In the 1980’s Aaron Allston ‘invented’ bluebooking as a concept and detailed it in the Champions supplement “Strike Force”. The ‘blue books’ in question were standard school exercise books. Aaron described how his players used these blue books for in-character dialogues, to discuss additional information relevant to a character or the team or to describe short gaming sessions that do not involve the entire group, but which instead focus on the actions of just one or only a couple of the characters.
Bluebooking is nothing more than writing out roleplaying and conversations, a type of email PBM (play by mail) between player characters and NPCs, rather than acting them out in person. Usually, this takes place between game sessions.
At first I used this method just to pass on background information such as in-game communication protocols and introduce and describe NPCs, however as a team we quickly agreed that we’d use it to expand the campaign between live sessions, fill in individual backstories and set up clues and ideas or covering certain aspects of the adventure that might have got missed out in the live sessions.
Some sessions are individual to a single character, some are team efforts and some are the Referee’s way of moving the story on.
From Aaron Allston’s Strike Force; “How does one write a bluebook? In almost all cases, a bluebook is a prose story. You can be as detailed or sparse as you want (based on your desires and skill levels), but a bluebook is—in effect—an exercise in creative writing. The scene may be critically important (but if it’s too important, you might want to save it for the table), or it might be a light-hearted piece that allows the other players to see a character under different circumstances. There may be a pre-planned end-point (especially if the bluebook is detailing what happened to a character or characters off-screen between adventures) or it might be open ended (such as if two characters intend to argue a philosophical point or foreshadow future events). Bluebooks are also a great way to show characters at home, while in their secret identities, or engaged in solo and social activities. And, as noted, they provide an excellent record of events and actions from previous sessions.”
In this campaign they have become a fun aspect of the game for both players and Ref though players can elect whether or not they want to participate and whether or not they want to share that session with the other player characters (it’s worth noting that all players receive copies whether or not they contributed to the session.)
If you haven’t tried bluebooking between sessions, as a referee I would recommend giving it a try as it really expands the game.
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 