What happened today? Well, Astarion said something sassy, Lae’zel tried to teach Gale how to build a shed, and Shadowheart wrote a Gauntlet of Shar-themed parody of ‘Is This The Way To Amarillo’. That’s about how I imagine the journal entries a new Baldur’s Gate 3 mod lets you write as part of an impressive in-game diary system will go.
Well, that and at least 100 words per day of moaning about having a little squid thing in your brain.
The mod’s dubbed Tav’s Journal and has been developed by Mazzle23. It repurposes a clever tool they created for custom in-game mod instruction pages the other month, letting the player take simple quest logs and turn them into detailed diaries packed with entries in which you can document whatever you like. So, when you look back through the events of a playthrough, instead of Larian’s default synopses, you’ll have unique personal records of what you were doing or thinking at whatever point.
Naturally, it’s aimed at the likes of those who get really deep into roleplaying or completionists who might be noting down details to return to, taking the sort of writing you might have done on a physical notepad up until now into the game itself.
Assuming you’re in it to feel more in the shoes of your tadpole-brained adventurer, you can kick off as you would in physical DnD by filling out the character profile and biography section for your character. Mazzle23 boasts of “large text areas for detailed storytelling and notes”, so feel free to go full War and Peace if you’ve time and a person in mind whose life thus far can’t be summed up swiftly. Handily for more verbose narrative-weaving entries, the mod’s diaries come with their own auto-save system and the ability to jump between editing and read-only modes.
They also include two kinds of to-do list, with the one for long-term goals mirroring the usual quest log, while the other provides for day-specific tasks “tied to particular journal entries” which I assume you’ll set up yourself. ‘Tell Gale he smells, then laugh when he cries’ for instance.
The aesthetically-pilled will be glad to learn that the mod boasts some visual customisation too, with six page themes to pick from and multiple fonts, in case you can’t feel truly at one with your dwarf unless you’re scrawling across a stone tablet in Comic Sans. Any worries about having to ruin previous work in order to tailor a diary to a fresh playthrough have been planned for, with each character being able to create and maintain their own simultaneously, while you can also duplicate journals if you want templates or backup copies.
All in all, it’s a really impressive thing to have pulled off, with Mazzle23 noting than an option to export journals as PDFs and auto-tracking for in-game stats are among the additions they’re working on for future updates. If you fancy giving BG3 journaling a go, you’ll need grab both the BG3 script extender and Mazzle’s EZ-Documentation.
