Happiness is a New Notepad

I'm sure you'll agree with me that there can be few pleasures greater in life than purchasing a new notepad.  You hand over the money and there it is: a hundred or more blank pages, waiting to be filled. With what? An infinity of options extends to the far horizon of your mind. Will it be the beginning of a novel-writing career that culminates in a Nobel prize? Will it be a book of poems that will win great plaudits and erudite reviews in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books? Will it be where you scrawl the screenplay for what will one day be a worldwide blockbuster movie? Will it provide the space for the initial sketches for great works of art that finally establish you as the greatest talent of your generation?

You have long suspected you had greatness in you. All it was waiting for was the right notepad. And now you have it in your hands! Feel it! Feel how the pages flip! Feel their delightful texture beneath your fingertips! Gaze on it in wonder! What was once a wonderful living tree that supported a miniature ecosystem of birds, caterpillars, lichen, ants and spiders has been reduced to this bundle of paper, all for you to transform into a work of power and beauty!

And then you go and put it in a drawer with the other thirty or forty blank notepads you own and half-forget about it. But at least you had the thought.

There is nowhere greater to buy stationery in all the world than Japan. I visit every 18 months or so to see family, and always come back with a few notepads when I do. Here is my latest purchase, perfect for dungeon design as I'm sure you'll agree:

It even has a beetle on the front!

Check out those numbers in the margins.

Check out those squares. Phwoar.

This type of squared notebook will be particularly prized by the aspiring DM for obvious reasons, but its original use is to help schoolchildren practice writing Japanese characters. You can order many like it Amazon. More expensive than you would be able to get them in Japan (this one set me back about 100 yen, or 50p), and nothing like as adventurous. But it will prove similarly inspirational.

Right now I am imagining using it to write 'the Kesennuma sessions' - thirty one-page dungeons inspired by the Sanriku coast. But then again it may end up in a drawer. We'll see.