relations
department and was told that many times the
office supply stores will only stock up on
these products during the beginning of the
school year, so the products won’t be
available for much of the year without
special ordering. In fact, Mead doesn’t even
carry the product on its own web site.
However, I did find that OfficeDepot.com
carries it, and it can be looked up by
product number on their webpage.
--William Blake Smith
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Review of Quadrille
Ruled Mead Notebook (c) 2006 - William Blake
Smith |
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